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This paper aims to explore the issue of corporate governance mechanisms by including the importance of stakeholders, primary objectives of the firm and the ownership of top financial managers of listed firms in Kuwait in the survey tool. It attempts to investigate whether theory aligns with the behaviour of financial managers in practice in an emerging market case.

A survey was developed to focus primarily on the current corporate finance practices implemented by CFOs in listed companies in Kuwait. The target respondents are listed firms in the Kuwaiti Stock Exchange (KSE). The survey includes questions on topics that are closely related to capital budgeting, capital structure, cost of capital and dividend policy. For example, the survey asks the managers how they estimate their cost of equity (CAPM or other methods) and whether the impact of the weighted average cost of equity is taken into consideration in their capital structure choices.

A surprising number of firms are now widely using IRR for decision making. CAPM is also in use, whereas WACC remains the most popular method used. There is some support for the “bird‐in‐hand” dividend theory in the tax‐free environment. Firms in Kuwait do not have any particular source of capital structure choices when it comes to how best to finance their projects as is the case in the US market. Firms in Kuwait are consciously striving for maximizing profits and those managers are regarded as their most important stakeholders. This may indicate the existence of agency problems.

The limitation of this study lies in the absence of empirical investigation on how corporate finance decisions may affect firms' performance in Kuwait. Hence, empirical validation will be performed by the authors in the next stage of this research, which will form the basis for further research. Empirical validation for the impact of corporate governance on performance is needed.

This research may benefit managers and decision makers in many aspects, including having an understanding of applying popular and the most suitable corporate finance and corporate governance techniques in the management of their companies. In this research, the authors have identified the gap between practice and academia.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first study to examine comprehensively major areas of financial policies and practices and corporate governance in an emerging market case, especially in the Middle East. Kuwait provides a unique institutional setting in its taxation system. Therefore, this study will make a contribution to the general literature in this field.

The purpose of this paper is to explore why students decide to enrol in a business postgraduate programme at Damascus University in the current Syrian crisis.

Exploration of students’ motives was generated in this study using semi-structured interviews. On the basis of saturation sampling, 11 interviews took place in the leading Syrian university providing postgraduate programmes, Damascus University.

The results from the interviews indicate the existence of six different motives for students to enrol in a postgraduate study: self-motives, professional motives, social motives, academic motives, lack of vision, and delaying military service, which is directly caused by the current war conditions in Syria.

Understanding postgraduates’ motives is essential at the national level, the institutional level, and also at the individual level to make better future plans related to opening new programmes or altering admission criteria. Recommendations to higher education policy makers are highlighted in the study.

The majority of previous studies concentrate on students’ motives to pursue postgraduate studies during financial crisis. However, very little is known on why students decide to enrol in a business postgraduate programme in a war context.

The study aims at estimating the shadow economy (SE) using the method of demand for currency in Palestine for the period 2008–2018 by studying the relationship between a group of variables that affect the ratio of money traded outside the banking system to the money supply in the broad sense.

The study has adopted analytical and descriptive research methods to estimate SE in Palestinian territories. The data has been obtained from the inflation reports issued by the Palestinian Monetary Authority for ten years, from 2008 to 2018. A standard model was constructed using EViews version 8 for statistical data processing after converting the annual data to quarterly data.

The authors demonstrated that the size of the SE in Palestinian territories has varied over time, and the annual average of its size during the study period reached about $1764.893 (in millions). This amount constitutes about 15.5% of the gross domestic product. The study provides recommendations for reducing the size of the SE in Palestinian territories.

The current study shows that shadow economics could significantly matter for economic policy design by policymakers.

This study deals directly with Tanzi’s “estimation of shadow economy in Palestinian territories” concept and its impact on economic policies.

This paper aims to offer a wider examination of the research concerning entrepreneurship characteristics in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region via a review of recent studies relevant to this topic. Research publications concerning entrepreneurship within the MENA region evidence growing interest in this field of study, with the potential to boost and drive future economic development and growth. This focus within entrepreneurship research is because of the economic development in the region, which is becoming increasingly important for policymakers and businesses.

The author performed a systematic literature review to produce robust information about entrepreneurship in the MENA region, followed by a thematic analysis to identify key research themes within each category.

Despite the growth in entrepreneurship research in the MENA region, research on certain factors is lacking. An analysis of 271 studies published between 2009 and 2019 identifies 9 main research categories, within which 30 themes have attracted significant academic attention. Female entrepreneurship and gender, youth entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship behaviour and orientation are the three key categories influencing perspectives on entrepreneurship in the MENA region. This study highlights research gaps and provides recommendations to guide future research on the sustainable development of entrepreneurship in the MENA region.

This paper highlights trends in entrepreneurship research amongst scholars within the MENA region and suggests paths for future research efforts.

