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In the opening speech at the International Islamic Capital Market Conference held in Kuala Lumpur recently, the Deputy Prime Minister Dato Seri Anwar Ibrahim (1996: 5), referring to the role of the capital market, advocates an “economic growth with distributive justice, profitability with social responsibility, prudent management and transparency in dealings”. He believes that these are the prerequisites of a healthy and sustainable economy.

Malaysia is now one of the newly industrialising countries and hopes to attain the status of a fully industrialised nation by the year 2020. She has embarked upon the capitalist path of development and has achieved spectacular economic success not only in terms of quantitative growth rate but also in terms of quality of human life.

The papers of this session taken together can be divided into a theoretical and applied parts. There are both interconnections and differences among these two categories of papers. The common thread of interconnection is the theme of ethics, which is shown either to be the groundwork of distribution and reorganization of ownership and market‐institutions interlinkages in the political economy, or is shown to be the groundwork of an ethical approach to the study of economic theory to make sense out of political economy in a human setting. The dissimilarity among the papers is due to an institutional‐economic approach in some papers and a straight‐forward treatment of ethical issues in economic theory seen through the classical economic reasoning.