EDITORIAL NOTE

As the newly appointed Director General of SESRIC and the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Economic Cooperation and Development, I would like to present, with great pleasure, the June issue of the 36th volume. The variety of paper submissions from a diverse set of emerging countries both from within and outside the OIC region is surely important with respect to the global objectives of our Journal. I am also delighted that researchers of applied economics, business and finance continue to demonstrate an increased interest in sharing the results of their valuable studies with the readers of our Journal.

This issue of Journal of Economic Cooperation and Development contains six outstanding articles which shed light on contemporary research questions.

The first paper investigates the determinants of private involvement in public infrastructure provision in Muslim developing countries. The issue is considered important due to the persistent gap between the demand for and supply of public infrastructure in most of the Muslim developing countries.

The second paper inspects the strategic alliance which has ignored new concepts on learning cycle and information that is given by partner. A failure of partnership in Small and Medium Entrepreneurship (SME) is usually caused by foundation from low commitment of partnership.

The third paper employs OLS and TSLS-instrumental variable techniques that take into account random effects to investigate the effect of corruption on savings, in addition to examining whether the effect of corruption on savings depends on income levels in the ECOWAS from 1996 to 2012.

The fourth paper studies the ASEAN economic integration progress based on the impact of ASEAN Free Trade Area (AFTA) on FDI inflows of both multi-country (Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand) with macroeconomy-level data and single country (Indonesia) with micro firm-level data.

The fifth paper explains the relation between international R&D spillover from international trade and FDI channel with productivity (TFP) based on endogenous growth theory in Asian Newly Industrialized Countries (ANIC) in period 1990 - 2010.

The sixth and final paper investigates the client satisfaction of faith-based and mainstream microfinance institutions. In this paper the level of satisfaction is considered on eight independent factors identified through literature survey and experts’ opinion.

I hope that this fine collection of articles will be a valuable resource for our readers and will stimulate further research. As our Journal mainly focuses on applied research in development economics, we welcome original papers dealing with important economic and social issues of immediate concern to the developing world. We will continue to give special attention to those papers which deal with the potentials for and possibilities of promoting and expanding economic and technical cooperation among developing countries as well as policy-oriented research papers which analyse successful economic development strategies and implementations in OIC Member Countries.

Amb. Musa KULAKLIKAYA
Editor-in-chief

Abstract articles of the Journal of Economic Cooperation and Development, Vol.36 No.2 (2015)