Volume 13 (2018): Issue 1 (April 2018)

This article strives to work out the causal relationship between natural disasters and economic growth in Pakistan. The study empirically tests the linkage using econometric techniques autoregressive distributed lag bound model by Pesaran (2001) and Granger causality test. We develop a proxy for the loss of natural disasters by a similar method as Noy (2009) and Bergholt et.al, (2012) did. The results of ARDL bounds testing approach evidence a negative long run relationship between the proxies of natural disasters and economic growth. The results of Granger Causality depict the uni-directional causality from natural disasters to economic growth both in short-run and long-run. Overall, the study determines that natural disasters deteriorate economic growth in Pakistan. This is the first study in Pakistan to assess the causal relationship among natural disasters and economic growth. So, further empirical evidence may link natural disasters to microeconomics and financial indicators. In future, researchers might control the impact of foreign development aid, remittances, political stability and country’s corruption rating. Natural disasters are an alarming issue and, addressing the questions related to their impacts on welfare of human being and economic growth of the countries contain significant importance in order to attract the attention of global development agencies and policymakers. As per INFORM (2015) risk index, Pakistan has the highest vulnerability towards natural disasters after Afghanistan. So, the study contains more significant value in context of Pakistan.

Organizational change occurs in every organization that deals with growth and transition. Organizational leaders develop a commitment to lifelong learning throughout their careers. As the organizational leader grows, the organization in which they lead grows as well. Organizational leaders are characterized by how they develop their strategic plan that will influence change. Discipline is essential to the development of a leader influencing organizational change. Organizational leaders create psychological contracts with employees to build trust, confidence, and business relationships. Psychological contracts motivate employees intrinsically, and in ways that go beyond the confines of the physical contract signed between employees and management. Organizational leaders honor psychological contracts to take advantage of the talented employees that can benefit the organization. Psychological contracts assist leaders guiding their organization through changes by creating intrinsic motivators to develop an understanding of expectations. Changes that need to occur should be well communicated and implemented at a time that offers the organization and advantage rather than a setback. Leadership differs from management by requiring an alternative approach when dealing with employees and how to direct change at the individual, group, or larger system level. Organizational leaders create an environment for change that must be nurtured for the employees to commit to following the leader. Organizational change develops throughout the life cycle of an organization and is dependent on the organizational leader’s willingness to continue to learn.

This paper examined the relationship between resource endowment and export diversification and its implication for economic growth in Nigeria based on data from 1981 to 2015. The result of the Granger causality test suggests that unidirectional causality runs from oil production to economic growth, while export diversification does not granger cause economic growth. From the error correction result, it was established that export diversification positively impacts growth from the last two periods, while in the current period, it has negative effect on growth. This means that the key issue with Nigerian economy might not be structural but institutional. That is, even if the economy is diversified, the expected result may still be a ruse without appropriate economic institutional reform. The study concludes that specialisation is preferred to diversification for Nigeria in the current circumstance. Hence, the key issue to sustain growth in Nigeria is not in the number of productive sectors but in their efficiency.

The aim of the research was to examine the effects of satisfaction and commitment of employees on the employees’ loyalty and to investigate the effect of employees’ loyalty on quality of services provided for customers. This research is applied in terms of objective and correlational type of descriptive-survey in terms of data collection. Population of the research includes two groups. The first group included employees providing service to customers of Ports and Maritime Organization of Bushehr (Iran) and the second group included customers receiving the services of the organization. From both groups, 250 people were selected using available sampling method to respond to questions of the research. To test the research conceptual model and research hypotheses, structural equation modeling was used. The results showed that job satisfaction of employees have significant positive effect on organizational commitment of employees. Also, job satisfaction and organizational commitment of employees have significant positive effect on their loyalty to organization. In addition, organizational loyalty of employees has positive and significant impact on improving the quality of customer service. Therefore, organizations should make their effort to recruit employees who are suitable for their activities.

