The paper first discusses the current trends in Islamic finance, which has become mainstream with currently more than US$800 billion of assets worldwide and a buoyant market for sukuk bonds. However, this exorbitant growth raises many challenges, particularly in the areas of banking, capital markets and regulation. Thus, the paper then considers these challenges, notably the economic and legal bottlenecks of sukuk, banking-specific issues, such as liquidity risk management and business models, as well as disharmonized financial regulation. Despite the challenges, the paper concludes that the Islamic finance industry has a bright future.

China is the world’s fastest growing economy and is also the second largest. However, the official estimates of the Chinese National Bureau of Statistics exaggerate GDP growth and need adjustment to conform to international norms as set out in the 1993 System of National Accounts (SNA). This paper presents and discusses the necessary adjustments. The two major contributions are new volume indices for the industrial sector and for "non-material" services. Finally, in order to measure the level of Chinese GDP in internationally comparable terms, the authors use a measure of purchasing power parity (PPP) instead of the exchange rate.