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This paper aims to assess the fiscal sustainability in Egypt during the period 1990–2018 using deficit accounts (DA) approach. It also tries to investigate the possibility of applying generational accounts (GA) in Egypt as a new approach to assess fiscal sustainability.

This paper tries to assess fiscal sustainability in Egypt during 1990–2018 using DA and GA approaches. DA approach includes primary deficit indicator, tax gap indicator, augmented Dickey-Fuller stationarity test for debt/GDP ratio and Johansen co-integration test between government revenues and expenditures. However, concerning the possibility of applying GA in Egypt, field study form was designed including specific questions to academic and executive economic experts to investigate if it is possible to apply GA in Egypt.

The empirical findings of the field study indicate that Egypt witnessed fiscal sustainability during the period 1990–2018 using DA. On the other hand, there are various obstacles, including administrative, technical, legal and political obstacles which hinder Egypt from applying GA to assess fiscal sustainability.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, this paper assesses fiscal sustainability in Egypt using DA for a longer and updated time series within 1990–2018. In addition, it is the first paper to examine the possibility of assessing fiscal sustainability using GA approach in Egypt.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between religious involvement and attitudinal (importance of helping others and of being socially active) and behavioral components of prosociality (volunteering, charitable giving, and blood donations) in Germany.

The empirical analyses are based on representative, longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, which allows avoiding issues of reverse causality.

The results suggest for a moderate, positive link between individuals’ religious involvement as measured by church affiliation and church attendance and the prosociality aspects addressed. Despite the historic divide in religion, the results in West and East Germany do not differ substantially in terms of the underlying mechanisms.

The paper complements the growing literature from experimental economics on the relationship between individuals’ religiosity and their prosociality. Based on representative longitudinal data, it contributes by providing evidence for Germany for which there is barely any insight yet and by addressing a wider range of attitudinal and (self-reported) behavioral components of prosociality.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether people who engage in religious activities are more generous in terms of both religious and secular giving.

Bivariate probit (BVP) and bivariate tobit (BVT) analyses show that religious people have a greater propensity to give and higher levels of giving to both religious and secular charitable organizations. The bivariate systems permit a test of the correlation across the different giving decisions, and the correlation between religious and secular giving is found to be highly significant.

Religiosity positively influences both religious and secular donations. After controlling for this correlation, the impacts of religiosity on religious and secular giving are more efficient estimates but smaller than expected.

As a result of these methodological shortcomings, the causal relationship between religiosity and charitable giving is far from clear. To overcome those problems, this study uses BVP and BVT models to control for the potential correlation between religious giving and secular giving by the same individual and then draws appropriate interpretations. This study adds a firmer theoretical foundation to the existing literature.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss whether altruism justifies ad hoc legislation with reference to three different contexts. One is defined by the libertarian notion of liberty; a second framework corresponds to the egalitarian vision; and a third one originates from social-contract theory.

The authors review two stylized visions of liberty, and consider to what extent the current legal systems comply with one of these visions. Moreover, the authors analyse the implications of the contractarian approach.

It is shown that current legislation is rather ambiguous and sometimes even contradictory. By and large, the common-law view tends to favour the libertarian approach, while the civil-law visions are closer to what one might expect from social-contract theory. In these cases, however, it seems that the letter of the law is often questioned by the academic community as well as by the judiciary, and decisions eventually follow the judges’ discretionary power.

This analysis of altruism combines the economic and legal perspectives. Although altruism is always considered an important part of social capital and worthy of privileged treatment, it is shown that policymaking is frequently inconsistent and sometimes contradictory.

Small farmers are considered one of the most affected communities worldwide due to poverty. Hence, this paper aims to study how the proposed waqf crowdfunding models are intended to provide alternative sources of funds for the waqf institutions and farmers.

The present study employed a qualitative method by analysing the relevant literature on crowdfunding, waqf cash, waqf and agriculture, together with the primary sources of the Ḥadīth.

This paper provides the conceptual framework of two waqf crowdfunding model (WCM) and the required parameters for their application. It is found that crowdfunding can bring immense benefits to the agriculture sector and farmers if it is integrated with waqf. This system will enable underprivileged farmers to meet their necessities and participate in their country's economic development.

Future research may consider a waqf crowdfunding integrated model targeting other businesses.

