Last two decades, corporate accounting scandals have represented a serious challenge to economic sustainability. To protect the shareholders right against abusive managerial conduct, the concepts of corporate governance structures and provisions have widely attracted the attention of practitioners and researchers. The main purpose of this paper is to examine the linkage between corporate governance and the performance of non-financial firms listed on Muscat Securities Market over the period 2007-2017. Additionally, whether financial leverage acts as a mediating factor is investigated. A panel fixed effect regression is conducted to test if there is a relationship between corporate governance, capital structure and firm performance. Overall results show that women on board, audit committee size, leverage and firm size are positively related to firm performance. The study presents a strong understanding to senior management to be focused more on corporate governance codes and regulations, as well as to both internal and external auditors to strictly monitor the application of corporate governance regulations.

In light of globalization and rapid economic changes, innovation became a necessity for all organizations. Innovation differs from one type of organization to another, and is considered more complex in the case of universities. This paper deals with innovation in Saudi universities, and searches to analyze its main features based on a number of pillars such as the quality of education, innovation in educational programs and teaching methods, innovation in applied research related to the industry, innovation in developing partnerships and networks, social innovation and innovation in achieving the university’s financial sustainability. Results show that despite the increasing development of higher education, the reality of innovation in Saudi universities does not match the potential of the country. In general, the pace is low and some constraints persist. It appears that the huge amounts of financial resources allocated to the higher education sector are not sufficient to improve innovation. In effect, qualitative aspects remain influential.

This study investigates the effect of oil and non-oil exports on economic growth in Bahrain over the period 1977-2015. The cointegration analysis shows that economic growth was positively and significantly related to exports. However, oil effects have the biggest effect on real GDP. Also, results show that oil exports have a positive impact on economic growth both in the short run and in the long run. Therefore, further encouragement of non-oil sectors and higher diversification of exports would lead to positive effects on the economy. Keywords: economic growth, oil exports, causality, Bahrain JEL Classifications: F11, N15, O40 DOI: https://doi.org/10.32479/ijeep.7476

The relationship between economic growth and the development of financial systems has been analyzed from different perspectives for a long time. This paper addresses the effects of the informal economy on the relationship between financial development and economic growth, using a panel data covering 20 countries during the period 1993–2020. The results show that financial development, as measured by the IMF’s Financial Development Index, is positively associated with economic growth (the coefficient α1 related to financial development fd is positive and statistically significant at 5%). The results also show that large sizes of the informal economy moderate the influence of this association (α1 remains positive and statistically significant at 1%, while the coefficient α2 related to the interaction between financial development and informal economy, fd and ie, is negative and statistically significant at 1%). In effect, financial development has the greatest impact on economic growth whenever there is control over the informal economy’s size. Inversely, a favorable ground for the informal economy limits the positive association between financial development and economic growth. However, the results show the absence of a causality relationship between financial development and economic growth (W-bar = 1.0015 and Z-bar = 0.0048; p-value = 0.9980). The informal economy plays no role in making this type of link significant (W-bar = 0.9761 and Z-bar = -0.0756; p-value = 0.9520).