This study investigates the determinants of profitability for industrial firms in Oman. Therefore, a sample of 17 industrial companies listed on Muscat securities market covering the period from 2006 till 2013 is utilized. Results from the panel ordinary least squares model reveal a positive and statistical significant relationship between profitability, the firm size, growth, fixed assets and working capital. On the other hand, the average tax rate and the financial leverage variables show a negative relationship with profitability. However, this relationship is significant only for the financial leverage variable. The study concludes that large growing firms with efficiently managed assets improve revenue and ultimately enhance profitability.

This study investigates the relationship between trade openness, financial development and economic growth for the Kingdom of Bahrain. Time series data are utilized form 1980 till 2012. The vector error correction model (VECM) in combination with innovation of accounting (variance decomposition and impulse response function) analysis are employed to explore the causal relationship between the variables. The stationarity properties of the data and the order of integration are tested using both the Augmented Dickey-Fuller (ADF) test and the Phillips-Perron (PP) test. All variables are found to be cointegrated indicating the existence of long-run relationship. The empirical findings show that trade openness and financial development have causal impact on economic growth. Conversely, growth is found to have no causal impact on trade and financial development, implying support for "trade-led growth" and "finance-led growth" hypotheses. Furthermore, the results show a short-run causality from financial development to trade openness. The findings suggest that trade openness and financial development are important elements in determining economic growth in Bahrain. Therefore, Bahrain should continue to patronize the development of its financial sector and to allow more trade openness in order to achieve a high and sustainable economic growth.

This study analyzes the relationship between trading volume and stock return volatility for industrial firms listed on Muscat securities market. Several tests were utilized to include: Brailsford model, vector autoregressive model (VAR), and the pairwise Granger causality test. The empirical results provide evidence of a significant positive effect for return volatility on trading volume. Likewise, the VAR model provides evidence of a significant positive effect of trading volume on stock returns. On the other hand, the pairwise Granger causality test reveals that trading volume Granger-cause stock return. The previous findings are inconsistent with the weak-form of the efficient market hypothesis.

This paper provides an empirical analysis of the relationship between economic growth and its determinants with special focus on gross fixed capital formation, export, import, and financial development for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). Therefore, the study utilized an annual data from 1980 till 2014, and employed both the autoregressive distributed lag model (ARDL) and the error correction method (ECM) to investigate the long-run and the short-run parameters between the variables. The findings suggest a positive relationship between fixed capital formation, export, in one hand and economic growth in the other hand, both in the short-run and the long-run. In contrast, the financial development variable found to have a negative effect on economic growth in the short-run, however, it turned out to be positive in the long-run. Finally, the import variable showed a negative contribution to growth in the long-run as well as in the short-run. The results are consistent with the theoretical and empirical predictions.

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