This study provides the required parameters for the application of the proposed models. Four areas were analysed and discussed: the regulatory compliance parameters, the shariah compliance parameters, the risk management parameters and, finally, waqf governance parameters. To the best of the author's knowledge, this is the first proposed waqf and crowdfunding integrated model for agricultural financing.

This study aims to compare the nexus between donations to Islamic and conventional microfinance institutions (MFIs) and their credit risk, financial performance and social outreach.

The authors use fixed effects and two-step system generalized methods of moments models with internal instrumentation. The analysis is conducted on an international sample of 1,519 MFIs in 55 countries during 1999–2019.

Islamic MFIs receiving greater donations experience an increase in credit risk, whereas the opposite occurs among their conventional counterparts. Donations are associated with an improvement in the depth of outreach of Islamic MFIs, allowing them to serve a poorer client base, despite a simultaneous decline in the breadth of their outreach. On the other hand, donations improve both the depth and breadth of conventional MFIs outreach. Donations also exhibit a positive relation with productivity, efficiency and sustainability in conventional MFIs.

This paper addresses a gap in the literature on Islamic MFIs and their use of donor funds by examining how donations contribute to the quality of their credit portfolios, financial performance and social outreach. This study used Ahmed’s (2012, 2017, 2020, 2021) total factor productivity model to capture the impact of donations on the performance of MFIs.

Donations are found to contribute to positive financial inclusion outcomes for both Islamic and conventional MFIs, a promising implication for society and donors alike.

This paper addresses a gap in the academic literature on Islamic MFIs and their use of donor funds by examining how donations contribute to the quality of their credit portfolios, financial performance and social outreach.

This paper aims to investigate the increasing trend of multigenerational co-living in the USA and to research the socioeconomic and cultural determinants of such decision.

This study uses the 2017 American Housing Survey data to run descriptive and regression analysis.

The authors find household income appears consistently to be the most significant factor determining multigenerational co-residence decision across all household compositions. Latino households are most likely to co-reside with multiple generations, followed by Asian and African American households. Immigrants tend to live in multigenerational co-residential housing units with smaller sizes and more impoverished neighborhoods, but show greater flexibility in making residential arrangements once they gain better education. In addition, older householders or female householders are significantly more likely to co-reside with multiple generations. Living in metropolitan areas has no impact on co-residence choice, although some evidence suggests that multigenerational co-residential families tend to live in inferior neighborhoods.

This study provides updated evidence on multigenerational co-residence choice in the contemporary United States. The findings provide evidence on how households make residential choices in response to financial hardships and contribute to the theoretical understanding of the variations of such decisions among immigrants and different ethnic and aging groups.

This study on multigenerational co-residence choice imposes important practical implications. The unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic creates ideal research setting to study how households cope with the tremendous uncertainties in the job markets and financial markets. Although multigenerational co-living may work well for some households with lower or moderate-income for financial reasons, it is not an attractive option for every family.

Sharing a home with multiple generations can be challenging. Policymakers should design policies and programs to provide households with guidance on how to live peacefully in multigenerational settings and make multigenerational co-living an appealing and cost-effective housing option for American families of all means.

This study contributes to the existing literature by providing new evidence on the determinants of multigenerational co-residence decision. This study’s findings are fundamental to guide policymakers in carrying out policies and programs aimed at providing a more appealing and cost-effective housing arrangement for American families. The evidence on the senior and minority subsamples are especially meaningful as the vast majority of the baby boom generation in the USA is aging and substantial growth is expected in multigenerational households over the next several decades. Understanding the increasing burden of old-age depression in aging societies will help policymakers prioritize public resources in city planning to address the needs of this rapidly growing population.

The paper studies the simultaneous effect of formal and informal volunteering on self-perceived individual health across nine European countries while controlling, among other things, for socioeconomic characteristics and social and cultural participation.

This paper employs the 2006 wave of the EU-SILC dataset for estimating recursive trivariate probit models using instrumental variables.

The paper finds that although formal volunteering and informal volunteering are correlated with each other, they have different impacts on health. Formal volunteering is never correlated with higher self-perceived individual health except in the Netherlands. In contrast, informal volunteering is related to lower self-perceived individual health in Austria, Finland, France, the Netherlands, Spain, and Italy.

