Search results for: financial burden

Authors: Hang T. T. Truong, Ronald S. Laura, Kylie Shaw

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Within Vietnam's system of higher education, its schools of business play a vital role in supporting the country’s economic objectives. However, the crucial contribution of soft skills for maximal success within the business sector has to date not been adequately recognized by its business schools. This being so, the development of the business school curriculum in Vietnam has not been able to 'catch up', so to say, with the burgeoning need of students for a comprehensive soft skills program designed to meet the national and global business objectives of their potential employers. The burden of the present paper is first to reveal the results of our survey in Vietnam which make explicit the extent to which major Vietnamese industrial employers’ value the potential role that soft skill competencies can play in maximizing business success. Our final task will be to determine which soft skills employers discern as best serving to maximize the economic interests of Vietnam within the global marketplace. Semi-structured telephone interviews have been conducted with the 15 representative Head Employers of Vietnam's reputedly largest and most successful of the diverse business enterprises across Vietnam. The findings of the study indicate that all respondents highly value the increasing importance of soft skills in business success. Our critical analysis of respondent data reveals that 19 essential soft skills are deemed by employers as integral to business workplace efficacy and should thus be integrated into the formal business curriculum. We are confident that our study represents the first comprehensive and specific survey yet undertaken within the business sector in Vietnam which accesses and analyses the opinions of representative employers from major companies across the country in regard to the growing importance of 19 specific soft skills essential for maximizing overall business success. Our research findings also reveal that the integration into business school curriculums nationwide of the soft skills we have identified is of paramount importance to advance the national and global economic interests of Vietnam.

Keywords: Business curriculum, business graduates, employers’ perception, soft skills.

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Authors: F. Gökgöz, M. E. Atmaca

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Electricity has an indispensable role in human daily life, technological development and economy. It is a special product or service that should be instantaneously generated and consumed. Sources of the world are limited so that effective and efficient use of them is very important not only for human life and environment but also for technological and economic development. Competitive electricity market is one of the important way that provides suitable platform for effective and efficient use of electricity. Besides benefits, it brings along some risks that should be carefully managed by a market player like Electricity Generation Company. Risk management is an essential part in market players’ decision making. In this paper, risk management through diversification is applied with the help of Value at Risk methods for case studies. Performance of optimal electricity sale solutions are measured and the portfolio performance has been evaluated via Sharpe-Ratio, and compared with conventional approach. Biennial historical electricity price data of Turkish Day Ahead Market are used to demonstrate the approach.

Keywords: Electricity market, portfolio optimization, risk management, Sharpe ratio, value at risk.

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Authors: Alireza Azimi Sani , Mahdi Allahverdizadeh

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increased competition and increased costs of designing made it important for the firms to identify the right products and the right methods for manufacturing the products. Firms should focus on customers and identify customer demands directly to design the right products. Several management methods and techniques that are currently available improve one or more functions or processes in an industry and do not take the complete product life cycle into consideration. On the other hand target costing is a method / philosophy that takes financial, manufacturing and customer aspects into consideration during designing phase and helps firms in making product design decisions to increase the profit / value of the company. It uses various techniques to identify customer demands, to decrease costs of manufacturing and finally to achieve strategic goals. Target Costing forms an integral part of total product design / redesign based on strategic plans.

Keywords: Target Costing, Target Cost Management, Cost Management, Activity Based Costing, New product design

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Authors: Mohammad Irfan

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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship among the key macroeconomic variables and Islamic stock market in India. This study is based on the time series data of financial years 2009-2015 to explore the consistency of relationship between macroeconomic variables and Shariah Indices. The ADF (Augmented Dickey–Fuller Test Statistic) and PP (Phillips–Perron Test Statistic) tests are employed to check stationarity of the data. The study depicts the long run relationship between Shariah indices and macroeconomic variables by using the Johansen Co-integration test. BSE Shariah and Nifty Shariah have uni-direct Granger causality. The outcome of VECM is significantly confirming the applicability of best fitted model. Thus, Islamic stock indices are proficiently working for the development of Indian economy. It suggests that by keeping eyes on Islamic stock market which will be more interactive in the future with other macroeconomic variables.

Keywords: Indian shariah indices, macroeconomic variables, co-integration, Granger causality, Vector error correction model.

