India is ranked fairly high amongst the countries in terms of out of pocket expenditure by its citizens on health and education. India is ranked 134th on the Human Development Index (2011 ranking). Public expenditure on human development is given increasing emphasis but the desired results...

The aim of this paper is to shed light on the relationship between education and growth in Morocco. Econometric tools (Granger-causality tests and cointegration) was used to evaluate the existence and direction of the relationship. The results show a significant short-term causality between...

This study examines the role of socio-demographic determinants on individual’s level of happiness. Primary survey data on Penang, Malaysia is used for analysis. Based on the findings, being married and Malay are associated with higher probability of feeling very happy or happy. Nevertheless,...

The main objective of this paper is to present a reading of The Arcades Project by Walter Benjamin in the context of the financial crisis, in particular, reflect from a few fragments of Benjamin's work appear to lie around a Black Swan. The recovery of the fragments of The Arcades seems...

In this paper using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) we evaluate the influence of national culture on education policy efficiency for 20 OECD countries. For that reason bootstrap techniques have been employed in order to produce biased corrected efficiency scores and confidence intervals are been...

This paper estimates the steady state growth rate for Ireland with an extended version of the Solow (1956) growth model. We show that the education and trade openness have played an important role to improve the long-run growth rate. Policies to further improve the long-run growth rate are...

The paper analyses the relationship between the popular Barro and Lee (2001) ‘Average years of Schooling’ with income inequality, wage inequality, and income deciles and income percentiles for the sample of developed and developing countries. The results suggest that countries where students...

After highlighting different views of Islamic scholars on option derivatives, the paper explores a potential role for option derivatives as useful risk management tool in commodity markets, while attuned to Islamic Shariah principles. The author illustrated a model of commodity stock market to...

The study is an empirical evaluation of specific criminal activities. The relationship of criminal activities with inflation, unemployment, investment, education and health are examined through an annual data set from 1980 to 2007. To test the order of integration, Augmented Dickey Fuller test...

Strong son preference in developing countries often motivates parents to undertake sex selection at birth, infanticide, and subsequent neglect of daughters, leading to low child sex ratios in these countries. An interesting question is whether such attitudes also lead to gender discrimination in...