SESRIC co-organized

The International Conference on Islamic Capital Markets, Regulations, Products and Implementation

together with the IRTI-IDB and the Muamalat Institute, in Jakarta, Indonesia on August 27-29, 2007.

Capital Market Authorities are regulatory and supervisory institutions to organize the capital markets and develop capital market instruments and institutions. They have a wide range of responsibilities ranging from fair and orderly functioning of the markets to protecting the rights of investors. However, depending upon the different development stages of the capital markets in Islamic countries, the list of priorities of the Capital Market Authorities changes from one country to another. In this connection, the Statistical, Economic and Social Research and Training Centre (SESRIC) highlighted the importance of technical cooperation among OIC Member Countries in order to share experiences in this area.

After the opening ceremony, the International Conference started with the panel on helping the growth of Capital Markets through cooperation among regulatory authorities. In this panel, panelists from Capital Market Authorities of Indonesia, Malaysia and Turkey presented the current stance of Capital Markets in their countries and briefed the participants about their future programs and expectations. After these concise presentations, the participants raised a lot of interesting questions regarding the Capital Market operations in the OIC Member Countries and the panel has been successfully completed with lively discussions.

In the afternoon of the first day of the conference, a session on Capacity Building has been held. In this session, Dr. Savaş Alpay, Director General of the SESRIC, briefly introduced the modalities for the Centre’s training programmes in different areas. The participants of the session discussed the details of appropriate modalities of technical cooperation among the OIC Member Countries on capacity building regarding the operations and regulations of the capital markets. At the same time, the session participants also shared their views on the details of a survey on capacity building, which would be administered by the SESRIC to identify the priority subjects for potential training programs among Capital Market Authorities of the OIC Member Countries.

After circulating the survey to the member states and getting their responses, SESRIC will organize training programmes on Capital Markets. These training programmes will be very useful for the member states as some of OIC Member Countries command sufficient human and technical resources as well as the necessary knowledge to enable the less experienced or newly emerging member states to speed up their capital markets development.

Conference web site:

http://www.icm2007.com/