The present paper attempts to investigate the challenges of taxation in Iran based on the tax behavior of construction companies in Kurdistan Province. From a 165 questionnaires, Scheffe and Friedman tests were applied to test the following research hypotheses: Efficiency of tax laws, the role of tax experts in filing correct tax reports, the extent to which willing or unwilling tax noncompliance is detectable, and the effectiveness of penalties considering the case of construction companies. The evidence rejects tax law efficiency as well as the efficiency of the penalty-reward system and confirms the negative impact of tax noncompliance on tax revenue. Also, interestingly enough, neither the input of financial expertise in filling out tax reports nor the role of accounting information when taxable income is reported is shown to be statistically significant. Altogether these results point to a highly problematic tax regime in Iran at least in so far as corporate tax from construction companies in Iranian Kurdistan is concerned.

The Arkansas Advanced Initiative for Math and Science (AAIMS) is program with the goal to increase Advanced Placement (AP) participation and increase the passing rate of AP exams. The program offers monetary incentives and support to students and teachers for one year, effectively creating a natural experiment. This paper exploits the one year treatment to empirically show that the program is effective at increasing a school’s AP participation rate by nudging the schools to increase AP offerings and satisfying a latent student demand for AP classes.

In this study, we examine the regional impacts of the 1997 Asian Crisis on Governance. We use World Bank’s Worldwide Governance Indicators (i.e. WGI) which includes six dimensions of governance. These six dimensions are “Voice and Accountability”, “Political Stability and Absence of Violence”, “Government Effectiveness”, “Regulatory Quality”, “Rule of Law”, and “Control of Corruption”. The seven regions that we examine are North America, Europe and Central Asia, Latin America and Caribbean, East Asia and Pacific, South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Middle East and North Africa. Our findings show that, due to the crisis, while the overall rankings of Latin America and Caribbean, and Sub-Saharan Africa improved, the overall rankings of Europe and Central Asia, East Asia and Pacific, South Asia, and Middle East and North Africa declined. There was no change in the ranking of North America due to the crisis. Both pre- and post-crisis, North America has the highest ranking in all six measures of governance.

Last decades the public debt increased continuously in all countries of European Union. At present, in many countries this dangerous growth is seriously affecting the general process of economic development. Although in a number of countries the public debt is today larger than 60% of GDP, as the imposed limit by Maastricht Treaty, the problem of its sustainability is varying from country to country. Following old and recent published studies in matter of public debt sustainability, one objective of our study is to analyse the existence of a convergence or a divergence process both at the level of the whole EU and within the two major groups of countries (EU14 – old members of EU, after Brexit, and respectively EU11 – new eastern members adhered to EU after 2000). Other objective is to build a model to simulate the long term dynamics of the public debt as a function of standard variables (such as GDP growth, interest rate, budgetary deficit, etc.). Moreover, by using recent data from Eurostat, IMF, and World Bank, we try to estimate few essential parameters in order to control the public debt sustainability in each country of EU. Finally, countries are grouped in a number of classes for which certain policy measures could be evaluated.

The study focused on financial sector development and manufacturing performance in Nigeria over the period of 1981 to 2015. In the study, three indicators such as manufacturing capacity utilization, manufacturing output and manufacturing value added were employed to proxy manufacturing performance while money supply as a percentage of GDP, domestic credit to the private sector and liquidity ratio were employed to proxy financial development. The study observed that credit to the private sector and money supply positively but insignificantly enhanced capacity utilization and output, but negatively impacted value added of the manufacturing sector in the short run. There is slight improvement in the long where both money supply and credit to private sector exert positive impact manufactured output. Hence, it becomes crucial for commercial banks to make available certain percentage of their profits for industrial expansion in order to create linkages between both sectors.

During the last few decades, the search for sustainability has experienced a tremendous momentum, encompassing all the levels of the global system. Fuelled by complex (both proactive and reactive) motivators, the process has surpassed the characteristics of an intellectual endeavor – more preoccupied by idealist goals, and less focused on the actual means to achieve them – and has proved that it can successfully be transposed into the corporate real world – of decision making, objective assessment, and relentless scrutiny. The paper aims to (broadly) explore the world of the most sustainable corporations – based on a descriptive (factual and dynamic) analysis of Corporate Knight’s annual rankings (2016-2018) of the Most Sustainable Corporations – in order to: (a). determine (by comparing and contrasting) the main features these organizations – able to transform the fuzzy concept of corporate sustainability into a coherent reality – display; and (b). set the premises for future (narrower) researches – aiming to explain the “how-s” behind the design, development and implementation of the strategies these corporations follow in their search for (sustainable) competitiveness.

