Inside-Out: Perception of Key Finance Professionals about Theory and Practice of Islamic Banking

Islamic banking has shown tremendous growth in the first decade of 21st century. By the end of 2008, global volume of assets under Islamic banking reached US$951 billion. In Pakistan, Islamic banking has displayed a tremendous annual average growth of 76% during the last seven years and accounts for 6% of the market share (SBP-2010). However, keeping in view the religious ideologies of the significant majority of Pakistanis, Islamic banking industry has expanded at less than its expected potential. This study documents the perception of key players in finance industry about Islamic banking, to highlight the underlying issues directly responsible for slower-than-potential-expansion of this industry. Findings suggest, although theoretically, that the industry perceives Islamic banking correctly, however professionals do not feel content with its practice

Private finance initiative (or public private partnership) implementation processes and perception of value for money

The aim of this study is to examine the relationships among perceptions of implementation processes, implementation difficulties and value for money (VFM) in UK school private finance initiative (PFI) or public private partnership (PPP) contracts. The results suggest that implementation factors, such as effective PFI ‘consultation’, ‘contractual’, ‘monitoring and review’ processes have a significantly positive influence on perception of VFM. The results also suggest that difficulties involved in actually implementing PFI processes, such as ‘lack of transparency’, ‘performance measurement difficulties’, ‘cultural differences’ and ‘lack of authority’ have a significant and negative influence on perception of VFM. These implementation difficulties were also found to be inversely related with perception of the PFI implementation processes but the extent of these relationships varied

Why private finance initiatives are so addictive - and yet offer such poor value for money

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The effect of entrepreneurship and regulation policy on competitive advantage

The aim of this study is to know and measure entrepreneurship, regulation policy to develop the competitive advantage in the north coast of West Java Indonesia.The research method used a quantitative approach. Data were collected through questionnaires distributed to 300 respondents (fishermen) from coastal areas of Jakarta, Bekasi, Serang and Cirebon. Data analysis technique use linear regression analysis.The results show that entrepreneurship related to competitive advantage, although the regulation policy is not related to competitive advantage. Likewise, between the entrepreneurship orientation with the regulation policy simultaneously related to competitive advantage.peer-reviewe

Risk and Returns of Shar??ah Compliant Stocks on the Karachi Stock Exchange: A CAPM and SCAPM Approach

This study documents the asset pricing mechanism of Shar??ah compliant securities listed on the the Karachi Stock Exchange. We select the CAPM market model to test for the impact in variations of stock returns on a sample of Shar??ah-compliant companies on ten years monthly data (2001-10). We first test the basic CAPM (Capital Asset Pricing Model) and its modified form known as the Shar??ah-compliant asset pricing model (SCAPM). We also analyse return differences due to size (market capitalization), book to market (B/M) value, price-earning ratio (PER), and cash-flow yield (CFY). Our results find a strong impact of the market index on stock returns (adj-R2 70%) and confirm the anomalies of size, B/M, CFY, and PER, while SCAPM is slightly better in explaining variations in cross-sectional stock returns

The role of corporate governance on the effect of state ownership on audit findings at state-owned enterprises

This study aims to analyze the extent to which the mediating role of corporate governance on the influence of state ownership on audit findings issued by Audit Board of the Republic of Indonesia on State-Owned Enterprises in Indonesia. The study used a sample of 98 observations (firm-year) during the period of 2010-2014. The results indicate that directly in line with predictions, there is a positive influence of the degree of state ownership on audit findings, and it is found that the level of state ownership has an indirect and negative effect on the governance of state enterprises, resulting in a negative impact of corporate governance on the audit. The results of this study imply that in order to reduce the potential for audit findings, the steps that need to be taken by the government gradually are to reduce the state ownership portion of SOEs, especially by privatization through stock offerings on the capital market and encouraging the implementation good governance in SOEs.peer-reviewe

