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...

In 1992 a blue-ribbon group of US economists led by Michael Porter concluded that the US stock market-based corporate model was misallocating resources and jeopardising US competitiveness. The faster growth of US economy since then and the supposed US lead in the spread of information technology...

This paper considers the pros and cons of establishing stock markets in sub-Saharan African economies at the present stage of their development. It provides theoretical analysis and empirical evidence from both developing and advanced countries to argue that for many African countries such a...

The article is a critical commentary on the World Bank's analysis of state-owned enterprises (SOEs), as exemplified in its recently-published Report, Bureaucrats in Business. While noting the positive contributions made by the Report, the article criticises the World Bank's understanding of the...