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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the link between trade diversion risk and new Halal market exploration.

This paper analyzes the Halal trade flows for Malaysia’s top 11 halal food/food-related commodities from 1967 to 2018 by relying on co-integration and auto-regression techniques.

This paper determines that the greater the country’s current comparative advantage in an exported good, the higher the risk of export diversion between the Halal and conventional markets. The diversion risk, however, disappears with a lower current comparative advantage.

To take advantage of the fast-emerging Halal market, a country should expand export of commodities with relatively low current comparative advantage but high demand in the target market, along with supportive trade policies to build competitiveness in the long term.

This study fills the gap in the literature by investigating if the theory of comparative advantage can predict the market diversification risk that may arise from the expansion of exports to the Halal market occurring alongside existing exports to the conventional market.

The gravity theory of trade explains the potential for trade between nations, but its application to trade in halal food has been questioned by previous studies. This study aims to investigate this issue and the role of trading partners’ economic strength and their distance from one another to identify Malaysia’s potential to export food to key halal markets.

The gravity theory of trade was used to examine Malaysia’s top 10 food exports to key halal markets from 2000–2017. The gravity panels were estimated using the Hausman-Taylor modelling technique to control for endogeneity within the model.

The application of the gravity theory of trade to a halal market context provides mixed results. Although the high economic strength (gross domestic product) of the trading partners enhances halal trade, the distance between the partners does not affect the volume of halal food exports. Moreover, the study identifies Malaysia’s potential to export only a few food commodities to key halal markets.

This study challenges the applicability of the gravity theory of trade to the halal food market. The study extends the model with additional controls for behavioural aspects and applies it to commodity-specific segregated trade in halal food. The findings underscore the need to extend the theory beyond its current focus when explaining trade opportunities in halal markets.

This study is based on the consumer purchase intention (CPI) in real estate. The purpose of this study is to investigate the link between CPI and preferred individual investment capacity in buying real estate properties. This study investigates if commonly known factors of CPI such as attitude, social power or subjective norms, perceived behavior power or control, location, surrounding environment and socialization can influence a consumer’s preferred investment amount when buying a house, either for own use or for rental purpose.

A total of 334 respondents participated in this study. The survey data was analyzed using factor analysis technique, ordinary least square technique and Poisson pseudo maximum likelihood technique.

This study finds that location, surrounding environment, property/construction papers, roads, mosque/temple and fire services significantly influence the preferred investment amount of a real estate investor.

This study suggests that a link exists between CPI and real estate investment decision through factors such as location, surrounding environment, legal documentation and communication facility. These identified CPI factors require serious consideration by the real estate developers and their financing partners.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the major determinants of China’s outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) in the economies along the “Belt & Road” Initiative (BRI afterward). China works on to advance the agenda of the BRI both at home and abroad. The BRI is set up to promote connectivity in five key areas: policy coordination, infrastructure connectivity, trade facilitation, financial cooperation and people-to-people contacts.

The existing literature is inconclusive with regards to the motives, patterns and determinants of the Chinese OFDI. The authors are, therefore, motivated to undertake this study to shed some new light on the influencing factors of the Chinese OFDI. The authors have made a unique data set that consists of China and its 64 partnering countries of the BRI over a time period of 12 years spanning from 2004 to 2015. This time period is chosen on the chief consideration of data availability. The authors have a balanced panel, and applied the gravity model in line with the theoretical arguments and econometric developments.

The paper assumes that China’s OFDI along the BRI was a function of gross domestic product (GDP), income per capita, distance and WTO. The findings showed that GDP, per capita income and distance were the key determinants of the OFDI. China’s entry into the WTO did not strongly affect the OFDI. China maintained a tradition of historical relationships along the BRI economies. After all, China is relocating its investment resources in line with the consideration of its partnering countries’ economic size, cross-border distance and per capita income.

This study is the first of its kinds to analyze the determinants of OFDI by means of gravity model. The authors have covered all the countries along the BRI. Hence, this paper aims to make a substantial contribution to the literature, both from a scientific and a policy perspective.

The story of the Bangladesh public sector is not a happy one as it has often failed to uphold efficiency and equality in delivering services to the people. Hence leadership has a critical role to play to ensure equality, effectiveness and efficiency. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the present condition and future prospect of leadership development in the Bangladesh public sector by focusing on the efforts initiated both by the government of Bangladesh and international organizations during the last ten years.

This paper has reviewed available literatures on theories of public sector leadership development and its application in Bangladesh to identify the state and future prospect of public sector leadership development utilizing available theories.

The analysis shows that partisan politics, dominance of generalists, absence of long-range feedback and monitoring systems and lack of efficient and knowledgeable trainers are the major impediments to public sector leadership development. International organizations provide proposals, frameworks, technical assistance along with funds to develop the public sector leaders but in implementing the schemes they have a very limited role in the implementation process.

This paper does not offer much empirical evidence on public sector leadership development in Bangladesh, but creates the platform for further research on public sector training and leadership development with empirical data. Significant variables can be drawn out of this piece of work to design future research on this very important issue.

This paper will help the interested individuals involved in the public sector leadership development in Bangladesh to understand the divergence between the efforts put in by the government and international agencies in developing public sector leadership.

