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The emerging markets have been witnessing a remarkable revival of rotating savings and credit associations (ROSCAs) serving as alternative informal financing and investment platforms, also known as savings-based finance (SBF) in Turkey. The purpose of this study is to present the SBF model mathematically, analyse the performance of the SBF sector and propose a new Sharīʿah-compliant SBF model for the acquisition of durables.

The paper thoroughly reviews the concept and practice of ROSCA across the globe, mathematically models and empirically analyses the performance of Turkish SBF companies using a unique data set.

The study formulates a two-person SBF model and proposes a Mudarabah-Wakalah hybrid model with a new investment feature. It is found that the concept of ROSCA is being operationalized in 105 countries across the globe under different names with slight business model modifications. The research also reveals that the demand for financing of durables in Turkey significantly increased in recent years with the demand for housing is twice greater compared to vehicles. Most importantly, a strong significant inter- and intra-comovement is observed between these durables implying that the success of the sector in one segment has attracted the customers to other SBF products. It shows that the SBF institutions can effectively serve as the alternative financing houses for pooling savings and financing the durables, and they have strong potential to capture a larger financial market share in Turkey and even globally.

The study constructs mathematical models and proposes a new investment wing to an existing SBF wealth fund.

This study aims to propose a model to elevate the financial empowerment of Muslim women by rejuvenating the practice of Mahr in society and facilitating the affordability of men to pay that Mahr amount.

The approach of this study is to offer a model through the interest-free savings-based finance concept. The model comprises four stages; each stage of the model is mathematically formulated and graphically explained to ensure clarity and coherence. To further investigate the issue, the authors use a convenient sampling method to ask a small sample size of respondents (women) from different countries about their financial contribution and empowerment in the family.

This model enables women to turn their exclusive financial right into a source of earning without borrowing from any source or paying interest on the principal amount. Besides, it encourages accelerating men’s obligation to pay the Mahr to the women immediately during the marriage ceremony by facilitating men’s affordability. Almost 45% of respondents state that a woman’s financial contribution exalts her decision-making power and strengthens her financial position in the family.

The authors attempt to revitalize Mahr practice in Muslim society to accelerate the process of receiving a woman’s exclusive financial right and empower a family as a whole through the Mahr model.

Considering the model’s uniqueness, the developed and proposed Mahr model in this research is novel; to the best of the authors’ knowledge, no other study has been conducted and developed such a model using the Mahr concept.

Chapter 17 discusses challenges for financing nature-based solutions (NBS). Financing NBS is a key challenge to ensure scaling of the use of NBS in urban areas. This is mainly due to the difficulty to monetize the value generated through the provisioning of ecosystem services, as well as the multiple cobenefits that NBS provide. Certain types of NBS, such as green roofs, have been able to allow for private value capture, enabling such projects to attract private or blended capital. Others, where benefits are generally regarded as public good, have to rely on different financing strategies and instruments. The section provides an overview of financing solutions (public, private, and blended instruments) for different types of NBS and their applicability to NBS in the urban context.

This study aims to investigate the evolvement of the concept and practice of the Rotating Savings and Credit Association (ROSCA) from informal fund collection for indivisible durables to real property acquisition under the interest-free SBF model by analyzing the previously conducted research that focused on the concept in terms of names, forms, and natures.

A PRISMA-compliant systematic literature review is adopted to ascertain the most relevant studies from various sources and analyze the extracted data or items to accomplish the research objective. Besides, bibliometric network, thematic, and statistical analysis are also applied to bolster the findings acquired from the systematic review. Furthermore, this study mathematically formulates and introduces the customized PRISMA systematic flowchart.

The results reveal that the concept of ROSCA has evolved over the years from informal to formal, micro to macro, individual to institutional, social to business, and fund collection for purchasing household items to real property acquisition since 1962. In this process, the focus area of the research has been shifted from characteristics, operation, and economics to law; source of funds, and history to social; benefits and contribution to digital, risk, and savings behaviour. It is noticed that the majority of the study are Africa-centric, followed by Asia; academic discussion on the ROSCA covers most of the social and economic arena, except the real property acquisition aspect. However, the SBF concept fills up this gap by introducing a real-property-acquisition-centric ROSCA model. The authors provide future agendas regarding focus areas that researchers may consider to develop the SBF concept.

The study focuses on the evolvement of a savings-based model. No study concentrates on the evolution process of the model from ROSCA to SBF; in fact, no conspicuous academic study is found regarding the systematic review of ROSCA in the literature archive.

There is a growing body of literature that recognizes the importance of Islamic financial literacy (IFL) while it is at the heart of our understanding of the overall financial system. To date, insufficient attention has been paid to Turkey, the Balkans and other potential Islamic finance hubs like Suriname. In fact, there have been no attempts to examine IFL in those regions or economies. The purpose of this paper is to test and validate the IFL scale developed by Dinc et al. (2021) in an international setting. By doing so, this study elaborates on possible antecedents and levels of IFL across countries and economic systems.

The design of the questionnaire used is based on the principles of Islamic finance and covers all the segments. The total number of collected observations is 3,579. This study uses the confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) to ascertain the factor structure and test the revised scale fit with the original form. Besides, IBM AMOS 25 Graphics is used for calculating the fit indexes for the scale.

The results from the CFA revealed that the scale has a good fit for its original and kept the four-dimensional structure. In addition, it also indicates that the predeveloped IFL scale is valid for different cultures, countries and individuals either having conventional or Islamic financial institutions preferences. Furthermore, results of empirical tests demonstrate that Turkey is significantly higher in Islamic financial awareness, whereas other countries' group is higher on all other subdimensions of the scale. On the other hand, female respondents indicate significantly higher levels of Islamic financial awareness, and male respondents show significantly higher levels of Islamic financial knowledge. Finally, the most prominent finding to emerge from the analysis is that the principles of Islamic finance are well accepted, except for some liberal views on the concept of “interest” (riba).

