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This study explores the adoption of crowdfunding in Pakistan, focusing on the challenges and opportunities within its unique entrepreneurial ecosystem. The research aims to provide insights into the regulatory mechanisms, stakeholder engagement and institutional factors influencing crowdfunding adoption.

Seventeen semi-structured interviews were conducted using a purposive sampling technique. Data was collected from diverse stakeholders involved in the crowdfunding process including investors, entrepreneurs, platform owners and regulators.

The study identifies various challenges, including regulatory gaps, investor concerns, platform-related issues and systemic challenges such as political instability and weak institutions. These challenges hinder the effective implementation of crowdfunding in Pakistan. Moreover, the study highlights opportunities for financial inclusion, bridging the gap between investors and entrepreneurs, and leveraging Pakistan’s entrepreneurial landscape for crowdfunding growth. While several challenges were common to both developed and developing countries, the study also identified distinct challenges such as digital literacy, reliance on the undocumented economy, insufficient regulatory frameworks and investor mindset specific to developing countries.

Since crowdfunding is an emerging phenomenon in Pakistan, this study had limitations as no official crowdfunding platform other than the Pakistan National Investor Portal had started operations. Therefore, this study involved only those stakeholders who were involved in designing regulatory sandbox suggestions. The sample size could be increased to include stakeholders from other developing countries in the future. This article, however, provides significant strategic guidance for policymakers in developing a framework to improve financial inclusion in development.

The study provides critical areas of concern for regulatory authorities for developing appropriate legislation to help overcome the challenges to the institutionalization of crowdfunding. This study also encourages stakeholders like investors and entrepreneurs to participate in crowdfunding while looking at the perspective of other parties.

This research highlights the need for the Pakistani society to be well-informed about alternative investment opportunities, like crowdfunding. The micro, small and medium enterprises (MSME) sector, along with the government, can also explore the benefits of crowdfunding to address their lack of access to capital and enable the inclusion of an informal economy to reduce poverty in a developing country.

Crowdfunding is a new phenomenon in Pakistan, and the scope of its application in the MSME sector has not been thoroughly investigated. This study reveals how micro and small firms can use crowdfunding to boost their economic operations by overcoming challenges and taking advantage of fintech (financial technology) to achieve financial inclusion, leading to economic sustainability.

Microfinance institutions (MFI) must adapt to rapidly changing market conditions, including stringent regulations and diverse customer demands, necessitating a high absorptive capacity. This research elucidates how organizational culture promotes knowledge sharing, thereby enhancing an organization’s ability to absorb and utilize new knowledge, with particular attention to the moderating role of MFI size.

Data were collected from 450 randomly selected employees of MFIs in Pakistan. Hypotheses were tested using structural equation modeling in WarpPLS 8.0.

The findings show that knowledge sharing mediates the relationship between organizational culture and absorptive capacity. The impact is more pronounced in larger MFIs, while smaller MFIs exhibit greater agility in adapting to new knowledge.

MFIs, particularly in dynamic markets like Pakistan, should enhance their absorptive capacity by fostering an organizational culture that promotes knowledge sharing. While larger MFIs benefit from structured knowledge-sharing practices, they should address potential bureaucratic impediments to maintain agility.

By improving absorptive capacity, MFIs can better innovate and tailor their services to underserved communities, contributing to financial inclusion and poverty alleviation in Pakistan. This research provides insights for policymakers and practitioners on fostering sustainable development through strategic organizational practices in MFIs.

The findings offer a practical framework linking theoretical concepts from the resource-based and knowledge-based views to real-world applications, particularly in developing economies. It emphasizes the crucial role of organizational culture in enabling MFIs to adapt and thrive in challenging environments.

This study models the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the performance of the private health-care sector in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries. This paper aims to address the economic, societal and sustainability of the health-care sector.

Data were collected from Bloomberg and the sample consists of 534 firm-year observations from 55 firms listed over 2010–2020. The authors apply panel data and control for the country and governance effects.

The authors found heterogeneous results regarding the three sub-sectors. The pandemic has a negative effect on the accounting and market performances of the “Pharmaceutical companies” and an insignificant impact on “Healthcare Management and Facilities Services.” Moreover, the impact of COVID-19 on health-care firms’ performance depends on the country’s economic classification and the degree of regulatory and governance frameworks.

Further studies may consider a larger sample and other regions. It is recommended to address the health-care sector's challenges to invest in new technologies such as “digital twin” and predictive and personalized medicine. It is worth testing model development theory and its effects on speeding up and designing models to ensure the proper functioning and developing mathematics to determine uncertainties in patient data and model predictions.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is novel as it is unique in modeling the impact of COVID-19 on the health-care public companies in the MENA region. The findings pinpoint firms’ and countries’ heterogeneous impacts on financial and market performances.

