Humayon A. Dar

Predicting corporate bankruptcy: where we stand?

Purpose – The incidence of important bankruptcy cases has led to a growing interest in corporate bankruptcy prediction models since the 1960s. Several past reviews of this literature are now either out‐of‐date or too narrowly focused. They do not provide a complete comparison of the many different approaches towards bankruptcy prediction and have also failed to provide a solution to the problem of model choice in empirical application. Seeks to address this issue.Design/methodology/approach – Through an extensive literature review, this study provides a comprehensive analysis of the methodologies and empirical findings from these models in their applications across ten different countries.Findings – The predictive accuracies of different models seem to be generally comparable, although artificially intelligent expert system models perform marginally better than statistical and theoretical models. Individually, the use of multiple discriminant analysis (MDA) and logit models dominates the research. Given t...

A capital adequacy framework for Islamic banks: the need to reconcile depositors’ risk aversion with managers’ risk taking

Conceptually, an Islamic bank has an equity-based capital structure, dominated by shareholders’ equity and investment deposits based on profit and loss sharing (PLS). There is no need for capital adequacy regulations if the Islamic banks are structured as pure PLS-based organizations. However, because of informational asymmetry and risk aversion by investors, there currently exist fixed claim liabilities on the Islamic banking balance sheets. This necessitates the imposition of capital adequacy requirements, which aim at maintaining systemic stability by achieving two fundamental objectives. First, capital regulations should protect risk-averse (assumed unsophisticated) depositors. This requires a minimum equity capital cushion and an optimal assets–liabilities composition. Second, capital regulations should give the right incentives to shareholders to promote prudent behaviour by the banks. This requires analysis of the effect of financial participation by shareholders on Pareto optimality, and analysis of potential behaviour by shareholders when facing financial uncertainty. This paper combines modern banking theory and principal-agent analysis to develop a framework for an optimal capital structure for Islamic banks. The proposed capital regulation includes a minimum risk-based equity capital cushion (as required under the Basel Accord), a prudent assets-liabilities (capital) structure (i.e. appropriate proportions of PLS- and non-PLS-based assets and liabilities) and a minimum ‘financial participation’ requirement. It is inferred from the analysis that such capital adequacy requirements will improve the soundness of current Islamic banking practice, thus paving the way for the wider use of PLS by Islamic banks in the long run.

The Gulf Co‐operation Council: A Slow Path to Integration?

This paper assesses the progress towards the intra-regional integration among the GCC countries. We find that although there is limited trade integration in the region as a whole, there are specific countries (for example Bahrain and Oman) that are significantly integrated with at least one trade partner from within the region. The paper argues that the GCC region will have to create a consensus on the trade barriers on the imports from outside the region if progress towards the intra-regional integration is to be increased. Copyright Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2001.

On making human development more humane

It is widely recognised that the human development index (HDI) does not totally capture the rich content of the human development concept, necessitating a more adequate measure of human development. This paper introduces an ethics‐augmented human development index (E‐HDI) as a new indicator of socio‐economic change and development. The E‐HDI incorporates freedom, faith, environmental concerns and the institution of family in the HDI and ranks countries of the world accordingly. It is envisaged to be of practical use in national policy making and may also be related to agenda of the bilateral and international development agencies. Just as the HDI has managed to shift discussions beyond gross national product, the E‐HDI is expected to inject ethical concerns more explicitly into policy making in the contexts in which the human development reports are used.