As a coastal emerging country, export-led marine economy has been the development model of Vietnam over the past decades since The Renovation 1986. Given the rise of globalization, regional economic integration and logistics enhancement have been identified as key engines for economic sustainability by Vietnamese government. Nevertheless, little sectoral and sub-sectoral evidence has been given for the platform shaped by policies relevant to export, logistics performance and regional economic integration. The paper employs the trade gravity model to study the relationship between seafood export, logistics performance and regional economic integration in the case of Vietnam. Sectoral and sub-sectoral trade gravity models are employed. Logistics performance from the exporter-side and importer-side is included in the estimations. Membership to effective regional trade agreements of Vietnam are proxies for regional economic integration. Zero trade issue is resolved by the Pooled Ordinary Least Squares (POLS), Poisson Pseudo-Maximum Likelihood (PPML) and Heckman Sample Selection estimations, while endogeneity is tackled by the difference and system Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) models. Findings vary by estimation methods, data levels, product groups, and whether which side is considered. In addition, theoretical contributions and some seafood export-driving policy recommendations relevant to regional economic integration and logistics performance development are discussed.

Because of chronic financial crises experienced during past several decades repeatedly and a failure to protect investors’ rights as a result, the world is looking for an alternative form of stock market for quite some time so that interests of all relevant stakeholders can be safeguarded. At the same time, from the perspectives of devout Muslims, the current form of stock market restricts a Muslim to make investments in the market because of several unsatisfying provisions from the viewpoint of the Islamic law known as Shariah. This study aims to provide the criteria under which conditions of the Islamic Shariah permit making investments in the stock market. Hand in hand with that primary discussion, it has been eluded briefly why the Islamic Shariah principles offer a better alternative against conventional practices of the stock market.

This is a descriptive study based on the literature review.

This study explores the basic Islamic principles of investment in the stock market by revisiting the norms laid down by Shariah and current global practices of Islamic stock market and indexes.

This study will work as a guideline for investors and market authorities to understand the original Shariah rulings and the benchmark rulings for investment or establishing full-fledged Islamic stock markets, indexes and mutual funds.

In this paper, the authors derive time-varying relative export competitiveness (REC) of the Cambodian rice sector from 1995 to 2018 and examine the key determinants of the REC.

Three different REC indexes are calculated in this paper. The authors also developed the relative symmetric export competitiveness (RSEC) index for calculation of comparative advantage. The short-run regression (SRR) model was applied for capturing the determinants of the REC.

The study results reveal that Cambodia's rice exports became relatively competitive over time. The key findings suggest the Cambodian REC was strengthened as a result of a successful implementation of rice policy and rectangular strategy. The benefits gained from EBA and BRI were found to be the factors contributed to the REC. The higher per capita income had a positive effect on the REC, while higher domestic prices reduced the REC in some phases of the sectoral development.

Further research is needed in two directions. First, the future studies might focus on other agro-products of Cambodia. Second, the development of the crop-specific factor endowment (CFE) model to consider the effect of endowment factors on the REC could be preferred in light of the data availability.

The research enriches the literature on the agricultural trade and provides a basis for further studies. This work makes a few contributions. First, it is the first study on the REC analysis for the Cambodian rice sector. Second, the latest 24-year data sets were covered. Third, a wide range of comparisons of REC among the world's top rice exporters was provided following implications of the various economic policies and foreign policy strategies, such as RS, EBA and BRI.

This study aims to investigate the effect of income and asset diversification on earnings management using discretionary loan loss provisions (LLP) in banks, and the role of risk level in mediating this effect.

A sample of banks operating in Middle East and North Africa countries was used to test the mediation model of Baron and Kenny (1986) with different measures of diversification and risk.

The results show that bank income and asset diversification have unique and combined effects on earnings management. The results also support the idea that a risk-mediating effect contributes to explaining this relationship among banks. Specifically, bank diversification strategies positively affect LLP-based earnings management by increasing bank risk. This result is relevant for conventional banks. However, only a direct and positive effect of diversification strategies on LLP-based earnings management can be observed in Islamic banks, and the indirect effect is not supported.

This study extends previous research by examining the unique and combined effects of income and asset diversification strategies on earnings management in the banking sector. Specifically, it provides new evidence that diversification strategies increase LLP-based earnings management, both directly and indirectly, through bank risk.

This paper aims to address the pressing problem of prediction concerning shipment times of therapeutics, diagnostics and vaccines during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic using a novel artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) approach.

The present study used organic real-world therapeutic supplies data of over 3 million shipments collected during the COVID-19 pandemic through a large real-world e-pharmacy. The researchers built various ML multiclass classification models, namely, random forest (RF), extra trees (XRT), decision tree (DT), multilayer perceptron (MLP), XGBoost (XGB), CatBoost (CB), linear stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and the linear Naïve Bayes (NB) and trained them on striped datasets of (source, destination, shipper) triplets. The study stacked the base models and built stacked meta-models. Subsequently, the researchers built a model zoo with a combination of the base models and stacked meta-models trained on these striped datasets. The study used 10-fold cross-validation (CV) for performance evaluation.

The findings reveal that the turn-around-time provided by therapeutic supply logistics providers is only 62.91% accurate when compared to reality. In contrast, the solution provided in this study is up to 93.5% accurate compared to reality, resulting in up to 48.62% improvement, with a clear trend of more historic data and better performance growing each week.

The implication of the study has shown the efficacy of ML model zoo with a combination of base models and stacked meta-models trained on striped datasets of (source, destination and shipper) triplets for predicting the shipment times of therapeutics, diagnostics and vaccines in the e-pharmacy supply chain.

The novelty of the study is on the real-world e-pharmacy supply chain under post-COVID-19 lockdown conditions and has come up with a novel ML ensemble stacking based model zoo to make predictions on the shipment times of therapeutics. Through this work, it is assumed that there will be greater adoption of AI and ML techniques in shipment time prediction of therapeutics in the logistics industry in the pandemic situations.