Volume 12 (2017): Issue 2 (August 2017)

This paper investigates the impact of farm-nonfarm diversification (FND) on household income and food expenditure in urban Ghana using propensity score matching (PSM) technique to account for potential selection bias. We find diversified households to be statistically different from undiversified households in terms of household characteristics. Age, gender, educational attainment of the household head, household size, ownership of livestock and agricultural land, and receipt of miscellaneous and rent incomes are positive and significant determinants of FND in urban Ghana. In addition, we find that participation in both farm and nonfarm activities positively and significantly impacts household income and food expenditure. In the light of growing urbanization, with its implications for unemployment, poverty and food insecurity, we recommend diversification among urban households as a means of smoothing income and consumption.

Environmental taxation has been developing for decades and it started to gain its importance, especially with the European Union extending. The usage of taxes as a part of environmental policy has been known for some time in Romania and developments in this area continued year by year. The present paper explores the current system of environmental taxes in Romania. It highlights the importance of car pollution tax in financing Environmental Fund and the existence of many tax liabilities irrelevant as financial importance.

This paper aims at analysing whether the Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey (CBRT), designing a new monetary policy framework to achieve financial stability in the last quarter of 2010, tries to pursue financial stability by putting price stability on the back burner. To this end, a forward-looking reaction function that is extended with nominal exchange rate gap and nominal domestic credits gap is estimated for the CBRT. The paper first performs unit root and cointegration tests and finds that the variables become stationary at first differences and that there is a cointegration relationship among variables. Then, the paper conducts the Kalman filter to obtain time varying parameters. The findings show that the coefficients of all explanatory variables did not change too much after the new monetary policy framework of the CBRT in the last quarter of 2010. Therefore, this paper asserts that the CBRT continues to pursue price stability as its primary goal and tries to achieve financial stability by using macroprudential tools. Thus this paper concludes that financial stability concerns have not changed the priority of the CBRT.

Most organizations nowadays have the required resources and should offer an appropriate culture to provide each employee with the opportunity and context to develop the feeling of meaningful work. The managers and organizational leaders should be the first to recognize and perceive the work they do as being important. In this article, we examine the current development of the study of the nature, causes, and consequences of meaningful work, and we offer ideas of research opportunities regarding the interface of organizational perspectives on performing and providing meaningful work.

Inflation and financial development are among the factors that influence economic growth and the interaction between them is a major issue in developing countries. The aim of this paper is to investigate the effect of inflation on financial development indicators in Iran using seasonal data over 2000-2015. To achieve the research objectives, time series data were collected from World Bank and seasonal inflation rate, with 5 financial development indicators were used to measure the research variables. Then I applied Johansen Co-integration Test and Vector Error Correction Model to estimate the proposed model. The results show that inflation has a negatively significant effect on financial depth and also positively significant effect on the ratio of total deposits in banking system to nominal GDP in Iran during the observation period. Also the existence of an equilibrium relationship between inflation and other 3 indicators of Iran`s financial development used in this study was rejected.

Startups and small businesses are facing many challenges in terms of financing their activities. These types of companies do not have the possibility to access capital market or to make IPO or to borrow money from banks like big, mature or well-known companies (who were at their beginnings startups or small businesses). They have to find different sources for financing their ideas/products/services that are in many cases very risky, hazardous or to ambitious. But, fortunately, the financing alternative for these companies have evolved during the last post crisis years. They have possibility to find some investors that are willing to invest in a non-name company by accessing crowdfunding platforms, impress angel investors, or attracting venture capital. All that in order to develop their business and to become a unicorn or to have a great exit.

This study investigated the relationship of political instability with the stock prices. Results of the study indicated the negative relationship of stock prices with political instability. Moreover, results of suggested that instable political system ultimately leads decline in stock prices. Inflation has shown negative relationship with stock prices whereas, industrial production and Exports have positive relationship with stock prices.

It goes without saying that Garments industry of Bangladesh has drawn a special attention to the mass people in the world because of being both cost leader and quality leader at the same time. The purpose of this research paper is to analyze the garments industry in Bangladesh which is going to be an emerging tiger in the world economy. It also aims to assess the impact of macro-environmental factors affecting the industry by PESTEL analysis. Again, five forces model has been analyzed to assess the impacts of competitive external factors on the Garments industry in Bangladesh. Furthermore, Garments sector competitive responses to the primary issues affecting the industry have been evaluated here. It also outlines the primary external influences to which this industry is subject. In this case, SWOT analysis has been conducted to assess the competitive position of this industry in comparison with the global perspective. The study suggests that total export is highly correlated with the exports of garments. It also finds that there is severe lacking in the safety and security compliance, wages and compensations and code of conduct of the current organizations. Moreover, GSP facility withdrawn can impact severely on the ready made garments of Bangladesh to compete with price in the international market with China, India and Vietnam etc. The ready made garments sector of Bangladesh is enjoying cost leadership as a source of completive advantage because of cheap labor. Finally, the study would like to recommend for further improvement of garment sector in Bangladesh.

