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The purpose of this paper is to measure the unidimensional and multidimensional inequality in the case of Pakistan and compare their results at the provincial as well as regional (urban and rural areas) level. The authors collected data from Pakistan Social and Living Standard Measurement and Household Integrated Economic Survey for fiscal years of 1998–1999 and 2013–2014.

The authors used Gini coefficient for unidimensional inequality and multidimensional indexing approach of Araar (2009) for multidimensional inequality.

The findings predicted that unidimensional inequality is relatively high in the urban area due to uneven dissemination of income, but multidimensional inequality is quite high in rural areas because of higher disparities among all dimensions. At the provincial level, Punjab has relatively high-income inequality followed by Sindh, KPK and Baluchistan.

This study is a pioneering effort to compare two time periods to explore unidimensional and multidimensional inequality in all provinces of Pakistan and their representative rural-urban regions by applying Araar and Duclos’s (2009) approach. Further, this study opens some new insights for policy makers.

Guided by institutional theory, this empirical paper examines variations in the adoption of HRM practices among SMEs in three different business sectors (services, manufacturing and trade).

Data from 300 owners/managers representing three business sectors were collected through a survey method.

The results suggest that service SMEs use more formal HRM practices than manufacturing and trade SMEs. Manufacturing SMEs are more formal than trade firms. Results are not affected by firm age.

Social desirability bias may have influenced respondents into portraying a positive image of the organization by inflating HRM sophistication. A further limitation is that the performance of the firms was not measured. As such, it is not possible to judge whether greater HRM formality correlated with improved organizational performance.

This study shows how the business sector shapes HRM practices in Pakistani SMEs. Findings help to inform Pakistan's Small and Medium Enterprise Development Authority (SMEDA) in dealings with manufacturing and trade firms in terms of improving HRM practices.

Given the important role of SMEs in economic development, comparative research on HRM in SME contexts is scarce. Since SMEs are vital for Pakistan's economy, an improved understanding of the sector's approach to human resource development is important. The findings extend the boundaries of prior comparative HRM literature in SMEs by addressing sector influences while controlling for contextual factors.

Pakistan had never been a place of serious and nuanced debate and contestation of politics of postcolonial critique, that is, the continuity of economic, political, and cultural dependency of newly independent countries (NICs) on ex-colonizers as pointed out by neocolonialism, dependency theory, and postcolonial theory, respectively. Instead, Pakistan is presented by extant liberal academic literature as a “failed nation” and a state dominated by the military and plagued by religious extremism. As opposed to this, through the literary and activists writings of Aziz-ul-Haq, this chapter will try to illustrate how cultural contestation of the nation-building project postindependence from British rule was a lot more complex and interesting in Pakistan. This was so because the nation-building project of Pakistan was, on the one hand, an amalgamation of Indo-Persian, Arab, Indian, and Western colonial and civilizational influences and, on the other hand, entailed suppression of resilient local and national cultures of its constituent nationalities developed over centuries. This was later expressed in ethno-nationalist politics. However, when it came to the politics of the marginalized in the late 1960s, there were important political, theoretical, and literary insights which caused a change in the direction of political practice in Pakistan, which paralleled the politics expressed by writers like Fanon and early Subaltern Studies influenced by the Naxal Movement in India. The contestation and confusion arising from this dialectic also entered Pakistan's literary and cultural sphere. This chapter not only tries to give a different postcolonial critique of the failure of nation-building project in Pakistan but, though at a preliminary level, is an attempt to separate the original postcolonial theory in its radical tradition from contemporary postmodern/poststructuralist postcolonial theory marked with pessimism and resignation.

This study aims to test the role of infrastructure for economic growth. For this purpose, panel data of the world is selected from 1998 to 2018 and the study has used slope moderator to test the productivity of real economic activity with economic growth.

In this context, the feasible generalized least square method is adopted to estimate the results. Four types of infrastructure indicators i.e. quality of air, port, rail and road are used along with disaggregated GDP.

