Malaysia has a vision of becoming an international centre for education. It has formulated policies and programmes to achieve this noble vision. Several agencies have been established to operationalize these government educational programmes. In addition to these agencies, there are institutions that have also played remarkable roles towards education in Malaysia, notably the Baitulmal. The present study examines the role of Baitulmal towards educating poor Muslim students in Sarawak. Specifically, the study investigates the relationship between total expenditure growth rate of Baitulmal as dependent variable and five independent variables, which include the growth rates of total zakat collection, total expenditure on university student, total expenditure on secondary and primary student, total expenditure growth rate on university student and total expenditure growth rate on secondary and primary students. An Augmented- Dickey Fuller (ADF) unit root test, Johansen and Juselius cointeg.....

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This study focuses on the factors that influence Felda students_ academic achievement. The factors studied were the motivation, competitive spirit of students, education level of parents or guardians, facilities, parental involvement and expectations. A total of 230 Form 4 students from three schools in the district of Jempol, Negeri Sembilan have been selected as respondents. This study used questionnaires to collect data and data were analyzed using descriptive statistics. The findings showed that the level of motivation, competitive spirit of Felda students, educational facilities, and parental involvement were average but the level of parental involvement was high. The results also showed a significant relationship between students_ motivation, education level of parents or guardians, educational facilities, and parental expectations with students_ academic achievement. There were no significant relationship between the spirit of competition and parental involvement with Felda stud.....

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This study investigates the influence of lecturers_ economic literacy on their organizational performance either directly or indirectly via commitment, teamwork, knowledge/skills and attitude. The basic theoretical framework consists of lecturers_ economic literacy as independent variable and lecturers_ organizational performance as dependent variable while knowledge/skills, teamwork, attitude and commitment as intervening variables. Five main hypotheses and fifteen specific hypotheses were posited and tested. The study was based on a survey design and the time horizon was cross sectional with minimal researcher_s interference. The survey was carried out in 4 educational departments selected randomly from 7 clustered polytechnics out of 21 polytechnics in Malaysia. The final number of participants for this study was 28 departments. The sample size comprise of 200 respondents of the total population. The research hypotheses represented a conceptual model of performance. The model hypoth.....

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In this paper the status of takaful and insurance in shari_ah and their operational mode were examined. To arrive at these findings and the discussions in this paper, reference was made to papers presented at various Islamic finance conferences, views and fatwas made by Islamic scholars and to some extent the sayings of Allah (S.W.T) and Prophet Muhammad (s.a.w) as carried in the Qur_an and Hadith, respectively. The basic concept of both takaful and insurance are viewed by many scholars as the same, in that the main objectives of both is that of providing protection against loss of properties and livelihood explained in Islam as `ikhtiar_. It is unanimously agreed that the differences between the two forms of insurance is the mode of operating them. While takaful is based on Shari_ah compliant principles for example paying premiums on the basis of tabarru and devoid of interest, it was identified that conventional insurance contains 3 Shari_ah non-compliant elements namely; gharar (unc.....

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This paper investigates the impact of oil price on the stock returns of eight economic sectors namely; Construction (CON), Consumer (CSU), Finance (FIN), Industrial (IND), Plantation (PLN), Property (PRP), Services (SER), and Mining (MIN). By employing the Augmented Capital Asset Pricing Model (A-CAPM), two tests were conducted. The first tests on symmetric relationship while the second detects the presence of an asymmetric relationship. The estimated results from Test 1 documented insignificant results in all sector analyses. These findings signified that the stock returns were not exposed to oil price shocks. The estimated results of Test 2 indicated the presence of one significant result in industrial (IND) analysis. In particular, the returns of the IND sector were negatively exposed to change in oil price, and it was more significant during periods of oil price increased. In other word, the event of oil price increased significantly reduced the returns of the IND sector. Keywords.....

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Principals_ management and leadership were perceived as the main factors to ensure school effectiveness and had significant impact on students, not directly but indirectly. The purpose of this study was to assess relationship between leadership styles of principals_ and students_ motivation levels with academic achievements of students in secondary schools in the Serian district of Sarawak. A questionnaire that contained 41 items was used to collect data from 302 samples. The descriptive findings of the study showed that 48.4% of the samples lived in families consisting of six and more family members and 81.8% of the families had an average monthly income of less than RM1,000 which was within the national rural poverty level. Analyses conducted showed that the principals favored transactional and transformational leaderships with means of 17.93 and 17.82 respectively. The Pearson Correlation analyses showed there were significant relationships between principals_ leadership styles and .....

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In Malaysia_s life long learning effort and policy to help working adults, a leadership development program was designed to help beginning and incumbent headteachers upgrade their knowledge and skills. While accomplishing this program in Sultan Idris Education University, many of the adult learners encountered critical incidents of life and death that could make or break their spirit and learning ability. The main purpose of this study was aimed at exploring the critical incidents of life and death that shape headteachers_ learning abilities in completing the first degree of management education. A critical incidents research paradigm was used. The data used in this exploration was collected mainly through self-reflective assignment and in-depth interviews from headteachers who had rose above life situations such as difficult child birth, battling cancer, Parkinson disease, accidents, kidnapping and other critical incidents while being adult learners. The research result yielded severa.....

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This research will focus on the relationship between the development of stock market and macroeconomic variables in Malaysia. Generally, the purpose of this research is to observe this relationship in the Malaysian context. In order to achieve the objective, Vector Auto Regression (VAR) estimation method was applied on the created research model. The variables involved in this research were the FBM Emas Shariah index (FBMES) used as proxy for Islamic stock market, FBM Kuala Lumpur Composite Index (FBMKLCI) used as proxy for conventional stock market, Industrial Production Index (IPI), Consumer Production Index (CPI), Aggregate Money Supply (M3), Islamic Inter Bank Rate (IIR), Treasury Bill Rate (TBR) and Exchange Rate of Malaysian Ringgit-United States Dollar. This research utilised monthly data from January 2007 to December 2011 taken from authorized sources. The findings showed that stock prices in Malaysia (Islamic and conventional) are co-integrated with the selected macroeconomic .....

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The openness declared in Malaysia aims to strengthen the economic interlinkages with other economies and enhancing the role of the liberalization itself as a key enabler and mechanism of economic growth.The main concern of this study is to examine the correlation between financial openness towards economy and the total output growth. Primary attention has been given, for not just focusing on country level but also going in depth into manufacturing industry level to look at this relationship based on Malaysia experience. By using de facto financial openness, the result shows that financial openness is significant for both in country and industry level and support that the volume of country_s assets and liabilities did impact on economy and output growth. However, in Granger causality test the significant level only shows on a country level. Keywords Financial openness, output growth, economic growth, manufacturing...

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