Recent economic and political developments have highlighted a challenge shared across the Arab region of generating employment, promoting inclusive growth, and improving competitiveness. In the short run, weakened macroeconomic fundamentals in the developing economies of the Middle East and...

This paper focuses on developments in the European Economic and Monetary Union sovereign debt markets in the past decade. The first part analyzes the integration and segmentation structure of the bond markets of the Economic and Monetary Union b

Money demand is critical for defining monetary policy options and is not driven necessarily by developed country standards of transaction demand, speculation motive, and opportunity costs grounded by fully functioning financial markets. However, market imperfections in less developed economies...

This paper estimates the private sector credit cycles for most of the oil-importing and oil-exporting countries in the Middle East and North Africa. Credit cycles are the medium-term component in spectral analysis of real private sector credit growth. Besides, the paper estimates the credit...

This article examines the accumulation of precautionary wealth in Afghanistan using detailed data from a large household survey. A percent increase in income variance is associated with a 0.22 and 0.84% increase in broad and narrow wealth, respectively. This precautionary response is most...

Recent economic and political developments have highlighted a challenge shared across the Arab region of generating employment, promoting inclusive growth, and improving competitiveness. In the short run, weakened macroeconomic fundamentals in the developing economies of the Middle East and...

Islamic Banking and Finance discusses Islamic financial theory and practice, and focuses on the opportunities offered by Islamic finance as an alternative method of financial intermediation. Key features of profit-sharing (as opposed to debt-based) contracts are highlighted, and the ways in...

Purpose – Islamic finance and socially responsible investing (SRI) have been two of the most rapidly growing areas of finance over the last two decades. During this period, they have each grown at rates that far exceed that of the financial markets as a whole. The purpose of this paper is to...