According to the results of this study, the role of industrial and agricultural value addition without infrastructure is negative. For industrial value addition, the cross product with all infrastructure types positively impacts economic growth. All the infrastructures, along with services value addition, except seaport, are contributing to economic growth positively. Along with agriculture value addition, only road infrastructure is contributing to economic growth positively. This study has also used two control variables i.e. quality of education and institutions. These variables are also found to be positive and significant with economic growth.

This study explores the moderating role of quality of infrastructure sector on real sector productivity, which is leading to economic growth.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically examine the effects of financial liberalization and trade openness on the economic growth of two countries, namely, Pakistan and India for the period 1985-2014.

This study uses the autoregressive distributed lag technique, which allows mixed order of integration. In addition, it uses the principal component method to create an index for financial liberalization to examine how it affects the economic growth of the selected countries.

The findings reveal that in the short and long run, trade openness has positive effect on the Pakistan’s economic growth while the financial liberalization has positive impact only in the long run. In the case of India, both financial liberalization and trade openness positively and significantly influence the economic growth in the short and long run.

By comparing the results of both countries, trade openness and financial liberalization increase the economic growth of India more than that of Pakistan. These results suggest that Pakistan should consider appropriate positive policies regarding financial liberalization and trade openness to achieve high and stable economic growth in the future.

This study creates financial liberalization index by using the principal component analysis method to explain the role of financial liberalization in the economic growth of Pakistan and India. In addition, it makes comparison of the results based on which country benefits most from the liberalization of trade and financial sectors. Only very few studies have examined these countries, yet their results have remained inconclusive as well.

Universities across the globe are spending an increasing amount of their budgets to offer web-based services to cater information need especially off-campus students. However, the success of web-based services depends on how well the target users are satisfied with the use of the web services. The purpose of this paper is to assess students’ satisfaction with the use of the Allama Iqbal Open University (AIOU) web-based services.

Pilot tested questionnaire-based survey was administered to collect data from a sample of 388; selected through systematic sampling technique from the study’s population consisted of master level students belonged to 11 different academic departments of the Faculty of Social Science and Humanities at the AIOU from all over Pakistan.

Based on 318 useful questionnaires, response rate 82 percent, the results show that majority of the students were satisfied with the use of at the AIOU web-based services except for online mailing books tracking system, library web OPAC and web radio service. However, t-test analysis shows that no difference was found in the opinion of male and female respondents in terms of their satisfaction with the use of the web services. ANOVA results indicate that there was no significant difference depicted in satisfaction with the use of the web services among the respondents enrolled in different disciplines of the faculty. Similarly, no significant difference was found among different age groups. Moreover, the respondents belonging to all five provinces; Punjab, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Sindh, Baluchistan, Gilgit Baltistan, and Federal Capital territory showed the same level of satisfaction with the use of the services. The results of regression analysis (R²=0.226) denote that both perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use significantly predicted, 22.6 percent, in students’ satisfaction with the use the web services.

The study provides valuable recommendations which may be helpful for web administration of the university to improve AIOU web-based services.

To the best knowledge, this is the first study conducted to investigate the satisfaction with the use of the university web-based services in distance education’s perspective of Pakistan.

This study aims to predict the financial performance of Islamic banks with sentiments of management from the textual information in annual reports.

The study uses data from 33 Islamic banks in six Islamic countries from 2006 to 2020. The authors estimate the model using the system GMM because it helps dealing with endogeneity problem, which are inherent in panel data.

The findings of the study reveal that there is a strong relationship between the sentiment expressed by management in annual reports and the current (future) financial performance of Islamic banks. The higher the positive sentiments of management, the better financial performance. In addition, the study also suggests that negative sentiments using term frequency-inverse document frequency is linked to a decrease in banks’ financial performance.

The study does not present the Islamic view on sentiment analysis in the context of Islamic scriptures due to the unavailability of a relevant dictionary.

