عالمی امن میں اسلام کا کردار

We live in a global village. The cyber world has brought together people and shurnk the distences, yet multi cultural, multi ethinic and multi national has become the norm of the day. There is virtually no such place, no town, no village, city or state where people from diverse backgrounds speaking diffirent lagnuages and professing diffirent creeds live. This diveristy and variety is the essence of life.  This paper analyzes various ways of establishing peace in the light of Islamic teachings. It finds out the causes of quarrels and disputes in different nations so that they may be prevented to make the world peaceful.

Impact of Culture on Stock Market Returns and Volatility Spillover: Case of World Frontier Markets

As integration is related to systemic risk and rewards in the markets, it’s coupled with both weak and semi-strong form efficiency. Little or no evidence is found on return and volatility spillover of Frontier markets let alone the very new emerging area of cultural Finance. This study takes US and fifteen frontier markets out of 32 from all five regions defined by MSCI 2015, based on their data availability from January 2000 to December 2015 for sixteen years. This study uses the Diebold and Yilmaz''s (2009) measure of financial integration which uses decomposition of Variances in vector autoregressive models, on weekly data of returns and realized volatility to arrive at static and dynamic return and volatility indices. At the second layer of analysis the static indices are used in cross sectional country pair financial gravity model to know the determinants of return and volatility spillovers followed by Balli, Balli, Jean Louis, and Vo, (2015). With addition of Weighted mahalanobis, asymmetrical Cultural distance measure of Yeganeh (2014) by taking four dimension of culture from Hofstede (2001), in the cross sectional determinant model this study take next step by examining the relationships in independently pooled panel data paradigm. By taking bi-lateral returns and volatility spillovers with four sub-sample periods of 2000- 2003, 2004-2007, 2008-2011, 2012-2015 of four years each, the study incorporates dynamism in integration of not only interdependence in financial markets but also in cultural variables. Moreover, in both cross sectional and panel data setting this study investigates the channels through which Culture operates, motivated by the work of Lucey & Zhang (2010); Eun, Wang, and Xiao (2015); and Rothonis, Tran, and Wu, (2016) through introducing moderators in OLS models. Finally this study also includes the crisis index developed by Sachs, Tornell, and Velasco (1997) and used by Zhu and Yang (2008) to know the contagion of crisis in frontier markets and if Culture is a channel of contagion through simple OLS methodology in panel settings. The Markets are partially integrated and spillovers are low as compared to previous results of emerging and developed markets. The overall high volatility spillovers against returns give way to behavioral and cultural factors and non-existence of rational models of finance in decision making. US as representative of the developed markets shows highest contribution to the shocks in Frontier markets variance ratios in both cases. This study found high significant positive relationship to our cultural distance measure and support the notion that culturally distant countries have low levels of spillovers in both returns and volatility. Geographical proximity related hypothesis was completely rejected proving that frontier markets financial dynamics are not derived by regions. Trade openness is a channel through which relationship between culture and financial integration weakens in both spillovers, which leads to the theory of liberalization and efficiency as posited by Bekaert, Harvey, and Lundblad (2003). On the other hand Capital account openness enhances the culture-spillover relationship a little bit which is against the theory but we can attribute it to sociological concept of cultural lag, and as theorized by Lucey and Zhang (2010), it is proved that trading is also channel of cultural impact on both returns and volatility spillover. Interestingly from the five international scaled crises only Sovereign Debt crises created the relationship between national crisis index and Volatility/returns spillovers. According to results only return spillover spread through channel of culture not the volatility spillover. Theoretically it proves that both weak and Semi-Strong form of efficiency do not hold in frontier markets. Significant impact of cultural distances can be attributed to home biasness and information costs, moreover openness is gradual and time taking process.