Volume 12 (2017): Issue 1 (April 2017)

The transformation in international business landscape has changed organizational management especially reward administration. This is done in order to maintain the organization’s competitiveness in global market place. In the field of reward administration, an emerging trend can be observed whereby most organizations are moving toward the application of psychological elements in administering organizational reward system. The ultimate objective of this study is to investigate the association between performance-based reward administration and interactional justice. The proposed model was empirically tested using a sample of 113 employees from fire and rescue agency in Peninsular Malaysia. This study found an evidence that performance-based reward administration (i.e., communication, participation and performance appraisal) is positively and significantly associated with interactional justice. This findings proves that the ability of administrators to appropriately implement communication openness, inspire participative decision-making and organize fairness performance appraisal in administering performance-based reward have significantly evoked the feeling of interactional justice when employees perceived that they are being fairly treated in the reward system.

The rising number of scandals leading to the closure of many large companies is worrisome. The traditional belief is that business and ethics are oxymorons and one is not expected to be totally virtuous during business operations. Nonetheless, this does not mean ethical standards should be side-lined. Professional associations such as the Chartered Financial Institute (CFA) uphold moral values and urge members to exercise high moral standards and diligence in their duties. Philosophically, major accounting scandals could have been nipped in the bud by whistle blowing before the wrong deeds escalated. However whistle blowing is a major issue and is viewed as disloyalty. In this paper, the dilemmas of whistle blowing are evaluated using contemporary ethical theories which are: egoism, deontology and utilitarianism. The analysis shows that deontology and utilitarianism are based on altruism and may support whistle blowing because they are grounded on consideration of other people. It is worth noting that morally upright adults are often a result of being brought up as ethical children from a psychological standpoint.

The Research mainly focus on the business of espionage, it should be done but must adhere to ethical standards to be able to increase the efficiency of products, lower costs, accelerate business growth. Meanwhile it has been feared able to cause social problems as in theft, causing casualties and harm to the company personnel as well as other individuals. Several strategies have been found to prevent business espionage happening within the business enterprise. The study was conducted through a research library.

This paper investigates Islamic Versus Conventional market indexes’ performance. It analyzes also their short and long term relationship by testing cointegration, causality and impulse response functions. The sample period is from 2003 to 2011 and splited into 3 sub-periods: pre, during and post subprime crisis. Our findings provide evidence that first, index performance are somewhat mixed over the different period and through the different indices under consideration, and support the hypothesis that the impact of faith-based screens on investment performance is insignificant. Second, over the three sub-periods, there is no long run relationship between the Islamic indices and their conventional counterparts’ performance, except for the Islamic emerging markets indices. Third, in the short-run, we find different causal links between Islamic Versus non-Islamic indices over the three sub-periods. This finding is robust even after testing an impulse responses functions. Our findings have important implications for international portfolio diversification.

The purpose of the present study is to examine the long run and the short run relationship between stock price and a set of macroeconomic variables for Indian economy using annual data from 1979 to 2014. The long run relationship is examined by implementing the ARDL bounds testing approach to co-integration. VECM method is used to test the short and long run causality and variance decomposition is used to predict long run exogenous shocks of the variables. The results confirm a long run relationship among the variables. Evidence suggests that Economic growth, inflation and exchange rate influence stock prices positively. However, crude oil price influences the stock price negatively. This implies that the increase in oil price induces inflationary expectation in the mind of investors and hence stock prices are adversely affected. The VECM result indicates that short run and long run unidirectional causality running from economic growth and FDI to stock prices in India. The result of the variance decomposition shows that stock market development in India is mostly explained by its own shocks. The Government can take steps to control the crude oil price in India and Investors’ confidence has to be gained by boosting the economic growth of the economy through appropriate policy tools.

The main purpose of this paper is to identify the drivers of firm performance by exploring both quantitative indicators - based on accounting profitability, shareholder value and economic value – and qualitative approach – based on balanced scorecard and triple bottom line. A literature review will be provided in order to obtain an optimum mix of quantitative and qualitative drivers for firm performance, on one hand, and a case study will be conducted for emphasizing the importance of both approaches, on the other hand.

