Assessment of the Competitiveness of Islamic Fintech Implementation: A Composite Indicator for Cross-Country Analysis

Islamic fintech is growing fast, especially in the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OOIC) member countries. In recent years, it has become one of the driving forces for the Islamic financial industry. Though the pandemic negatively affected global financial business, including conventional and Islamic segments, Islamic fintech has continued its steady development. i-Fintech increases access to Islamic financial services and financial inclusion in general to provide ESG-rich investment opportunities. The rise of Islamic fintech can help countries become financial hubs and promote sustainable development goals. This paper is aimed at designing an original composite indicator of the competitiveness of Islamic fintech adoption in order to perform a comprehensive assessment of the competitive advantages that are being used across various countries. The research methodology includes data for 65 countries where Islamic fintech companies are represented. We analysed 31 variables describing the development of Islamic financial technologies in each country and combined them into five categories included in the composite indicator. Key factors that determine the development of Islamic financial technologies in different countries around the globe are singled out. The economies with the highest scores are analysed to define their strengths and weaknesses. The practices of the leading countries that address identified vulnerabilities are described.

Financial Consideration of Energy and Environmental Nexus with Energy Poverty: Promoting Financial Development in G7 Economies

Energy and environmental concepts have been extensively studied in the past. However, these studies often lacked integrated analysis of energy, monetary, public, and ecological aspects to assess energy and environmental issues. This article provides analyzation of the G7 nations’ qualitative, social, cultural, and health achievement in the energy poverty indexes. These include the energy economics and climate change of energy poverty, by using DEA like a composite indicator. The G7 countries’ combined energy consumption is equal to 34% of the world’s total, whereas the GDP is 50% of the global total. As a result, this article develops a comprehensive series of energy, financial, societal, and environmental indicators that are up to date. Such indicators are utilized to assess energy financial, societal, and EPI using a mathematical composite indicator. Canada has the greatest EPII score, indicating that it can deal better than the other G7 countries with energy independence, productivity expansion, and social impact, and France’s and Italy’s the second tier. While Japan has a 0.50 EPI grade and the United States will have the lowest, the G7 countries are growing faster. Finally, we propose a policy framework for enhancing the research area. The energy, societal, and EPI were created by combining these elements. In terms of energy independence, economic growth, and sustainability practices, Canada beats the other G7 countries according to the data. France and Italy are in the 2nd and 3rd places, respectively. Despite having a higher level of economic development than the G7 countries, Japan has a 0.50 Environmental Performance Index rating, whereas the United States has a minimum average Environmental Performance Index rating. Finally, in order to improve the study’s subject, we propose a policy framework.

Inequalities in Health: Methodological Approaches to Spatial Differentiation

The prevalence of inequalities in the general health position of communities can be assessed by using selected determinants. The aims of this article are three-fold: (1) to apply a comprehensive approach to the assessment of inequalities in the general health position of communities, (2) to determine the spatial differentiation of determinants, and (3) to present selected assessment methods and their impact on the results. To present a quantitative assessment of these inequalities in health status in communities, a composite indicator (Health Index) was developed. This Health Index is composed of 8 areas of evaluation and 60 indicators which include, amongst others, determinants of health status and healthcare at district level (LAU 1) in the Czech Republic. The data are evaluated using multicriteria decision-making methods (the WSA and TOPSIS methods). Findings suggest that, when all eight domains are assigned the same weight of one, the spatial differentiation among the districts is similar when using both methods. If different weightings are assigned to the districts, changes occur in both the index values and the rankings of the analyzed districts. For example, the allocation of weightings in both methods results in a rearrangement of the ranking of districts for which the Health Index is around the average.

Urban Sustainability Deficits: The Urban Non-Sustainability Index (UNSI) as a Tool for Urban Policy

Urban sustainability has been revealed as one of the key elements in achieving global sustainability. There is a wide range of indicators in this field; however, sustainability indicators have not been exempt from criticism, in both their formal aspects and practical usefulness. If measuring sustainability is “measuring the immeasurable”, then the objective of this article is to propose a composite indicator that evaluates only the deficits of sustainability or, which is the same thing, the unsustainability of cities. This focus has the advantage of showing up the particular deficiencies and thus the priorities that each city must attend to. For this purpose, only unsustainability, defined as the distance to a sustainability target, was considered. Aggregation was carried out through generalized means, which lead to a proper balance between compensatory and non-compensatory aggregation. The results emerging from the application of our methodology to a sample of fifty different cities suggest that all cities should attend to some aspect concerning sustainability, and that no city is sustainable, but only less unsustainable, showing both significant differences between cities in terms of the degree of unsustainability and a common underlying structure of unsustainability in which the environmental dimension contributes the most.

A note on the configuration of the digital ecosystem in Latin America

We evaluate the main characteristics of the digital ecosystem of North American (USA and Canada) and 16 Latin American economies for 2019. By employing the ‘benefit of the doubt’ model rooted in non-parametric techniques to scrutinize a composite indicator designed to assess the digital ecosystem (i.e., the Digital Platform Economy (DPE) index), the analysis allows the computation of endogenous (country-specific) weights that can be used for developing more informed policy making. The results show that countries prioritize different aspects of their digital ecosystem which confirms that, contrary to homogeneous prescription, tailor-made policy is a more desirable approach if the objective is to optimize the resources deployed to enhance the countries’ digital ecosystem.