Islamic Social Finance

Using the data from Pakistan Panel Household Survey (2010), this paper assesses the role of financial inclusion in reducing social exclusion. The findings from regression analysis confirm a statistically significant negative impact of financial inclusion on social exclusion including deep [multidimensional] social exclusion. Deep exclusion for population having financial inclusion drops to 34.8% from 81% otherwise. Most importantly, none of the women was found having deep social exclusion if she has access to financial services.

The paper traced the essential functions and role of awqaf that it played in the past and still providing socio-economic services for the society. The paper provides explicitly the experiences of a few organizations, which play a significant role in this direction and made some recommendations for the improvement of the sector in the present circumstances.

The world has made notable progress in achieving the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of halving the rate of extreme poverty (from 43 per cent in 1990 to about 17 per cent in 2011) before 2015. Nevertheless, about 1 billion people are still under the poverty line. Despite the progress at the global level, poverty prevails with different intensity in different parts of the world.

The main purpose of this study is to evaluate the performance of local governments in Pakistan through citizen’s satisfaction with local public service delivery in the context of the 2001 devolution plan. The devolution policy variable is found to be statistically significant, indicating that people’s satisfaction level declined significantly when the devolution plan was rolled back. The impact of demographic and socio-economic variables on citizen satisfaction with local government is also found to be statistically significant in a majority of cases.

It is commonly observed that the current methodology of product development in Islamic finance has failed to reflect the productive nature of Islamic economics. This is evidenced by a number of current products being substantially indistinguishable from their conventional counterparts according to the commonly-held views.

Although the Organization for Islamic Cooperation (OIC) was not established with the explicit purpose of providing aid to the world’s underprivileged, its founders were motivated, at least in part, by a wish to impersonate and enhance “Islamic solidarity” in the face of widespread poverty in Muslimmajority countries (İhsanoğlu 2010:3). Diverse OIC institutions emerged, including the Islamic Development Bank (1975), the Islamic Solidarity Fund (1974), and the Islamic Centre for Development of Trade (1981), dealing with both humanitarian and developmental concerns (Kayaoglu 2015:17).

Unarguably the current methodology of product development in Islamic finance has failed to reflect the social dimension embedded in Islamic economics. This is evidenced by the nature of the current financing products in Islamic banks being hardly distinguishable from that of conventional products, according to critics and observers. Therefore, a substantial change is required in this methodology in order to observe the social responsibility while structuring a financing product.

This study centers on the premise that entrepreneurship is an embedded process. Although “the entrepreneur” is inherently an “individual,” entrepreneurship can never be fully disembedded from the more general social settings within which any business venture is situated. An Islamic-based economic discursive framework should be cognizant of the different forms of sociality, spatiality, and community as well as the various norms, codes, and symbols that define society more generally. The work of Karl Polanyi on embeddedness is engaged and juxtaposed with

This article studies the political economy of Turkey’s relations with sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) since 2002 while Turkey was under the Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) rule. It argues that Turkey has focused its engagement in Africa mostly on humanitarian assistance and the economy. Contextualizing Turkey’s relations with SSA vis-à-vis other emerging market economies, especially the BRICS (Brazil/Russia/India/China/South Africa), provides ample insights into the nature of Turkey’s engagement in SSA.