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This study aims to incorporate visitors’ preferences for sustainable development into the policy framework of Rainforest Discovery Centre (RDC), Sabah, Malaysia.

A stated preference technique known as choice experiment (CE) method is used in this study. Four management attributes, namely, information provision (IP), protection level (PL), guided tour (GT) and entrance fee (FEE), were identified as the most relevant aspects of the RDC in Sabah. Two econometrics models which are conditional logit and random parameter logit were estimated to achieve the purpose of the study.

This study finds that visitors support the proposed development of RDC. The alteration of protection level (i.e. improvement of “PL” attribute) is the most concerning matter among visitors. Since the random parameter logit model revealed that PL is specified as random, the individual heterogeneity exists for PL.

The current issues in ecotourism were studied and integrated into the methodology. A unique and comprehensive policy structure was developed, and enables to respond with any contemporary issues linked to protected areas (PA) without neglecting the natural and cultural endowments.

This study presents an in-depth understanding of visitors’ preferences in the ecotourism industry and used CE as a mechanism tool to explore visitors’ preferences. This study incorporates the conceptualisation of visitors’ preferences and sustainable tourism development into the PA framework structure.

这项研究的目标是将游客的偏好纳入马来西亚沙巴的热带雨林探索中心(RDC)的政策框架中以促进可持续性发展。

种陈述偏好的技术称为选择实验(CE)的方法被采用在本文。,其中四个管理属性; 包括资讯供应(IP) 、 保护水平(PL) 、导游陪同的旅游(GT) 和入门收费(FEE), 视为沙巴RDC最相关的方面。,另外两项計量經濟模型有条件Logit和随机参数Logit模型也被用以估计来达到研究目的。

这项研究发掘游客是支持RDC的拟开发。,保护级别的改造（即“ PL”属性的改进）也是访客中最关注的事。,由于随机参数Logit模型被指定为随机, 因此PL是存在个别异质性。

此项研究研证了生态旅游中的当前问题, 并且将其综合到方法论中。,研发了独特而全面的政策结构, 以便能应对任何与受保护区域相关的当前问题, 同时非忽视自然和文化禀赋。

这项研究使用了CE作为一种机制来探索游客的偏好, 及深入了解生态旅游业中游客的偏好。,此项研结合游客偏好和可持续旅游业发展的概念并纳入了PA框架结构。

Este estudio tiene como objetivo incorporar las preferencias de los visitantes por el desarrollo sostenible en el marco de políticas de Rainforest Discovery Centre (RDC), Sabah, Malasia.

En este estudio se utiliza una técnica de preferencia declarada que se conoce como método del experimento de elección (CE). Cuatro atributos de gestión, a saber, suministro de información (PI), protección nivel (PL), visita guiada (GT) y tarifa de entrada (FEE) fueron identificados como los aspectos más relevantes de la RDC en Sabah. Dos modelos econométricos que son logit condicional y logit de parámetro aleatorio fueron estimado para lograr el propósito del estudio.

Este estudio encuentra que los visitantes apoyan el desarrollo propuesto de RDC. La alteración de El nivel de protección (es decir, la mejora del atributo "PL") es el asunto más preocupante entre los visitantes. Ya que El modelo logit de parámetros aleatorios reveló que PL se especifica como aleatorio, la heterogeneidad individual existe para PL.

Los temas actuales en ecoturismo fueron estudiados e integrados en la metodología. Se desarrolló una estructura de política única y completa que permite responder con los temas contemporáneos vinculados a las áreas protegidas (AP) sin descuidar los aspectos naturales y culturales dotaciones.

Este estudio presenta una comprensión profunda de las preferencias de los visitantes en el industria del ecoturismo y utilizó CE como una herramienta de mecanismo para explorar las preferencias de los visitantes. Este estudio incorpora la conceptualización de las preferencias de los visitantes y el desarrollo del turismo sostenible en el Estructura del Marco PA.

Banks are important sources of external credit but they are reluctant to lend to small and medium enterprises (SMEs) due to the high credit risk involved. Therefore, Credit Guarantee Corporation (Malaysia) Limited (CGC) was set up to assist SMEs to secure loans from financial institutions in Malaysia. Being the sole issuer of credit guarantees to SMEs, the performance of CGC directly reflects the availability of credit guarantees to SMEs. Hence, to ascertain the accessibility of credit guarantees, this study evaluates the efficiency of credit guarantee schemes provided by CGC. From a non‐parametric analysis, CGC is found to be operating at a relatively low level of overall technical efficiency. Therefore, CGC should consider reallocating its existing inputs as well as increase the amount of credit guarantees granted to SMEs in order to achieve a reasonable level of efficiency.

The purpose of this paper is to know the method adopted by the Malaysian supervisor to regulate the Takaful sector, and to propose a new approach related to the effective supervision.