The purpose of the study is to identify the impact of some assumed dimensions as vital reasons for investment sluggishness in Bangladesh resulting stabilized GDP growth rate around 6 percent over last decade in spite of having some favorable microeconomic and macroeconomic indicators such as controlled inflation rate, huge foreign exchange reserve, export growth etc. The study is descriptive in nature where correlation, regression and trend analysis have been conducted from the data of primary and secondary sources. The result of the analysis shows that mainly five important dimensions of investment sluggishness named high lending interest rate, corruption in public and private organizations, political unrest, inadequate power generation and supply and infrastructure problem are significantly affecting investment sluggishness in Bangladesh resulting stabilized GDP growth rate. At the end of the research paper, some measures have been recommended to overcome the obstacles of investment growth.

In this article, we provide a detailed review on the behavior of calendar anomalies (day–of–the–week, January and turn–of–month in particular) to understand their evolution over time. The research in the area of stock market indicates negative returns on Monday and positive returns on Friday; however, in the currency markets, results are opposite, that is, the returns on Monday are positive and higher than the returns on Friday which show negative returns. For the January (TOM) effect, the literature suggest that the returns during January (TOM trading days) are higher (lower) than the returns during rest of the year (non–TOM trading days). Further, these calendar anomalies were stronger during the 1980s and 1990s and have gradually diminished in the recent times which indicate that the markets have achieved a higher degree of efficiency.

This paper aims at investigating the link between fraud and business cycle in Nigeria using primary data sourced from questionnaires administered on both fraudsters and fraud managers. This is premised on the ground that Nigeria is in recession and has been recently described as fantastically corrupt. Understanding the link between fraud and economic behaviour would give an in depth understanding of fraud levels in the different phases of the Nigerian economy and would help the fraud management system in Nigeria which is believed to have great consequences on the nation's economy. Our result shows that though there is a significant relationship between fraud and business cycle in Nigeria, the level of fraud committed does not solely depend on either expansion or recession exists in the economy, rather, there is an identified range of fraud that might be increased in adverse economy.

Since the 1990s exports of fresh agricultural products by air from Uganda have been increasing and making a significant contribution to her International trade. Products include mostly fish, flowers, papain, and vanilla constituting over 95% of all air exports. Farming of the items is mainly by small scale farmers who depend on the natural climate of the country. Consequently, monthly yields are also climate dependent making individual export volumes unpredictable. In spite of these uncertainties, this study was intended to investigate possible existence of a model in the trends. Monthly data were collected from Uganda Civil Aviation Authority from 2009 to 2012. Analysis was by using ARIMA Approach with the help of Eviews 8. Visually the data exhibited irregular patterns and without a trend or seasonality. First order differencing stationarised the data and the residuals had a random non-significant noise suggesting a Random Walk Model expressed as ARIMA (0, 1, 0) and a negative drift. The model shows a link between current and one lag export volumes and the negative drift is a convergence of successive differences in export volumes. These findings have policy implications in expansion and forecasting of the exports potential of applicability of Random Walk Theory in practice.

The global commandments of sustainable development, assumed and translated by the EU into a series of communications and resolutions, have found themselves a new (and more powerful) expression into the “Directive 2014/95/EU (…) as regards disclosure of non-financial and diversity information by certain large undertakings and groups”; in order to increase the transparency of their sustainability-related actions and results, these companies need to report (starting from 2018, by referring to the financial year 2017) information “relating to, as a minimum, environmental, social and employee matters, respect for human rights, anti-corruption and bribery matters”. As regards the Romanian companies, although they have had a relatively delayed start in terms of embracing CSR initiatives and practices (and SCR reporting respectively), the Directive 2014/95/EU could represent a great opportunity for diminishing the gap – if properly internalized and strategically operationalized. The paper aims to perform a strategic diagnosis analysis on the CSR practices and CSR reporting in Romania, on the threshold of the Directive 2014/95/EU enforcement, in order to make an effective prognosis on its consequences and impacts.