The findings of the study suggest that developing accurate models with the help of textual information for performance prediction of Islamic banks help shareholders, regulators and policymakers avoid devastating events. Using textual information may also help reduce the information asymmetry between the management and shareholders, which may lead to more efficient bank supervision. The study can also help investors evaluate their prospective investments in the Islamic bank.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first of its kind that uses management sentiments for performance prediction of the Islamic banking sector. It may add a valuable contribution to the existing literature.

The delivery of information services in higher education is increasingly relying on Web-based systems. The low adoption and underutilization of information systems have been major problems for developing countries such as Pakistan in terms of realizing their full benefits. This study aims to investigate factors affecting student use of Allama Iqbal Open University’s (AIOU) Web-based services by using the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) from the perspective of Pakistani distance education.

This study has adopted quantitative research design with the UTAUT model as a theoretical framework. A self-completion structured questionnaire-based survey has been administered to 388 master’s level students, selected through systematic sampling from the target population. The response rate was 82 per cent (318). All statistical tests have been performed using IBM SPSS (version 20.0) and Process macro for SPSS.

Findings of the model’s hypotheses reveal that performance expectancy, effort expectancy and social influence are significant predictors of student behavioural intention to use AIOU Web-based services, whereas actual student use is dependent on facilitating conditions and student behavioural intention to use. The impact of moderating variables with respect to age, gender and experience did not influence the actual use of the Web services. However, the research model significantly measured (62.1 per cent) the actual use of AIOU Web-based services by the students.

This study is delimited to the UTAUT model to investigate the phenomena. Besides this, the context of the study is the voluntary instead of mandatory usage of Web services. A study conducted in mandatory settings, in which students are bound to use Web services, may have different results.

This is the first attempt to apply the UTAUT model to investigate the factors affecting student use of Web-based services from the perspective of distance education and the findings prove strong support for the model.

This study aims to describe the role of knowledge diffusion in evolving governance principles for Islamic banking.

This study develops a discursive theoretical debate using the discourse analysis method on the Sharīʿah principles related to interest (Riba), excessive uncertainty (Gharrar) and profit and loss sharing and their convergence with the conventional banking principles of profitability, solvency and liquidity.

The study proposes a novel framework that describes how knowledge diffusion bridge-up the Sharīʿah and banking principles in terms of integration of banking principles by Sharīʿah scholars, integration of Sharīʿah principles by managers and the resultant, emergent principles for the governance of Islamic banking.

The proposed framework can inform professionals on how knowledge of banking practices and Sharīʿah can help them in governing Islamic banking. The Board of Directors may adopt a holistic approach for encouraging enhanced interactions between Sharīʿah scholars and managers. Such interaction may be increasing harmony, reducing conflicts and better coordination resulting in Sharīʿah-compliant and market wise viable products and services, thus increasing banking profitability.

This is the first study, which acknowledges and illustrates the role of the knowledge diffusion process in evolving governance principles for Islamic banks. This paper contributes to the theory of corporate governance by using the knowledge, aptitude and practice theory lens to examine conceptually how Islamic banking governance principles emerged through the knowledge diffusion process.

The aim of this study was to investigate the use of software for the automation of academic libraries in Sialkot. This study consisted of three objectives, including recognizing the reasons to adopt the software for library automation, investigating the problems faced by librarians while using library software and identifying the satisfaction level with the attributes of library software.

A quantitative research approach was used to achieve the objectives of this study. A survey was conducted to collect data from the library information science professionals working in the academic libraries of Sialkot. The data was collected from 46 library professionals through a structured questionnaire.

The findings showed that the economic cost of implementation, maintenance and the software providing multilingual support were the major reasons for adoption of software for the purpose of automation. In this study, compliance with the internet, noncooperation in library automation by university/institution, availability of training facilities, insufficient library budget, a lack of financial/economic resources, staff transfer and a lack of consultancy and technical service were identified as major issues when using library automation software. However, the respondents were quite satisfied with the performance of software attributes including circulation modules, easy to use cataloguing modules, reports’ modules, software attributes of administration modules and multilingual facility.

This study persuades library and information science professionals to automate their libraries through the adoption of library software.