Improving quality of service through road side back-bone network in VANET

The vehicular ad hoc Networks (VANETs) are expected to support a large spectrum of traffic alert, dynamic route planning, file sharing, safety and infotainment applications to improve traffic management. User satisfaction plus in time delivery of real-time messages is the most significant quality evaluation criterion for vehicular applications. High mobility and rapidly changing topologies always lead to intermittent quality of services, higher delay and packet dropping issues in network. To improve the quality of services for multi-hop and dynamic environment, different types of solutions have been proposed. The article introduces multi-protocol label switching based on roadside backbone network to provide widespread, scalable, high-speed, robust quality of services and improve network efficiency. The simulation results showed that proposed model improves data transmission and routing performance in terms of data delivery, throughput, end-to-end delay and achieve adequate utilization of resources

Segmentation of extrapulmonary tuberculosis infection using modified automatic seeded region growing

In the image segmentation process of positron emission tomography combined with computed tomography (PET/CT) imaging, previous works used information in CT only for segmenting the image without utilizing the information that can be provided by PET. This paper proposes to utilize the hot spot values in PET to guide the segmentation in CT, in automatic image segmentation using seeded region growing (SRG) technique. This automatic segmentation routine can be used as part of automatic diagnostic tools. In addition to the original initial seed selection using hot spot values in PET, this paper also introduces a new SRG growing criterion, the sliding windows. Fourteen images of patients having extrapulmonary tuberculosis have been examined using the above-mentioned method. To evaluate the performance of the modified SRG, three fidelity criteria are measured: percentage of under-segmentation area, percentage of over-segmentation area, and average time consumption. In terms of the under-segmentation percentage, SRG with average of the region growing criterion shows the least error percentage (51.85%). Meanwhile, SRG with local averaging and variance yielded the best results (2.67%) for the over-segmentation percentage. In terms of the time complexity, the modified SRG with local averaging and variance growing criterion shows the best performance with 5.273 s average execution time. The results indicate that the proposed methods yield fairly good performance in terms of the over- and under-segmentation area. The results also demonstrated that the hot spot values in PET can be used to guide the automatic segmentation in CT image

Data selection test method for better prediction of building electricity consumption

The issue of obtaining an accurate prediction of electricity consumption has been widely discussed by many previous works. Various techniques have been used such as statistical method, time-series, heuristic methods and many more. Whatever the technique used, the accuracy of prediction depends on the availability of historical data as well as the proper selection of the data. Even the data is exhaustive; it must be selected so that the prediction accuracy can be improved. This paper presented a test method named Data Selection Test (DST) method that can be used to test the historical data to select the correct data set for prediction. The DST method is demonstrated and tested on practical electricity consumption data of a selected commercial building. Three different prediction methods are used (ie. Moving Average, MA, Exponential Smoothing, ES and Linear Regression, LR) to evaluate the prediction accuracy by using the data set recommended by the DST method

Physicochemical composition of hydro-distilled essential oil from coriander ( Coriandrum sativum L.) seeds cultivated in Pakistan.

This experiment describes the physiochemical composition of the essential oil derived from the seeds of coriander (Coriandrum sativum) cultivated in Pakistan. Hydrodistilled essential oil content from coriander seeds was found to be 0.15%. The physicochemical properties namely density (25°C), refractive index (25°C), acid value, ester value, and optical rotation (25°C) determined for the essential oil were found to be 0.8310, 1.4592, 4.0, 23.7, and +11.5 g/cm3, respectively. A total of 48 chemical constituents representing 90% of the essential oil tested were identified using Gas chromatographyflame ionization detector (GC-FID) and Gas chromatography-mass spectroscopy (GC-MS). Linalool with contribution of 69.60% was found to be the principal constituent. Other important components identified were: geranyl acetate (4.99%), γ-terpinene (4.17%), α-pinene (1.63%), anethol (1.15%) and pcymene (1.12%). The analyzed essential oil mainly comprised of oxygenated monoterpene hydrocarbons (80.83%), followed by monoterpene hydrocarbons (8.00%), sesquiterpene hydrocarbons (0.47%) and oxygenated sesquiterpene hydrocarbons (0.35%). Overall, the physicochemical attributes and chemical profile of the tested essential oil from Pakistan were reasonably comparable with those investigated for coriander seed essential oils from other regions of the world suggesting its potential for functional foods and cosmetics applications