Importance of the Islamic banks in the Monetary Transmission Mechanism in Malaysia

Monetary policy influences the real economy through various channels including bank lending. Currently, Malaysia is operating under dual banking systems; conventional and Islamic banking. The latter has distinctive feature of interest-free. Hence, this study aims to empirically explore the relevance of Islamic banks' financing in channeling the monetary policy effects to the real economy. To achieve this objective, the study relies on an autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) bound testing approach and innovation accounting approach, and uses quarterly data spanning from 1991:Q1 to 2010:Q4. The study documents that Islamic financing channel for monetary transmission exists in Malaysia. Islamic financing is unequally distributed to economic sectors in response to monetary policy shock. Furthermore, the findings also reflect that Islamic banking as operating in dual banking system, is not spared from the interest rate and monetary conditions of the country.