In this study, we examine the impact of the 2008 Global Crisis on “access to finance” in high-income OECD, high-income non-OECD, middle-income, and low-income countries. We use three measures of access to finance. These are “Number of bank branches per 100,000 adults”, “Value traded of top 10 traded companies to total value traded (%)”, and “Market capitalization outside of top 10 largest companies to total market capitalization (%)”. During the run-up to the crisis and immediately after the crisis, we do not find any significant change in any of the three “access to finance” measures. We find that, during the crisis, only middle-income countries were affected significantly. These countries were affected in only one of the measures which is “Value traded of top 10 traded companies to total value traded (%)”. This measure went up and this change is marginally significant. We conclude that the global crisis only affected “access to finance” in middle-income countries.

The main objective of the paper is to find out the determinants of NPAs in the Indian Banking sector and to study if these determinants vary across the three different ownership structures viz., public sector banks (PSBs), private banks (PBs) and foreign banks (FBs), of banks in India. The panel data for all the banks from 2005 to 2014 is collected from the official website of Reserve Bank of India (RBI), the Central Bank of the country. The econometric technique of Fixed Effects model and Random Effects model is used for the purpose. The results reveal that Macro economic factors, like log of percapita income (LPCY) and Inflation (INFN), are significantly affecting NPLs in Public Sector Banks (PSBs). In case of private banks (PBs) LPCY is highly significant while bank specific variables like size and total loans to total loans of the banking sector (TLTLBS) are significant at 10% level. For FBs none of the variables were significant.

For better or for worse, the “corporations rule the world” assertion is nowadays more actual and accurate than ever before, as multinational companies represent the undisputable engine of the globalization process, and the latter continuously (re)creates the background against which global multinationals are flourishing, while reinforcing their “domination”. Since 1995, the Fortune Global 500 ranking (FG 500) annually provides a comprehensive and eloquent image of the world of global multinationals; the merits of the FG 500 ranking go beyond the synchronic approach of the characteristics of global multinationals (in terms of revenues, profits, assets and employees - by sector, industry and country), as it also favors diachronic analysis and comparisons - which are essential for strategists in identifying evolving trends and substantiating corporate strategies able to lead to sustainable competitiveness. The paper aims to determine the contribution of sectors to FG 500 ranking in 2016, on one hand, and to emphasize on some industry-based dynamics in FG 500 - by comparatively analyzing the 2016 and 1996 rankings, on the other hand.

This main purpose of the study is to investigate upon the impact of non-standard work practices on children development, family functioning and employees’ health and safety concerns in a 24/7 Economy. This paper reviews the concept of 24/7 economy and explores the impact of non-standard work practices. A survey instrument is administered to 400 householders of Mauritius and the questionnaires were further processed and analysed with the statistical programme SPSS 20, by using descriptive and inferential analysis. The results of the findings have demonstrated that changes in children development and family functioning and employees’ health and safety concerns highly impact on the householders. The evidence of numerous associations from the present research have shown that 24/7 economy will give rise to pollution. Indeed, children will be affected by lack of parental time and employees might suffer from health issues with the 24/7 culture. The present research fills the significant gaps in the literature review by generating an integrative functioning framework of the 24/7 economy for island economies.

Emotions and feelings have always been part of human beings. Its use in the organisational context in order to achieve competitive advantage, that is, the management of emotions by female workers remains a matter of great debate. Hochschild through her book “The Managed Heart: Commercialisation of Human Feeling” in 1983 brought forward the concept of Emotional labour. This paper has attempted to explore areas where female workers are being employed to carry out emotional work and for this purpose a hotel in the eastern cost of Mauritius was chosen being part of the hospitality industry. The survey was conducted there so as to be able to gather quantitative information about this subject issue and a personal interview was also being carried out in order to obtain the opinions of the human resource manager on this concept as being a woman and a manager herself. A series of recommendations have been provided in order to encourage better treatment of women and make them happy employees.

This paper examines the effect of monetary policy shocks on exchange rate in a Multiple Indicator Approach (MIA) framework. This study has employed a monetary policy index of key monetary policy instruments in India (Bank rate, Cash Reserve Ratio, Repo and Reverse Repo rates). The study finds the empirical evidence for puzzling behavior of price level and exchange rate. Both price and exchange rate increase initially in response to a contractionary policy shock. Policy shocks affect output, inflation and exchange rate to an appreciable extent over a forecasting horizon of one year.

The purpose of this paper is to study the relationship between the organization's mission statement and its outcomes from a fit perspective in the alignment of the organization's structural and cultural elements. Based on an extension of Campbell's (1991) mission model by combination of ideas from two schools of thought in mission statement studies (structural and cultural), the authors introduce the concept of “fit” to show how it contributes towards a new mission statement model. The results show that both alignments are important to create a fit situation in order to positively impact organization outcomes. Based on Cohen (1988), the detected effect size of .322 is considered large. The managerial implication is that there should be more focus on managing organisational alignment to support a fit situation as this is instrumental to mission statement effectiveness. The originality of this study stems from the idea that while past studies develop model based on ideas from within the confine of a particular school of thought, this study is one of the first to combine ideas from both the structural and cultural schools of thought by extending Campbell's (1991) mission model using the fit perspective.