فصلنامه اقتصاد اسلامی
پیاپی 56 (زمستان 1393)

Nowadays, the financial sector is a major and developing part of modern economies. The development of different kinds of economic activities depends on their having access to the financial services. Thus, the relation between financial development and economic growth has been an interesting issue to the economic researchers in recent years. One of the most important factors affecting the financial markets development and their becoming efficient is the diversification of financial instruments. Diversifying them, with their different risk and maturity, on the one hand, provides the owners of market funds with a various range of investment alternatives, and on the other hand, makes the companies’ financing methods diverse and facilitates the financing of projects. Moreover, historical evidences support the financial innovation’s crucial role in economic growth. Given the importance of the issue, we try to examine the innovative features of the contracts used in the Iranian usury-free banking system. Our findings show that, increasing the financial stability, distributing the risk between the financial markets participants, and covering inflation through the channel of financial innovation, these contracts lead to the development of financial markets. Furthermore, using endogenous growth models, we have analyzed these contracts’ relation with financial innovation and economic growth.

The quality and quantity of consumption of society’s goods and services are two of the societies’ major economic and value concerns. In the societies based on Islamic values, imprudential consumption and the so-called Israf and Tabdzir are viewed as important economic problems. Our topic here is that the religion’s different dimensions affect consumer behavior and attitude. Adopting asociological approach and using Islamic economics’ theoretical foundations, thus, we have examined the impact of four different aspects of religion - ritual, empirical, consequential, and cognitive - on the consumer behaviors and attitudes of the households in Isfahan. The research has been performed adopting survey method and using organized questionnaire, and the required data have been collected, using the cluster sampling method, from a 383-member sample of Isfahani married women. In order to examine the simultaneous effect of variables, the path analysis method in the software EQS 6.2 has been utilized, and in order to perform the correlation analysis, the software SPSS16 has been used. Our main hypothesis here is that there is some relation between different aspects of religiousness and the attitude towards consumption. The findings show that these aspects have a significant negative relation with the attitude towards consumption, and that there is a significant positive relation between the attitude towards consumption and the consumer behavior.

Since examining the banks’ function, that is, credit creation, is of high importance in the studies regarding Riba-free banking, the present article is directed towards examining in more depth the bank credit creation, and studies the formation of credit creation mechanism. The findings show that credit, as social capital, can cause time transfer in the exchanges and become their temporary intermediary. However, its being formed requires mutual trust-based actions, whose process is time-consuming. Requiring different kinds of security and transforming trust into credit, banks create credit for individuals, and then, monetizing the credit, pay them loans. Given this mechanism, social capital is indeed transformed into economic one, and the main intermediary of exchanges substitutes for the temporary one. This attitude towards bank formation and its operation process may raise such issues as the realm of private banks’ activities in Riba-free banking system or banking activity’s relation with wealth’s circulation and accumulation, and provide an appropriate topic for in-depth studies in the field of Islamic banking.

One of the instruments for financing government’s budget deficit in the developing countries, including Iran, is inflation tax, which has been utilized since decades ago. The present article tries to explicate its relation with and impact on the economic justice. Inflation tax is a result of the increase of paper money over the amount the economy needs, which transfers money’s purchasing power from the public to the government. The question here is whether one can regard the rise of injustice as a universal and systemic consequence of inflation tax, regardless of the particular society’s nature. The article’s hypothesis is that inflation tax, among other things, leads to the rise of injustice in the society. The findings show that it leads to the rise of injustice in some different ways. The method adopted in this article is the library one in the phase of gathering information, text analysis in the Quranic and Hadith deductions, and descriptive-analytical in the economic arguments.

The present article tries to closely examine Gharar as one of the most important forbidden trades in Islamic canon and the foundational Islamic economic rules. In order to do so, at first, using library method and examining Shiite jurisprudential resources and the researches fulfilled in this area, it interprets Gharar, and then, adopting descriptive research method, utilizing mathematical argumentation, and simultaneously using game and contract theories, analyzes and studies this important economic rule. In order for this analysis to be performed, at first, investigating the literature on the kinds and defined features of Gharar and the theoretical foundations of game and contract theories, the article performs the theoretical modelling, and then examines the economic interactions and the enforcement of contracts in terms of social welfare and the well-being of the parties to the exchange. The results show that, on the basis of contract theory and game theory with developed structure as well, existence of Gharar reduces social well-being.

Production process in Iran, as in the other developing countries, involves exploiting and, at the same time, destroying the environment. Since the environmental and social problems increase in the course of development, and they are not simply solvable by law and market mechanism, observing ethics and existence of ethical markets are necessary in order for these problems to be solved. Ethical market is the place for supplying and demanding goods and services that have environmental benefits and are standard so long as the social issues are concerned. In the present article, we introduce different indexes for identifying ethical markets, and compare, in this regard, Iran with the countries mentioned in the Iran’s 20-Year Vision Plan and also with selected developed countries in 2012. Thereafter, using the software SAS and adopting principal component analysis method, we introduce a general index for ethical markets and compare Iran’s position with that of Vision Plan countries and a set of selected developed and developing countries. The results show that the environment operation index has the greatest effect on the general index of ethical markets, and good governance index takes second place. The selected countries, excluding China, are the top ranked ones in the table, and, between the Vision Plan countries, Georgia ranks first. Iran, with respect to the indexes of ethical markets, ranks low.