After a brief recent empirical sketch of Islamic finance, the paper turns to its main theoretical and conceptual purpose. It seeks to relate the concepts of Islamic and conventional finance, and to examine certain important questions which arise from the interaction between these systems. The...

Islamic finance has come of age. Islamic banking and finance have been growing at a very fast rate, despite apparent serious setbacks (such as interruption of payments in Abu Dhabi in 2009, the Great Recession in Western countries between 2008 and 2010, and the recent turmoil in Middle Eastern...

This study is a sequel to the 2012 Sheng and Singh article that identified and explained the significance of the two central tenets of Islamic finance: namely, its underpinning by a strong ethical system, and the absolute prohibition of the use of interest rates. That study also argued that the...

From its humble beginnings in the 1990s, Islamic finance has become a trillion US dollar industry. The market consensus is that Islamic finance has a bright future due to favourable demographics and rising incomes in the Muslim community. Moreover, despite voices sceptical of an accommodation...

Abstract In the 1980s, fifty years after the Great Depression industrial countries came again to be haunted with the spectre of mass unemployment. The unemployment situation, into the 1990s, continues to be dire in several European Union countries. Double digit unemployment rates are currently...

Although in the post-World War II period as a whole, developing countries have made substantial economic and industrial progress, during the last decade or so, many of them, particularly in Latin America and Africa, have been in an acute economic crisis . As a consequence, these countries have...

Abstract Two principal analytical and practical policy issues in economic development today are: a) the degree and kind of openness to the world economy a developing country should seek; b) what should the government do, or not do, in order to promote fast economic and industrial development....

Legal origins theory suggests that law reform,strengthening shareholder and creditor rights, should enhance financial development. We use recently created datasets measuring legal change over time in a sample of 25 developing, developed and transition countries to test this claim. We find that...

Abstract In the first large-scale comparative studies of corporate financing patterns of large firms in leading developing countries (DCs), Singh and Hamid (1992) and Singh (1995) arrived at some rather surprising conclusions. This research showed that although there are variations in corporate...

Abstract The East Asian countries have achieved a spectacular average rate of economic growth over the last 30 to 40 years, with very substantial diversification and economic development. Korea, for example, managed to transform itself from being a largely agricultural society in 1960 to the...