The key approach in this paper is a case study over a clear period of time, to discover a wide variety of economical, financial, social, and cultural factors potentially related to Malaysian Takaful system. In addition, both explanatory and descriptive approaches are used, to seek explanations of problems, make careful observations, and give detailed recommendations. The study collected relevant quantitative and qualitative data.

The key findings are: the basis of Takaful’s operation is established on the principles of Islamic Laws, Takaful operations are regulated by the Central Bank, this supervisory body has adopted elements of the two methods: regulation and supervision, the Malaysian Takaful industry has experienced rapid growth and transformation, and the proposed approach includes four key elements.

This study provides a road map for the next studies in this new topic.

The paper guides the policy makers to giving more independence and allocating more resources to the supervisory body, for the development of an important component of the financial system.

The essay is distinguished from the previous researches by limiting and identifying a clear period of the study. Further, the authors have listed the most important elements of the leading programs. Finally, the approach is more concerned with new aspects of the ongoing supervision, strategic axis and the supervision stages.

Islamic finance and Halal product sectors are thriving successfully. This chapter is a general review of the perception of Asian consumers on Islamic finance and Halal sectors in the global Halal economy.

The first section will briefly describe the Halal concept in both Islamic finance and Halal industries, and the growth of both sectors in Asian countries. The second part highlights the review of Asian consumers’ perception towards Islamic finance products and Halal products.

The review found that the consumers’ perception towards the Islamic finance products and Halal products is distinctive. This is due to the diversity of Asian countries in terms of geography, religion, culture, ethnic, school of thoughts (madzahib), income per capita and government’s involvement.

The third part of the chapter concentrates on planning towards Halal marketing, which involves the move and future challenges in different layers of industries to gear up and strengthen the Halal economy.

This study aims to identify the factors to food safety certification adoption among farmers in Malaysia.

This study was conducted qualitatively using a method of interviewing with unstructured questions. To identify the factors that influence and prevent the adoption of food safety certification among Malaysian farmers, nine (n = 9) agricultural industrial experts were randomly chosen.

Based on data analysis using thematic analysis, the respondent highlighted 14 factors to food safety certification. Specifically, the most frequent determinant highlighted by the respondent is enforcement (12). Additionally, it has been proven that the identified factors aligned with existing theories: technology, organization and environment (TOE) framework and eco-innovation theory. These theories help researchers to create effective strategies and produce significant findings from their research.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to investigate food safety certification adoption among farmers in the Malaysian agriculture industry using the integration of the TOE framework and eco-innovation theory. The stakeholder is expected to receive the benefits of creating efficient campaigns to encourage more farmers to obtain food safety certification. This study provides further knowledge by improving the understanding of the processes involved in certification adoption, providing context-specific insights, best practices, policy guiding development and emphasizing the effects of certification on sustainability and competitiveness.

This chapter provided systematic and comprehensive analysis on trawl fisheries management and conservation measures in the Straits of Malacca. Detailed analysis is conducted on Malaysian fishery management framework particularly domestic country's trawl fishery status, legal structure, input-control strategies, ecosystem protection plan, pollution, law enforcement, and complementary measures that designed to reduce and prevent overfishing in the exclusive economic zone (EEZ) of Malacca Straits. Gaps and challenges found in existing trawl fisheries literature are presented followed by recommendations for improvement in the management and conservation of trawl fisheries.

Questionnaire studies of knowledge, attitude and practice (KAP) are effective research in the field of health, which have many shortcomings. The purpose of this research is to propose an automatic questionnaire-free method based on deep learning techniques to address the shortcomings of common methods. Next, the aim of this research is to use the proposed method with public comments on Twitter to get the gaps in KAP of people regarding COVID-19.

In this paper, two models are proposed to achieve the mentioned purposes, the first one for attitude and the other for people’s knowledge and practice. First, the authors collect some tweets from Twitter and label them. After that, the authors preprocess the collected textual data. Then, the text representation vector for each tweet is extracted using BERT-BiGRU or XLNet-GRU. Finally, for the knowledge and practice problem, a multi-label classifier with 16 classes representing health guidelines is proposed. Also, for the attitude problem, a multi-class classifier with three classes (positive, negative and neutral) is proposed.

Labeling quality has a direct relationship with the performance of the final model, the authors calculated the inter-rater reliability using the Krippendorf alpha coefficient, which shows the reliability of the assessment in both problems. In the problem of knowledge and practice, 87% and in the problem of people’s attitude, 95% agreement was reached. The high agreement obtained indicates the reliability of the dataset and warrants the assessment. The proposed models in both problems were evaluated with some metrics, which shows that both proposed models perform better than the common methods. Our analyses for KAP are more efficient than questionnaire methods. Our method has solved many shortcomings of questionnaires, the most important of which is increasing the speed of evaluation, increasing the studied population and receiving reliable opinions to get accurate results.

Our research is based on social network datasets. This data cannot provide the possibility to discover the public information of users definitively. Addressing this limitation can have a lot of complexity and little certainty, so in this research, the authors presented our final analysis independent of the public information of users.