This paper has explored a pioneer model for online shopping behavior for natural flowers in Mauritius. Further to the extensive literature review, a survey method was adopted whereby 200 questionnaires were distributed to respondents using a non-probability convenience sampling method. The empirical estimates of the study have depicted that price, trust, reputation of retailers; education and age have an impact towards online shopping behavior for natural flowers, whilst gender and income do not influence customers. Correlation analysis also revealed that perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, subjective norms, behavioral intention and attitudes impacted on the online shopping behavior for natural flowers. A pioneer conceptual model was also proposed in this paper, whereby, policy makers and practitioners of online business can use the model as a reference to pave the way to encourage online purchases. This research represents a different way of understanding online shopping behavior for natural flowers.

In this article, we investigate the causality links between behavioral factors and the decision to adopt IFRS in developing countries until the year 2013. We implement this empirical model by using the neo-institutional approach and based on a sample of 108 developing countries. Our empirical results show that there exists bidirectional causal relationship between the majority of the developed behavioral variables and the decision of adopting or not IFRS by developing countries. They also indicate through multivariate analysis that the selection of IAS / IFRS by developing countries is primarily legitimized by institutional and social pressures (institutional isomorphism). These empirical insights are of particular interest to local accounting standard setters of selected countries since they can provide a better discernment of factors that can encourage the adoption of IAS IFRS.

The study seeks to assess the impact good corporate governance in State Owned Enterprises (SOEs) of Mauritius by obtaining the general perspectives of employees in this particular sector. This study comprised of two stages. Firstly, a focus group discussion was conducted among few employees in SOEs of Mauritius. This exploratory phase was useful in identifying additional views on the impact, barriers, issues and challenges on the level of good corporate governance in SOEs of Mauritius. A survey was then being conducted as a second phase of the study among a sample of employees from SOEs in Mauritius. The analysis focused on the objectives of the study, which were to assess the practice of good governance in SOEs in Mauritius, its benefits and the barriers towards practicing good governance in these firms. The major findings of the study showed that most respondents acknowledge the positive impact of good corporate governance in the day to day of their organisations. However, they also reported that constant governmental intervention acts as a barrier for the proper functioning of SOEs in Mauritius.

India is having a long-term oriented culture where people are more focused on their future rather than present. Due to this the savings rate in India has always remain at a significant level. India’s savings performance has been quite impressive in a cross-country context. India’s gross domestic savings rate in the recent period is comparable to Indonesia, Thailand and Korea, much lower than that of China, Malaysia and Singapore but much higher than that of many other emerging and advanced economies. India ranked 2nd in terms of gross domestic savings among top 10 economies of the world in the year 2015, just below that of China. The gross domestic savings which stood at around 23 per cent in 1990 has reached around 35 per cent in 2015, well above the world average of 23.5 per cent. Various factors which resulted in an increase in gross domestic savings rate are rapid economic growth, large scale migration of rural population to urban area, Rise in income of government employees after 6th pay commission, persistence of saving habits among households, awareness programs by government and financial institutions etc. Household savings has always remained a major component of gross domestic savings followed by private corporate savings and public sector savings. It was the result of high savings rate that the Indian economy stand strong during the global recession of 2008. During the tenth five year plan i.e. from 2002-2007 the increasing in gross domestic savings was maximum among all. Bank deposits have always remain the most preferred avenue for savings for households. Total deposits in Indian banks crossed Rs100 billion mark in 2017.

In the context of global integration, one country’s economic fluctuations will affect another country through a variety of ways, the global economic crisis in 2008 is the best proof. The economic ties between China and Japan are closely related. Japan was once the largest trading partner of China. It is very important to study the influence mechanism of economic fluctuations between China and Japan for the stable development of China’s economy. This paper selects China’s export to Japan(CEX) Japan’s export to China(JEX) Japan’s direct investment to China (FDI) Chinese gross domestic product (CGDP), Japan’s gross domestic product (JGDP) five variables. We use impulse response and variance decomposition to analyze the interaction of Chinese and Japanese economy. Finally we come to the conclusion: China’s economy affected by the impact of Japan’s economic fluctuations bigger than Japan’s economy affected by China; the contribution rate of imports from Japan is greater than the export to China’s economy.