This study aims to empirically examine the financial and operating performance of Egyptian privatised companies. The study compares the pre-and post-privatisation financial and operating performance of 60 companies from Egypt that have experienced privatisation through different methods during the period from 1991 and 1997. There were significant increases in the mean and median levels of profitability, operating efficiency, capital investment, output and dividends for the whole sample of companies after privatisation. There were significant decreases in the mean and median of both leverage ratios and employment levels. Further analysis was also undertaken using the three different background characteristics (i.e. size of company, type of industry and privatisation methods). No significant differences were detected in the Kruskal Wallis test analysis of privatisation methods. The Wilcoxon test, the Proportion test and the Kruskal Wallis test analyses for the company size and industry type revealed some significant results. Overall, the findings do seem to support the broad benefits of the Egyptian privatisation programme and the improvements in the financial and operating performance of the privatised companies. Contribution/ Originality: This study is the first logical analysis of the Egyptian privatization programme and its financial and operating performance since 1991. It is one of the very few studies to have investigated the privatization phenomenon in the Middle East.

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BACKGROUND: Privatisation policies have aroused enormous interest in both developed and developing countries. Previous research findings reveal that privately owned companies are more efficient and profitable than comparable state owned enterprises (SOEs). Moreover, it has been argued that these reforms would be even more effective if accompanied by privatisation. As a result, privatisation that aims to enhance the performance of SOEs has been regarded as one of the key features of emerging economies. OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this study is to examine the extent to which the benefits of privatisation have been achieved in emerging economies. In particular, the study assesses the developmental changes and improvements in the performance of privatised companies in Egypt as an emerging economy. METHODS: This study was carried out in three stages. First, it was felt necessary to obtain a broad overview of the effect of the Egyptian privatisation programme on the performance of the privatised companies by analyzing secondary data of privatized companies. Second, in an attempt to obtain a more precise understanding of the impact of privatisation, an online questionnaire survey was distributed to the finance managers of 56 privatised companies during the period September 2020 to January 2021. Third, a series of semi-structured interviews were undertaken with senior managers in 8 different privatised companies. The purpose of these interviews was to supplement and amplify the themes and issues that had arisen from stages I and II of the research. RESULTS: The findings reveal that privatisation improved the process of accountability within the company and efficiency gains is the most important advantage of privatisation. CONCLUSIONS: The study concludes that privatisation leads to more difficulty in safeguarding the interests of the weaker groups in society.

However, the term "privatisation" is widely believed to have first been used by Mr John Diebold, an American policy maker, who used this term during his campaign to transfer a government owned service from the public sector to the private sector in the USA (Lord, 1987). According to the Economist magazine the term "privatisation" appeared in print for the first time in the Economist in the early 1970s.Privatisation can be considered as an umbrella term which can be used to denote a scale of policy initiatives in different countries with different modes and motives. The word "privatise" itself can be taken to mean the opposite of nationalise, i.e. as the transfer of ownership of state enterprises to the private sector. Privatisation can also be defined in simple terms such as "the process by which governments sell their state owned enterprises (SOEs), completely or in blocks of shares, to private investors, local and foreign" Megginson and Netter (2001) document that privatisation as a political, social and economic policy can be taken to mean "the deliberate sale by a government of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) or assets to private economic agents".Overall, from the above definitions, privatisation can be described as a political, social and economic process, which leads to change in ownership structure of the enterprise from the state to the private sector. In addition, privatisation encourages the private sector to play a vital role alongside the public sector in reducing the level of government intervention in terms of planning, regulation and subsides. THE SPREAD OF THE PRIVATISATION PHENOMENON THROUGHOUT THE WORLDOver the last four decades, there has been a widespread change of opinion regarding the role of state and private enterprises in promoting economic growth. Despite the fact that SOEs are the most common example of privatisation, it must be noted that governments can also privatise land, housing (which has been done in the UK) and even services and utilities such as banking, insurance, education, road construction, maintenance, water, electricity and other services that have been privatised in different countries by contracting out to private companies. More important than understanding privatisation itself as a process is understanding its underlying rationale that there are limits to what governments can provide and that some economic undertakings, especially industrial companies, are tackled more efficiently by the private sector. . It was mentioned earlier that it was the UK that pioneered privatisation. It was the UK also which in many cases pioneered the growth of the state sector among private enterprise economies. It was undoubtedly British teaching which inspired many countries of her previous empire to follow the course of public sector economics and centralised planning.It is hard to find a country that has not experienced privatisation of some kind or another. While the privatisation trend, historically, is usually associated with the UK, the first "denationalisation" programme occurred ...

The purpose of this study is two-folded. The first purpose is to examine the perception of Islamic finance experts and Shariah scholars on the Islamic cryptocurrency (i.e., GOLDX and OneGram). The question is whether it has a role in reconciling cryptocurrency in Islamic finance. The second is to introduce the new Islamic cryptocurrency to serve these rich Islamic populaces. The study used a qualitative research approach by conducting interviews to explore the Islamic scholars’ views on the framework of the new Islamic cryptocurrency. The scholars have been deemed to meet particular requirements of having comprehensive knowledge and have extensive experience in both the Islamic Shariah and cryptocurrency. Accordingly, the number of such scholars was limited, and eventually, with the access offered only to five scholars from different Islamic countries. We thoroughly analyzed the collected data from the interviews. The findings reveal that Islamic law is absent on the essential models for the conventional cryptocurrency utilization(such as bitcoin) as either a legitimate or illicit apparatus exchange device. Consequently, introducing new Islamic cryptocurrencies is to reconcile cryptocurrencies such as GOLDX and OneGram. They will play a vital role in attracting more than 1.5 billion Muslims around the globe to enter the world of cryptocurrency.