The paper looks at local experience and concerns in environmental disasters in the upper Indus Basin, widely thought to become more serious due to climate change. Emphasis is on the lives and livelihoods, responses, and concerns of those most affected. Several events and their contexts are examined. They highlight socially distributed and differentiated risks, losses, adaptive capacities, and available or absent protections. Cases at the village level underline problems relating to aspects of women's work and health; and how, while traditional practices are being enforced to ensure their continued seclusion and subordination, the villages and men's work are increasingly drawn into the modern economy and modernizing developments. Often these trends undermine traditional risk-averse practices but fail to provide alternatives. Some larger disasters reveal a disconnect between research and official responses, and expose the needs of local communities, whether in villages or mountain towns. This study examines how exposure and vulnerability to environmental dangers are a social construct. It leads to an argument for the “professional ear” in these contexts, finding ways to listen to those rarely heard, and translations that respect their concerns. Such work looks at conditions essentially invisible to climate models, and differing in character and approach. Arguably, it should come ahead of attempts to use model results to propose adaptive responses in these contexts.

Intellectual capital (IC) plays a pivotal role in the high-tech and knowledge-based economic sectors. With the emergence of FinTech, which, with respect to the banking sector, is merging high-tech with the k-economy, there is an emerging need to highlight the importance and understand the dynamics of bank IC. With respect to Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) economies, where FinTech has become de rigueur, banking is bifurcated into Islamic and banking sectors. Through comparative empirical analysis, the purpose of this paper is to examine IC efficiency in Islamic and conventional banks with a view to elucidating the impact of IC, in aggregate and decomposed into its components, on an operational, financial and market performance of Islamic banks juxtaposed with conventional banks.

Using data collected from 59 banks for five years (2012-2016) involving 295 observations, an independent variable derived from the modified value added IC (MVAIC) components are regressed against dependent bank performance indicator variables [Return on Assets (ROA), Return on Equity (ROE) and Tobin’s Q (TQ)]. Two types of control variables complete the regression analysis in this study: bank-specific and macroeconomic.

The findings elicited from the empirical results demonstrate that there is positive relationship between IC efficiency and financial performance (ROE) and market performance (TQ) in Islamic banks. In conventional banks, however, there is a positive relationship between IC and operational performance (ROE) and financial performance (ROE).

The model in this paper presents a valuable analytical framework for exploring IC efficiency as a driver of performance in dual-sector banking economies characterized by co-existence of Islamic and conventional financial institutions. In addition, this paper highlights bank management lacunae manifesting in terms of the weak nexus between: IC and asset efficiency (ROA) in Islamic banks and IC and market value (TQ) in conventional banks.

Intellectual capital (IC) is considered as a lifeblood of the high-tech and knowledge-based sectors. Therefore, there is a great need to highlight the importance of IC in the banking sector. Since the banking sector in the gulf countries is mainly based on Islamic and conventional banking, the purpose of this paper is to provide a comparative empirical analysis between IC efficiency in Islamic and conventional banks, and its impacts on a bank’s operational, financial and market performance.

This study examined 59 banks for five years to end up with 295 observations. The independent variable is the modified value added IC components; the dependent variables are performance indicators (return on assets, return on equity and Tobin’s Q). Two control variables are utilized in this study: bank-specific and macroeconomic.

The findings deduced from the empirical results demonstrate that there is a positive relationship between IC efficiency and financial performance (ROE) and market performance (TQ) in Islamic banks. However, in conventional banks, there is a positive relationship between IC and operational performance (ROE) and financial performance (ROE).

The results of this study can be used to present a successful model for the Islamic and conventional banks to concentrate more on the role of IC in enhancing the bank’s performance. In addition, the results of this study may provide a wake-up call for Islamic banks to examine the reasons for the imperfect relationship between the IC and asset efficiency (ROA), as well as for conventional banks to examine the reasons for an imperfect relationship between the IC and market value (TQ).

This study aims to examine the impact of intellectual capital (IC) efficiency on bank’s operational, financial and market performance.

The study examined 59 banks for 5 years to ends up with 295 observations. The independent variable is the modified value added IC component; the dependent variables are performance indicators (return on assets [ROA], return on equity [ROE] and Tobin’s Q [TQ]).

The findings deduced from the empirical results demonstrate that there is a positive relationship between intellectual capital efficiency and financial performance (ROE) and market performance (TQ).

The results of this study may give a wake-up call for banks to examine the reasons of imperfect relationship between the IC and asset efficiency (ROA).