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This paper first establishes a statistical measurement for OPEC Member Countries compliance levels with their respective quotas and then examines the correlations and the causal relationships between compliance levels and oil market fundamentals. The compliance level is measured by the deviation of the production level from the respective quota for OPEC Member Countries, and this is based on the Euclidean distance formula, while oil market fundamentals are represented by OECD oil demand and stock levels, and the OPEC Basket price and oil supply. Monthly data from January 1996 to June 2000 was used and two sub-periods considered, where the first sub-period was characterized by a low level of compliance and the second by a high level. The analytical results of correlations and causality showed different directions of relationships between compliance levels and oil market fundamentals.

ABSTRACT. The objective of this research is to use neural networks for predicting Islamic banks performance. A data sample of twenty six Islamic banks has been collected for the period 1991 -1993. Seven financial ratios were constructed from the data sample. Kohonen neural network was used first to group the Islamic banks into high and low performance groups using the seven financial ratios for the performance year (1993).

The objective of this paper is to estimate a weighted variables formula that could be used to calculate OPEC quota distribution. Instead of assigning an arbitrary weight to each of the selected variables included in the formula, we estimate weights based on historical data, using regression analysis. Six national characteristics of OPEC Member Countries, related to oil and socio-economic factors, are considered in the estimation. Time-series are used from 1982 to 2001, for each OPEC Member Country. The results show that the estimated weights are sensitive to the periods considered in the analysis, as well as the number of variables selected. However, there is no specifi c optimum way of dealing with the sensitive, complex quota issue.

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