Combining recurrent neural networks with methods based on the attention mechanism improves the performance of the model and solves the need for large training data. Also, using these methods is effective in the process of improving the implementation of KAP research and eliminating its shortcomings. These results can be used in other text processing tasks and cause their improvement. The results of the analysis on the attitude, practice and knowledge of people regarding the health guidelines lead to the effective planning and implementation of health decisions and interventions and required training by health institutions. The results of this research show the effective relationship between attitude, practice and knowledge. People are better at following health guidelines than being aware of COVID-19. Despite many tensions during the epidemic, most people still discuss the issue with a positive attitude.

To the best of our knowledge, so far, no text processing-based method has been proposed to perform KAP research. Also, our method benefits from the most valuable data of today’s era (i.e. social networks), which is the expression of people’s experiences, facts and free opinions. Therefore, our final analysis provides more realistic results.

This paper aims to present a conceptual model on the efficiency of Islamic real estate investment trusts (I-REITs) available in Malaysia. The key difference between the Islamic and their conventional investment vehicle part is mainly its own Shariah framework. For instance, I-REITS must comply with the requirement of Securities Commission Act 1993 as well as the Guidelines on Islamic Real Estate Investment Trusts (Islamic REITs Guidelines).

The paper reviews and synthesises the relevant literature on the performance analysis and efficiency measurements of REITs. The paper then develops and proposes a conceptual model to measure the efficiency of Malaysian and Islamic REITs.

The paper identifies and examines the appropriate methods and instruments to measure the efficiency in relation to the risk and profitability of I-REITs. The efficiency measure is important for the fund managers to maximise the shareholders’ return in an investment of property portfolio as well as proposing the best way to allocate resources efficiently.

This is a preliminary review of current work that identifies the issues that will be addressed in future empirical research. The authors will be undertaking this future empirical research in measuring the efficiency of Malaysian real estate investment trusts (M-REITs), particularly the I-REITs, using the non-parametric approach of data envelopment analysis.

To date, there has been very limited research on the efficiency measurement of I-REITs. The current analysis of REIT has been focused on traditional non-Islamic funds. This paper will review and discuss the current literature on efficiency measurement to determine the most appropriate approaches and methodologies for future application in performance analysis of efficiency measure for Malaysian and Islamic REITs.

The purpose of this study is to extend previous literature and examine risk management efficiency among Takaful (TI) and conventional insurance (CI) firms in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). This study also aims to determine whether Takaful firms are more efficient in managing risks, compared to CI firms.

This study examines risk management efficiency among Takaful and CI firms in the KSA and the UAE for a sample of 20 insurance firms comprising 10 TI firms and 10 CI firms for the period 2018–2020. The authors use Data Envelopment Analysis to estimate efficiency scores among insurance companies to compare risk management efficiency between CI and TI companies and apply two-way analysis of variance to statistically analyze the data.

The results of this study show that TI firms have a higher efficiency score than CI firms, but not significantly and that insurance firms in KSA have higher efficiency scores than insurance firms in UAE. The results also reveal that TI firms did not significantly outperform CI firms in managing risks; however, there is a significant difference in efficiency scores among insurance firms in KSA and UAE.

The authors also contribute to the literature by providing important insights into how the operational business environment of the country can influence the risk management efficiency of CI and TI companies.

This study promotes understanding the insurance industry, its efficiency and risk management, thus offering key implications for decision-makers, regulators and managers associated with the insurance industry in UAE, KSA and other emerging insurance markets. Regulators could provide enabling policies that foster and promote the business environment, as there is a need to improve risk management efficiency in the insurance industry. Also, the results of this study show that the operating status of the UAE insurance industry in terms of efficiency and risk management is lower than that of KSA. Hence, it would be useful for UAE managers and regulators in taking steps to improve the overall insurance industry market.

The results of this study make significant contributions by providing new insights to the existing literature on the risk management efficiency in the insurance industry, as it adopts a different methodological approach that examines risk management efficiency among TI and CI companies.

Paddy farmers form the backbone of food security. However, poverty plagues them despite having linked them to the rice value chain. To overcome this, the concept of involving smallholders in post-farm value chain stages is promoted. The purpose of this paper is to explore the potential of upgrading smallholder involvement in rice value chains through the adoption of a sustainability standard.

The authors built a system dynamic model to capture both conventional and certified sub-value chains. The latter deviates from the conventional one and capitalizes on compliance to a sustainability standard.

When compared to conventional farm gate sales methods, the simulations revealed obvious profitability of direct marketing with respect to certified sustainable rice. Although coupled with productivity growth, the simulations indicated the shift to standard adoption would likely to be both limited and slow.

The findings suggest that the profitability of a certified rice value chain will remain fettered. In order to enhance both farmer livelihood and food security, given the limited prospect of moving smallholders up that chain, the authors conclude that national policy should be rationalized and concentrated on the possibility of diversifying the end-use of rice through research, development and subsequent commercialization.