Human Prosperity Measurement Within the Gloom of Maqasid Al-Shariah

This study is trying to interpret the theory of Maqasid Al-Shariah in wide context, which further based on the measurement of socio-economic prosperity; it takes into account the major drawbacks of the existing measurements. The proposed measurement is an integrated Maqasid Al-Shariah based composite index to measure socio-economic prosperity of economies in general and muslim countries in particular. The integrated Maqasid Al-Shariah based measurement does not isolate economic and social progress from the spiritual and biophysical variables that effect human prosperity. Specifically, in this paper, we will be looking at the theory of Maqasid Al-Shariah and socio-economic prosperity, in order to develop these constructs within the proposed composite index and the measurement variables, where each variable constructs under the Maqasid Al-Shariah. This study argues that the existing measurements of socio-economic progress are limited by number of measured variables and, therefore, do not portray the real socio-economic prosperity status

Foreign direct investment in Malaysia: Trends and prospects

This paper reports on a study analyzing recent trends, pattern and prospects of the foreign direct investment (FDI) in Malaysia in the post-1997 financial crisis period. Among the ASEAN-4 countries, Malaysia continues to remain as the main centre for attracting FDI.The macroeconomic variables such as GDP, exports and employment are found to be positively influenced by the growth of FDI in Malaysia. To enhance the positive effect of FDI on the growth process of the Malaysian economy the flow of FDI into export-oriented sector and use of domestic inputs by the foreign oriented firms need to be encouraged.It is suggested that for sustained flow of FDI, continual price stability, macroeconomic balances, good governance and economic liberalization reforms are crucially important in the country.In the event of declining inflows of FDI, Malaysia has to shiR towards inward looking policies and search other alternatives to sustain its growth and economic prosperity by seeking more investment oufflows as a global player

Validity of Landauer's principle in the quantum regime

We demonstrate the validity of Landauer's erasure principle in the strong coupling quantum regime by treating the system-reservoir interaction in a consistent way. We show that the initial coupling to the reservoir modifies both energy and entropy of the system and provide explicit expressions for the latter in the case of a damped quantum harmonic oscillator. These contributions are related to the Hamiltonian of mean force and dominate in the strong damping limit. They need therefore to be fully taken into account in any low-temperature thermodynamic analysis of quantum systems.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure

Effective thermodynamics of strongly coupled qubits

Interactions between a quantum system and its environment at low temperatures can lead to violations of thermal laws for the system. The source of these violations is the entanglement between system and environment, which prevents the system from entering into a thermal state. On the other hand, for two-state systems, we show that one can define an effective temperature, placing the system into a `pseudo-thermal' state where effective thermal laws are upheld. We then numerically explore these assertions for an n-state system inspired by the spin-boson environment.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figure