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Authors: Seyed Mohammad Reza Hosseini

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The new institutional Economics helps generalization and expansion of new classic by adding the institution theories to Economic. It is clear that the appropriate institution is among the factors that lead to success in Economic programs. If the institutional are appropriate, the society will save the source and when we make use of time to apply the program, there will be welfare and average revenue product will also increase. In Economy, one should not expect the real manifestation of Economic programs only with a model for estimating and predicting rather institutions of the same purpose and along with production are needed to form the process of growth and development costs. In this research, the institution role in transaction costs, financial markets, distribution of revenue and capital and its influence on the process of growth and development are investigated so that handicaps and problems of Iran Economic Institutions can be recognized. In other words, incapability, non productivity and ambiguity of the institution in Iran Economic are some of the factors that handicap Economic growth and development. For example, Iran government as an important institution while having 20 ministries,83 organizations and 60 years of programming could not go along the growth and development but why?

Keywords: Institution, New institutional economics, Transaction costs.

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Authors: Javad Elkaie Behjati, Mehrzad Minouei

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The present study aimed to assess the cost of money based on separating deposits and identifying actions and costs affecting in the process of cost of money in EN Bank of Iran (also known as Eghtesad Novin Bank). The method to calculate the cost of money is based on Activity-Based Costing (ABC). To conduct the study, the required data including deposits in banks and absorbed costs related to the same deposits were extracted from the financial statements of the bank. In order to cost the bank services properly as well as determining the commercial strategies required by commercial units, the data are precisely studied and the cost of each deposit is calculated according to the ABC. Eventually, the factors helping to improve the cost management and also a new model to calculate the cost of money in the bank are presented by some applicable formulas. Furthermore, some offers have been provided for users of both sections, in the practical section in commercial units and the theoretical one in universities.

Keywords: The cost of money, activity-based costing, banking, bank deposits, bank fees, services bank.

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Authors: J. Uka, B. McKay, T. Minton, O. Adole, R. Lewis, S. J. Glanvill, L. Anguilano

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Effective heat treatment conditions to obtain maximum aluminium swarf recycling are investigated in this work. Aluminium swarf briquettes underwent treatments at different temperatures and cooling times to investigate the improvements obtained in the recovery of aluminium metal. The main issue for the recovery of the metal from swarfs is to overcome the constraints due to the oxide layers present in high concentration in the swarfs since they have a high surface area. Briquettes supplied by Renishaw were heat treated at 650, 700, 750, 800 and 850 ℃ for 1-hour and then cooled at 2.3, 3.5 and 5 ℃/min. The resulting material was analysed using SEM EDX to observe the oxygen diffusion and aluminium coalescence at the boundary between adjacent swarfs. Preliminary results show that, swarf needs to be heat treated at a temperature of 850 ℃ and cooled down slowly at 2.3 ℃/min to have thin and discontinuous alumina layers between the adjacent swarf and consequently allowing aluminium coalescence. This has the potential to save energy and provide maximum financial profit in preparation of swarf briquettes for recycling.

Keywords: Aluminium, swarf, oxide layers, recycle, reuse.

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Authors: P. Wlodarczak, J. Soar, M. Ally

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The dramatic rise in the use of Social Media (SM) platforms such as Facebook and Twitter provide access to an unprecedented amount of user data. Users may post reviews on products and services they bought, write about their interests, share ideas or give their opinions and views on political issues. There is a growing interest in the analysis of SM data from organisations for detecting new trends, obtaining user opinions on their products and services or finding out about their online reputations. A recent research trend in SM analysis is making predictions based on sentiment analysis of SM. Often indicators of historic SM data are represented as time series and correlated with a variety of real world phenomena like the outcome of elections, the development of financial indicators, box office revenue and disease outbreaks. This paper examines the current state of research in the area of SM mining and predictive analysis and gives an overview of the analysis methods using opinion mining and machine learning techniques.

Keywords: Social Media, text mining, knowledge discovery, predictive analysis, machine learning.

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Authors: Adel Aloraini

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Financial forecasting using machine learning techniques has received great efforts in the last decide . In this ongoing work, we show how machine learning of graphical models will be able to infer a visualized causal interactions between different banks in the Saudi equities market. One important discovery from such learned causal graphs is how companies influence each other and to what extend. In this work, a set of graphical models named Gaussian graphical models with developed ensemble penalized feature selection methods that combine ; filtering method, wrapper method and a regularizer will be shown. A comparison between these different developed ensemble combinations will also be shown. The best ensemble method will be used to infer the causal relationships between banks in Saudi equities market.