The first limitation concerns the absence of other measures of volunteering, such as volunteering hours that are not available in the employed dataset. The second limitation is that the dataset collection on social and cultural variables in EU-SILC is cross-sectional while the optimal dataset should be a panel data. The third limitation is that instrumental variables are observed in the same year of declaring self-perceived individual health while the optimal timing would be at least one year before.

Findings of the paper show that formal volunteering has no effect on self-perceived individual health while informal volunteering has negative consequences.

Volunteering is performed because of an individual decision and could be considered a consequence of how social responsibilities are distributed within countries. Our results show that informal volunteering has a negative effect on health; this is likely to depend on how people manage stress coming from performing this altruistic activity. It is likely that a more cautious distribution of social responsibilities could prevent the negative effects of informal volunteering on health.

The originality of the present paper is in simultaneously examining the impact of formal and informal volunteering on self-perceived individual health. Furthermore, most of the existing studies on formal volunteering and health focus on a single country; this paper compares nine European countries characterized by different social, cultural, economic, and institutional features. Finally, the paper addresses the issue of reverse causation.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-11-2017-0548

Social participation (SP) has been shown to have a favorable impact on health status, particularly among elders in developed countries. However, empirical study is scarce for China. This study explores the relation between social participation (SP) and health status among middle-aged adults and elders in China when controlled socioeconomic characteristics of individuals.

This paper employs an empirical study based on the data from a three-wave national longitudinal survey: the Chinese Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) from 2011, 2013 to 2015. It collects data from 28,895 individuals aged 45–84. It uses lagged variable method (LV) to address the reverse causality problem, and the random-effects model or fixed-effect model to address the heterogeneity problem.

The paper finds the social participation positively affect self-reported health statistically. The influence of social participation on self-reported health flows through two channels: the improved mental health effect (SP-MH-SRH channel) and the increased income effect (SP-income-SRH channel). In comparison with the SAP-income-SRH channel, the influence of the SP-MH-SRH channel l is greater.

First, the absence of other measures of volunteering, such as hours of social participation that are not available in the employed dataset. Second, even though the LV model and FE model are used in the paper, there may remain the endogeneity problem in the results. Third, the influences of formal and informal social participation should be distinguished in the future research.

Social participation may improve the self-reported health status. The influence of SP on health may be due to the improved mental health effect (SP-MH-SRH channel). In order to improve the mental and physical health status of middle-aged adults and elders the government should consider even more promotion of social participation.

First, this paper focuses on the correlation between social participation and well-being (self-reported health) of middle-aged adults and elderly in China, the previous studies on the issue for China are scarce. Second, this paper uses the lagged variable method (LV) to address the reverse causal relation problem, and the fixed-effects model or the random-effects model to address the heterogeneity problem. Third, the two channels (the improved mental health effect and the increased income effect) are firstly investigated in this study.

The purpose of this study is to investigate and discuss the viability of Islamic crowdfunding (ICF) as an alternative form of financing small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in the Middle Eastern and Islamic business environment. This study raised essential questions: what is the perception of ICF in the Middle East? Does the Middle East region really need an Islamic crowdfunding model to support SMEs? Is it possible to create a crowdfunding platform complaint with Sharia? What are the requirements for developing an Islamic crowdfunding model?

The methodology followed to answer these questions is a qualitative research design depends on in-depth interviews, literature review, historical analysis and critical discussion. Data analysis was conducted using NVivo to analyze 25 in-depth interviews with Islamic scholars, Sharia board members and Islamic finance experts from different Middle East countries such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Egypt, Iraq, UAE and Bahrain. In addition, more than 115 transcriptions, memos and research articles were used.

The study provides a new Islamic Sharīʿah-compliant crowdfunding model as the main outcome of this study. In addition, the content analysis revealed four main themes to be the essential pillars to develop the ICF model. These provisions of Islamic Sharia are: Project Idea (Halal) (28.5%), Funding Goal (36%), Return and Risk (14%) and Funding Commitments (21.5%). The findings also revealed that the four types of crowdfunding (reward-based crowdfunding, donation-based crowdfunding, loan-based crowdfunding and equity-based crowdfunding) are legal and supported by evidence from Quran and Sunnah.

Despite the critical development in Islamic finance and the expanding number of young Muslims slanting digital Islamic services, empirical studies exploring this issue in the Middle East is still inadequate. Further, ICF has increased attention and there is an urgent need for financing new SMEs in the Middle East.