This research attempts to explore how reverse logistics (RL) and sustainable supply chain initiatives (SSCI) affect sustainability performance (SP) in the manufacturing industry under the moderating effects of organisational learning capability (OLC). At the same time, this study is expected to allow manufacturers to advance towards a high level of model generation in the green economy.

The data for this study was obtained from 451 manufacturing companies in the Hebei Province, China. This study develops a model and tests all hypothesised relationships using partial least square–structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) with two-step analytical procedures.

The results indicate that SSCI and RL have a positive relationship with SP, and SSCI is positively related to RL. Moreover, the OLC moderates the relationship between RL and SP as well as the relationship between SSCI and SP.

The findings of the study yield valuable managerial insights on how the effective implementation of green practices, coupled with the utilisation of learning capabilities, can contribute to improving the sustainability of manufacturing firms. The study has certain limitations that suggest potential avenues for future research, the most significant of which is our reliance on data from a single country, which may impede the generalisability of the findings.

This study contributes to the existing literature on SP by considering RL and SSCI and offers a unique theoretical argument that describes the relationships by considering the moderating effect of OLC, which has not been empirically explored.

This study aims to examine whether corporate culture and stakeholder type influence the level of corporate social responsibility disclosure (CSRD) and, if so, the motivations behind this.

An experimental method was adopted in this study to achieve the research objectives by evaluating the perceptions and motivations for CSRD among 120 participants (financial managers and accountants) from 50 financial institutions listed on Boursa Kuwait.

Results indicate that perceptions of CSRD are strongly affected by stakeholder type but not corporate culture. When these two factors are considered jointly, they do not affect the level of CSRD. Regarding motivations, participants from Conventional Financial Institutions seek legitimacy by opting to provide higher levels of CSRD to both shareholders and the general public than those from Islamic Financial Institutions.

This study has implications for three groups: institutions, society and accountants. Each group plays a crucial role in how financial institutions practicing corporate social responsibility (CSR).

Few studies have compared CSR practices between these two types of institutions, with most being descriptive. To the best of the author’s knowledge, this study is the first to use an experimental approach, which controls for all potential factors determining CSRD.

This study aims to investigates the challenges faced by Pakistani financial institutes (FIs) and regulators in implementing robust customer due diligence measures.

The study adopted a qualitative technique. Twenty-five semi-structured interviews with chief compliance officers and regulators were conducted.

The study concluded that the main challenges are name screening, obsolete nature and quality of databases and undocumented, unregistered and unregulated portions of the economy and society. In addition, identification and verification of high-profile customers and beneficial owners, lack of specialised staff and cost of compliance are the significant challenges faced by FIs in Pakistan.

The Pakistani financial sector is less researched on anti-money laundering front, especially concerning customer due diligence. Further, the social, cultural and economic norms of the Indian sub-continent are more or less the same. Therefore, the study findings could be generalised to the region.

Using the maqasid-based consumer preference index (MCPi), this study aims to investigate customer preference for Islamic home financing.

The current study, based on valid 1,034 usable questionnaires and the MCPi, evaluates consumer choice for the supplied Islamic home finance products by 16 Islamic banks in Malaysia.

According to the findings, all banks have a moderate value of MCPi. Bank Islam Malaysia Berhad is at the top of the list, followed by Maybank Islamic, Commerce International Merchant Bankers Islamic and Malaysia Building Society Berhad.

The MCPi is used in this study to test a new technique to measuring consumer preference. The contributions are confined to these particular variables – Educating Customer, Establishing Justice, Promoting Welfare and Fulfiling Islamic Debt Policy. The research also has limitations in terms of the facility’s general setting. Future research may shed light on these issues from new angles.

This research offers banks a new way to manage their products based on maqasid al-Sharīʿah.

In the context of Malaysia, this study introduces the MCPi, a new measure of consumer preference for home financing.

This study aims to explore the effect of Saudi Vision 2030 and its government initiatives on macroeconomic variables related to housing.

This exploratory study used an empirical–analytical approach. Based on secondary data, a set of hypotheses was contrasted to verify whether there has been any change in the trends of macroeconomic variables related to housing after Saudi Vision 2030 entered into force.

The results show that the trend of percentage of housing ownership went from a continuous decrease to accelerated growth since the implementation of Saudi Vision 2030. However, the effect of these advances is not observed in non-oil gross domestic product (GDP) or in the economic activities of the construction, real estate and financial services sectors.

This study notes that despite successful housing outcomes, it appears that Saudi Vision 2030 does not have a positive impact on non-oil GDP. Consequently, government entities should review the degree to which other economic activities contribute to non-oil GDP. A limitation of the study was that the GDP of housing construction and marketing and that of granting mortgage loans were not specifically available, nor were data on public and private investment made for implementing government initiatives.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to explore the effect of Saudi Vision 2030 on housing and its contribution to the economy.