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Purpose The purpose of this paper is to assess the impact of trade and financial sector openness and their simultaneous openness on financial development of South Asia. Design/methodology/approach To serve the purpose, a panel data set of four South Asian economies, namely, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, was constituted for the period spanning from 1996 to 2015. Along with the conventional panel unit root test and co-integration test, pooled mean group estimations were used to formulate the empirical findings. Findings The findings suggested a significant negative impact of financial openness and significant positive impact of trade openness on the financial development of South Asia. The empirical evidence did not support simultaneous openness of trade and financial sector for the studied region. Originality/value The study contributes to the existing literature by analyzing the effect of trade and financial openness on financial development of South Asia. The study provides substantial evidence to the stakeholders for formulating policies that can boost financial development of the region.

PurposeThis research intends to determine the role of terrorism in defying foreign direct investment (FDI) in top terror effected economies.Design/methodology/approachPanel data on FDI and terrorism from top terror effected economies spanning from 1987 to 2018 were used and the relationship for whole sample was investigated. Later the sample period was divided into pre (1987–2001) and post 9/11 (2002–2018) subsample and same relationship was tested to investigate the normalization of terror effect on FDI. The method of Pooled Mean Group (PMG) was used to test the hypothesis.FindingsThe results showed a negative but statistically insignificant impact of terrorism on the FDI inflows in the long run. Later the sample period was divided into pre (1987–2001) and post 9/11 (2002–2018) subsample. The empirical estimates for pre and post 9/11 periods indicated a negative and statistically significant relationship between terrorism and FDI for pre 9/11 period, and a negative but statistically insignificant relationship between the two variables for post 9/11 period.Originality/valueThe findings suggest several important policy implications for the terror affected countries and are further discussed in the study.

Companies offer different products and services to differentiate themselves from their competitor. In an organizations, employee's abilities and skills to deal with the customers play an important role in succeeding businesses. They offer superior services to their customers that leads to satisfaction. It has become an essential marketing strategy nowadays. Therefore, in this study we try to investigate the role of customer service skills on customer loyalty via customer satisfaction. Generally, bank customers aware of service facility, but the leading factors to select the best service provider bank are to get more comfort and to save time. Due to this fact, the study examined the effect of problem solving skills, reputation building, customer service culture, Nonverbal and verbal communication skills on which customers' intend to select best Pakistani banks. A sample data of 350 respondents is used to test the hypothesis. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis were used to test the measurement model and structural equation modeling is used to test the hypothesis. Findings from analysis suggest that reputation building skills (RBS), Problem solving skills (PSS), Customer service culture (CSC), nonverbal and verbal communication skills (NVCS) show positive and significant impact on customer satisfaction. It is recommended that, bank should educate their employee about how to deal with customer polite and soft skills to compete with other banks in market and develop marketing strategies through social media and other marketing channels to change consumer's attitude in favor of their particular bank.

The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of Islamic Banks and Takaful on economic growth of Pakistan. Using panel data from 2009 to 2014 of five Islamic Banks and five Takaful Companies, and taking Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as dependent variable, Total Deposits (TD) of Islamic Banks and Total contribution (TC) of Takaful companies as independent variables, analysis is done to find the impact of Islamic Banks and Takaful companies on the economic growth of the country. The study employs Fixed Effect Model for the econometric analysis. The study concluded that there is a significant role of Total Deposits of Islamic Banks and Total Contributions of the Takaful Companies in the growth of the economy. It is thus, recommended that Economic policymakers should take into account this valuable fact and should take serious measures for facilitating Islamic Financial Sector. This research can be used as a platform for the economic policymakers to evaluate and comprehend the importance of Islamic Financial System in developing countries like Pakistan.