The purpose of this paper is to study the direction of causality between the stock market and macroeconomic variables. India is taken as a case study. Although, there have been many studies which attempted to find out the relationship between Indian stock market and economic variables, this...

This paper seeks to close the gap of the lack of empirical evidence surrounding the different impact of conventional interest rates on Islamic finance components – Islamic stock markets, Islamic banking and Islamic insurance (called takaful). Such evidence remains imperative in order for the...

Generally, Shariah (Islamic) indices are considered to have lower portfolio betas relative to conventional ones. The lower portfolio beta of Islamic indexes is a logical result of Shariah screening. As Shariah screening eliminates stocks with high financial leverage, the resulting portfolio beta...

Econometricians had been blamed for the financial crises that occurred due to their giving a ‘false hope’ to investors and policy makers using untested theoretical assumptions. Therefore, econometricians had been challenged to reform their studies by grounding them more solidly on reality....

During the mid-1990s, the Government of India and the World Bank began exploring new approaches to extension that would address these system problems and constraints. The result was a new, decentralized extension approach, which would focus more directly on agricultural diversification and...

An estimated 85% of Afghanistan’s population lives in rural areas, most of which are resource poor farmers whose livelihoods depend on agriculture and livestock in agro-pastoral or crop-livestock systems. Agriculture – including the processing of agricultural and livestock products --...

Decentralizing a large, complex national extension system is not easy, but the Government of India appears to be moving toward this long-term goal. Although ATMA model has been successful in addressing many of the extension problems and has shown exceptional impacts during the NATP phase but it...

Medicinal and aromatic plants (MAPs) provide opportunities for developing a variety of safe and cost effective, prophylactic, and curative medicines for a number of maladies. It is estimated that the primary health care of over 80 per cent of the world’s population still depends on plant based...

In India, poverty reduction is one of the major objectives of economic development programmes. Though, India was the first country in the world to define poverty as the total per capita expenditure of the lowest expenditure class, which is required to ascertain a minimum intake of 2400 kcal/day...

The milk producers have been deprived of their due share in increased consumer’s price of milk in Bihar. Almost two times increase in the processing cost and profit margin to milk unions might be due to inefficient use of milk plants and perhaps cheap availability of labour resource. The...