Economic Pricing Mechanisms for Islamic Financial Instruments: Ijarah Model

The Islamic Economic and banking industry have been trying for the last two decades to extend its outreach to expand its operation business and services in a comparable footing to conventional banking. This paper discusses one of the important hurdles in the growth of Islamic banking which is the use of KIBOR as benchmark for pricing the Islamic banking products. Muskun home financing product of BankIslami Pakistan Limited is used in this paper to elaborate the pricing and benchmarking of product, spread between the conventional interest rate and Islamic profit rate as well as the alternative product pricing mechanism to be used by Islamic banks for this product. Details of Muskun home financing product are discussed in this paper in addition to the marketing strategy, market approach, economic product development, and all other relevant processes.Islamic Economics, KIBOR, Benchmarking, Pricing, Riba based system, Confidence

Analyzing Consistency of Behavioral REST Web Service Interfaces

REST web services can offer complex operations that do more than just simply creating, retrieving, updating and deleting information from a database. We have proposed an approach to design the interfaces of behavioral REST web services by defining a resource and a behavioral model using UML. In this paper we discuss the consistency between the resource and behavioral models that represent service states using state invariants. The state invariants are defined as predicates over resources and describe what are the valid state configurations of a behavioral model. If a state invariant is unsatisfiable then there is no valid state configuration containing the state and there is no service that can implement the service interface. We also show how we can use reasoning tools to determine the consistency between these design models.Comment: In Proceedings WWV 2012, arXiv:1210.578

Alternative Pricing Mechanisms for Islamic Financial Instruments: Economic Perspective

The Islamic banking industry has been trying for the last two decades to extend its outreach to expand its operation business and services in a comparable zone to conventional banking. This paper discusses one of the important hurdles in the growth of Islamic banking which is the use of KIBOR as benchmark for pricing the Islamic banking products. Muskun home financing product of BankIslami Pakistan Limited is used in this paper to elaborate the pricing and benchmarking of product, spread between the conventional interest rate and Islamic profit rate as well as the alternative product pricing mechanism to be used by Islamic banks for this product. Details of Muskun home financing product are discussed in this paper in addition to the marketing strategy, market approach, product development, and all other relevant processes.Islamic Economics, KIBOR, Benchmarking, Pricing, Riba based system, Confidence

Whether Fiscal Stance or Monetary Policy is Effective for Economic Growth in Case of South Asian Countries?

The relative significance of fiscal and monetary policy has been one of the most unsettled issues in economics. Relevant literature shows that the study of the effectiveness of monetary and fiscal policy is equivalent to the study of the relative efficacy of Keynesian economics and monetarism. This study investigates the relative effectiveness of both types of policies in the context of modern panel data analysis in case of South Asian Countries during the period from 1990 to 2007 to test the Monetarist and Keynesian claims, and to find out that whether the policy instruments have a significant relationship with economic growth. Im, Pesaran, and Shin and Levin, Lin, and Chu tests have been used to investigate the order of integration. For long run and short run relationship we utilis ed the advance Autoregressive Distributed Lag Model ARDL a co-integration (panel) test and ECM (Error Correction Method) respectively.Fiscal Policy, Monetary Policy, Panel Co-integration

Quality in early childhood education: Assessing early child development - a holistic approach for ages 3-6 years

Early childhood lays strong foundations for adulthood. Experiences, positive or negative, during this period have long-lasting effects. The purpose of this paper is to underscore the need for an integrated approach towards early years, particularly pre-school period (3 to 6 years). The article also introduces to ‘Record of Early Childhood Growth and Development’ developed by Human Development Programme of Aga Khan University to measure holistic child development

Mediating role of psychological contract in the relationship between workplace spirituality and affective commitment

Malaysian banking sector is facing commitment challenge of their employees especially in the current highly competitive business environment. Now banks want to retain and engage their competent employees so there is a need to create or enhance their affective commitment because this affective commitment is a key to retain and engage competent employees. Previous research explains that effective commitment provide employees emotional attachment with their organisation so there is a need to explore those factors through which organisations can develop the affective commitment of their employees. Healthy amount of research has been conducted to deal with employee attitude and commitment. As time goes on new concepts are coming up with new management ideas. One such new area of research is workplace spirituality. Previous research in this field discovered numerous benefits of workplace spirituality to the organization and employee as well as organizational and employee development, and commitment. Literature review pointed out that Malaysian banking sector is facing the problem of employee commitment. Present research is an attempt to deal this problem of employee commitment with the help of workplace spirituality along with psychological contract as a mediator. Subjects for this research were 350 bank employees working in commercial banks in Malaysia. Structural equation modelling SEM – PLS was the main statistical technique utilized in this study. All the main relationships were found to have significant effect on employees affective commitment, Overall, the results indicate that the model provide good understanding of the workplace spirituality‟s influence on employees commitment in banking sector of Malaysia

Extraction, Characterization, Amino Acid Profile of Halal Gelatin from Kampong and Broiler Chicken Feet Skin

Gelatin is one of the food additives where the issue of halal is interesting to study. Several previous studies have explored alternatives to halal gelatin. This study analyzes gelatin's chemical and physical properties from kampong and broiler chicken feet skin. The results obtained can be utilized to develop a halal alternative to gelatin. The study used a nested randomized design consisting of two factors: variations in the chicken origin and the concentration of the acid solvent. The first factor, the kind of chicken, had two levels, kampong and broiler chickens. The second factor was acetic acid concentration (CH3COOH) with 2 %, 4 %, 6 %, and 8 % (v v–1). Gelatin from the skin of kampong chicken feet skin with 4 % (v w–1) acetic acid reached a yield of 12.67 %, a moisture content of 10.29 %, an ash content of 1.58 %, a protein content of 82.52 %, a pH 4.53, a viscosity of 4.78 cp, and a gel strength of 66.29 g cm–2. Gelatin from broiler chicken leg skin with 4 % acetic acid reached a yield of 10.90 %, a moisture content of 7.95 %, an ash content of 7.95 %, a protein content of 82.48 %, a pH of 4.76, a viscosity of 5.4 cp, and a gel strength of 70.13 g cm–2. Kampong and broiler chicken feet skin gelatin were similar to commercial gelatin concerning the glycine percentage. Glycine has more than 50 % gelatin from all amino acids. Glycine from kampong chicken feet skin gelatin was 53.37 %, broiler chicken feet skin gelatin had 51.95 %, and commercial gelatin was 54.33 %. The meatballs using kampong and broiler chicken feet skin gelatin (acetic acid 4 %) meet all the requirements of NSA (National Standardization Agency of Republic of Indonesia -Standar Nasional Indonesia: 3818-2014) for moisture, ash, protein, and lipid content variables