Foreign Direct Investment and Economic Growth Literature Review from 1994 to 2012

AbstractForeign direct investment (FDI) has been viewed as a power affecting economic growth (EG) directly and indirectly during the past few decades. This paper reviewed an amount of researches examining the relationships between FDI and EG, especially the effects of FDI on EG, from 1994 up to 2012. The results show that the main finding of the FDI-EG relation is significantly positive, but in some cases it is negative or even null. And within the relation, there exist several influencing factors such as the adequate levels of human capital, the well-developed financial markets, the complementarity between domestic and foreign investment and the open trade regimes, etc

Islamic Banking versus Conventional Banking, During the Global Financial Crisis: Bahrain

Banks are the most influential sector in the economy with ability toaffect a country's growth. Once global financial crisis hit, many corporationas well as banks are affected. The research objective is to study theperformance of both Islamic and Conventional banking when crisis happen.Several performance indicator are used to evaluate performance with the help ofthe Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) version 20.0 software toanalyze the quantitative data collected from annual report of selected banksstretching from year 2005 to 2013 in Bahrain. For the outcome, Islamic bankingmay perform better than conventional banking during the crisis, but in the longrun the result is reversed due to conventional banking size of business.Keywords:Islamic banking, Conventional banking, Bahrain, Global financial crisis

Economic Growth and Foreign Direct Investment Inflows: The Case of Qatar

Recently, Qatar, a well-known oil production country, has been convinced as a successful case in attracting foreign direct investment (FDI) as a smaller economy. This paper aims to investigate how FDI inflows affect Qatar’s business cycles. Time-series data was selected from 1990 to 2010 as available. The VAR Impulse Responses and the Granger Causality test were mainly employed by using Eviews. The derived result shows that the FDI inflows and the economic growth in Qatar interact with each other in a relatively long term

Islamic Banking vs. Conventional Banking, During the Global Financial Crisis: Malaysia as a Case

ABSTRACT The purpose of this paper is to measure and discuss the impact and performance of conventional and Islamic Banking in Malaysia during the global financial crisis. Performance is measured in terms of profitability, operational efficiency, liquidity and business growth. The period of study is during the financial crisis 1997 (Asian Financial Crisis) and 2007 (Global Financial Crisis). Several published papers and researches have been used in this study. The comparison is made between the performances of Conventional Banking with Islamic Banking in Malaysia. The findings show that Islamic Banking had performed better than Conventional Banking, Therefore, it can be concluded that the Islamic Banking system is able to sustain, survive and compete with the conventional banking system especially during the Global Financial crisis

The Drivers of Quality of Working Life (QWL): A Critical Review

Abstract: To achieve the quality of work life, regular effort is required by the organizations which offer the employees more opportunities for their job effectiveness and collaboration on the overall effectiveness. The high quality of work life (QWL) is essential for all organizations to continue attracting and retaining employees. QWL is a comprehensive program which is designed to increase employees' satisfaction. The purpose of this paper is to find the drivers that can affect the quality of work life. Based on an intensive literature review which was conducted to identify the frequency of eight drivers in 15 selected research papers, it has been chosen specific drivers which estimated to have an impact on QWL. The factors that investigated are: reward, benefits and compensation; job satisfaction; career development; top management involvement; communication; employee motivation; cohesion of work and life; and safety and security. The findings of the study reveal that the most frequent drivers are rewarded, benefits and compensation, followed by career development, communication, and safety and security respectively in order of frequency. The other drivers top management involvement, cohesion of work and life, job satisfaction and employee motivation were found to be less frequent in the literature review