Because of the diverse demography of the collected sample observations, this revised scale has a homogeneous set of implications. This IFL scale can accurately measure the level of IFL attained by an individual, group, society or nation, as well as suggest necessary actions based on its four-dimensional structure.

This study tests the IFL scale by considering two key elements: increased sample size and vast geographical coverage. To ensure that the developed scale is universal, this study took into account more than 3,000 observations from 28 different countries. These amendments ensure the uniqueness of this paper and its originality.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the detrimental consequences of participating in stokvels among women entrepreneurs within the South African township economy.

The research used the Gioia methodology, involving the implementation of a qualitative inquiry with an inductive approach. Semi-structured interviews served as the primary method for data collection. The study had a sample comprising 20 women entrepreneurs located in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Narratives on the detrimental consequences of participating in stokvels among women entrepreneurs within the South African township economy included fraudsters, misunderstanding and dishonesty among stokvel partners, year-end robbery and theft, stokvels being dominated by men, operating outside of formal regulatory frameworks, exclusion and limited funding.

Sample size challenges feature as a notable limitation, including the research being conducted in only one province of South Africa. Caution should be exercised when seeking to generalize the findings in other contexts.

While there is an array of literature on the impact of stokvels on entrepreneurship, there are deficiencies in studies that have looked at the detrimental consequences of stokvels on women entrepreneurs. As a result, the goal of this research is to add to the present corpus of African entrepreneurship literature, specifically in the context of South Africa.

To maintain road systems in the USA, state departments of transportation (DOTs) generally use in-house workers or private contractors. Limited studies have calculated the cost savings of hiring private contractors; however, most of them have not calculated cost savings based on life-cycle costs (LCCs). The purpose of this paper is to determine whether the LCC of chip seal and stripping maintenance activities performed by in-house workers are cheaper than those performed by private contractors.

The paper collected the hard cost data of chip seal and stripping maintenance activities performed by state DOT in-house workers, as well as private contractors, from 2003 to 2016 from the Nevada DOT Maintenance and Asset Management division. Statistical tests were conducted to test the research hypothesis that the LCC of chip seal and stripping activities performed by in-house workers are significantly less than those performed by private contractors.

The study results showed that the cost per unit and LCC of chip seal and striping work performed by in-house workers were significantly less than those performed by private contractors in Nevada.

The study only collected data from Nevada DOT, so readers should use caution in generalizing the findings of this study. Additionally, factors affecting the cost of these maintenance activities for private contractors are significantly different compared to in-house contractors. Therefore, these differences may be some of the potential reasons for cost difference between these two methods.

The practical implications of this study are that state DOT engineers need to plan for outsourcing chip seal and stripping maintenance activities only to private contractors that are cost effective, based on life-cycle cost.

The LCC analysis framework developed in this study will help state DOT engineers to determine cost savings by using in-house workers for road maintenance works.

There has been a lack of research, particularly within the New Zealand (NZ) context, focusing on the identification and assessment of risk factors for construction projects, leading to a wide variation between design-phase elemental cost plans (ECPs) and the outturn tender sums (OTS). Still to be investigated is how risks interact to produce such variability. This study aims to determine the risk-influencing factors, identified through risk measurement, during design development.

This study adopted literature review and online questionnaire survey. The literature review was used to identify the factors affecting project budgetary performance, which was used to design the questionnaire survey culminating in data analysis. The questionnaire was administered to 64 practising project managers (PMs) in NZ. Their responses were analysed using descriptive statistics, mean ranking analysis, degree-of-risk measure and correlational analysis, to find the top-five risk factors impacting the variability observed, through ranking the mean and degree of risk values that produce such variability.

Significant risk factors were identified from the questionnaire survey analysis, such as changes in project owner/stakeholder requirements, experience of project team, site condition information, competency of consultants and information flow and quality. These provided some insights in explaining the variability between the design-phase ECPs and OTS based on risk impacts from PMs’ viewpoints.

Findings revealed a drift of 23.86% in budgeted costs (inflated risks), which seems significant. Prioritising top risk factors may provide handy information for researchers on the variables that could be relied upon for the development of a forecasting model for application in NZ.

The study findings have implications for PMs seeking to provide information on mitigation strategies by using risk management approach, considering the influence of development risks on building project delivery and, consequently the project owner’s financial position. To guard against wide variation between design-phase ECPs and OTS, the main contribution of this study is to raise consultants’ awareness of the important risk factors for their planning at the outset, thus assisting PMs in pro-actively managing their clients' budgets.

This study creates value by synthesising literature on construction project budgeting and highlighting areas for further research. By giving adequate attention to key risks associated with budget overruns in commercial projects, variability between ECPs and OTS, a common phenomenon in NZ, can be controlled to achieve cost savings. Based on this, further study suggests the development of a model that could assist the stakeholders in NZ to more reliably predict OTS from the design-phase ECP and pro-actively avoid unfortunate budget/cost overruns, disputes and even project abandonment.

The purpose of this paper is to extend the audit pricing literature by examining whether institutional investors and political connection are associated with higher audit fees.

Both descriptive and multivariate analyses are employed to address the research objectives. In addition, the authors use panel data to control for both heterocedasticity and contemporaneous correlations in each cross‐section.

Based on a panel analysis of 390 Malaysian firms from 1999 to 2003, a positive relationship between institutional ownership and audit fees is found, although the economic impact is minimal. Further, the authors find that audit fees are higher for politically connected firms.

A thorough examination on the role of political connection is much warranted to provide a better understanding on such connection influences the audit market.

This paper provides an alternative view on the role of political connection, and on how they influence the audit market.