This paper explores the major factors impacting upon the ecological adoption of solar water heaters in Mauritius. The paper applies data reduction technique by using exploratory factor analysis on a sample of 228 respondents and condenses a set of 32 attributes into a list of 8 comprehensible factors impacting upon the sustained adoption of solar water heater in Mauritius. Multiple regression analysis was also conducted to investigate upon the most predictive factor influencing the adoption of solar water heaters in Mauritius. The empirical estimates of the regression analysis have also depicted that the most determining factor pertaining to the ‘government incentives for solar water heaters’ impacts upon the adoption of solar water heaters. These results can be related to sustainable adoption of green energy whereby targeted incentive mechanisms can be formulated with the aim to accelerate and cascade solar energy adoption in emerging economies. A novel conceptual model was also proposed in this paper, whereby, ecological stakeholders in the sustainable arena could use the model as a reference to pave the way to encourage adoption of solar water heating energy. This research represents a different way of understanding ecological customers by developing an expanding on an original scale development for the survey on the ecological adoption of solar water heaters.

Fiscal Decentralization is the devolution of fiscal assignments to lower governments for high growth and better delivery of public services. The current study covering the period from 1972 to 2009 is an attempt to find out the impacts of fiscal decentralization on public services deliveries in Pakistan. Public services are proxy by Gross enrollment at primary school level while fiscal decentralization by fiscal transfer and expenditure sides of devolution. Using time series data, it is found that the individual impacts of fiscal transfer are although insignificant but still support the theoretical proposition regarding fiscal decentralization and public services relationship while delegation of expenditure responsibilities helps in improving the gross enrollment at primary school level. Furthermore the study evident that complete delegation of fiscal responsibilities to lower governments enhance enrollment ratio in Pakistan.

Using Annual Survey of Industries (ASI) dataset for 11 two-digit manufacturing industries and 20 states, this paper tests the relationship between dynamic agglomeration externalities and regional manufacturing growth for India. Three types of dynamic externalities have been proposed in the literature for explaining this relationship – Marshall-Arrow-Romer (MAR) specialization externalities, Jacobs’s diversity externalities, and Porter’s competition externalities. This paper examines the effect of these dynamic externalities on regional manufacturing employment and total factor productivity (TFP) growth for selected Indian industries between 2001-02 and 2011-12. The panel data model results show that dynamic externalities are important in influencing employment growth but they do not seem to have an impact on the growth of manufacturing productivity. Further, the results show that specialization externalities positively affect the employment growth of capital-intensive industries whereas diversity externalities favourably affect the employment growth in labour-intensive industries. Our results suggest that the importance of dynamic externalities should not be examined by pooling all industries. The results also highlight the importance of infrastructural investments for boosting the growth of manufacturing employment and productivity.

This paper empirically examines whether commodity derivatives can be used as an alternative investment asset in India where commodity markets are at emerging state and provides the same diversification benefit as they provide in developed commodity markets. In India only commodity futures are prevalent so various commodity indices representing various sectors has been used in the study. Diversification aspect of commodity derivatives has been tested initially by using correlation analysis. Compounded Daily Growth rate and Relative Standard deviation has been used as a measure of calculating risk and return of daily data of SENSEX, BOND and four Commodity Indices (MCX Comdex, MCX AGRI, MCX Metal, MCX Energy). Markowitz Efficient Frontier theory has been used to calculate portfolio risk return and Sharpe risk adjusted ratio has been used to evaluate the various portfolios. Optimal portfolio has been obtained for the combination of equity, bond and commodity and overall results of the study indicate that an investor who is risk averse will prefer to invest in combination of SENSEX, BOND & MCX Energy whereas an investor who gets utility by taking more risk for more returns will prefer to invest in combination of SENSEX, BOND & MCX Metal. Investor having inclination towards moderate risk return would tend to invest in MCX AGRI along with SENSEX and BOND.