Keywords: Causal interactions , banks, feature selection, regularizere,

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Authors: Beata Czarnacka-Chrobot

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Majority of Business Software Systems (BSS) Development and Enhancement Projects (D&EP) fail to meet criteria of their effectiveness, what leads to the considerable financial losses. One of the fundamental reasons for such projects- exceptionally low success rate are improperly derived estimates for their costs and time. In the case of BSS D&EP these attributes are determined by the work effort, meanwhile reliable and objective effort estimation still appears to be a great challenge to the software engineering. Thus this paper is aimed at presenting the most important synthetic conclusions coming from the author-s own studies concerning the main factors of effective BSS D&EP work effort estimation. Thanks to the rational investment decisions made on the basis of reliable and objective criteria it is possible to reduce losses caused not only by abandoned projects but also by large scale of overrunning the time and costs of BSS D&EP execution.

Keywords: Benchmarking data, business software systems development and enhancement projects, effort estimation, software engineering economics, software functional size measurement.

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Authors: Glenda Wrenn, Juliet Muzere, Meldra Hall, Allyson Belton, Kisha Holden, Chanita Hughes-Halbert, Martha Kent, Bekh Bradley

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Understanding the help seeking decision making process and experiences of health disparity populations with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is central to development of trauma-informed, culturally centered, and patient focused services. Yet, little is known about the decision making process among adult Black women who are non-treatment seekers as they are, by definition, not engaged in services. Methods: Audiotaped interviews were conducted with 30 African American adult women with clinically significant PTSD symptoms who were engaged in primary care, but not in treatment for PTSD despite symptom burden. A qualitative interview guide was used to elucidate key themes. Independent coding of themes mapped to theory and identification of emergent themes were conducted using qualitative methods. An existing quantitative dataset was analyzed to contextualize responses and provide a descriptive summary of the sample. Results: Emergent themes revealed that active mental avoidance, the intermittent nature of distress, ambivalence, and self-identified resilience as undermining to help seeking decisions. Participants were stuck within the help-seeking phase of ‘recognition’ of illness and retained a sense of “it is my decision” despite endorsing significant social and environmental negative influencers. Participants distinguished ‘help acceptance’ from ‘help seeking’ with greater willingness to accept help and importance placed on being of help to others. Conclusions: Elucidation of the decision-making process from the perspective of non-treatment seekers has implications for outreach and treatment within models of integrated and specialty systems care. The salience of responses to trauma symptoms and stagnation in the help seeking recognition phase are findings relevant to integrated care service design and community engagement.

Keywords: Culture, help-seeking, integrated care, PTSD.

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Authors: Petra Horváthová, Andrej Miklosik

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One part of the total employee’s reward is apart from basic wages or salary, employee’s benefits and intangible remuneration also so called contingent (variable) pay. Contingent pay is connected to performance, contribution, cap competency or skills of individual employees, and to team’s or company-wide performance or to combination of few of the mentioned possibilities. Sometimes among the contingent pay is also incorporated the remuneration based on length of employment, when the financial reward is not connected to performance or skills, but to length of continuous employment either on one working position or in one level of remuneration scale. Main aim of this article is to define, based on available information, contingent pay, describe individual forms, its advantages and disadvantages and possibilities to utilization in practice; but also bring information not only about its extent and level of utilization of contingent pay by companies in one of the Czech Republic’s regions, but also mention their practical experience with this type of remuneration.

Keywords: Contingent pay, individual contingent pay, team contingent pay, company-wide contingent pay

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Authors: Darwina Arshad, Paul Hughes

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Recent environmental turbulence including financial crisis, intensified competitive forces, rapid technological change and high market turbulence have dramatically changed the current business climate. The managers firms have to plan and decide what the best approaches that best fit their firms in order to pursue superior performance. This research aims to examine the influence of strategic reasoning and top level managers- individual characteristics on the effectiveness of organizational improvisation and firm performance. Given the lack of studies on these relationships in the previous literature, there is significant contribution to the body of knowledge as well as for managerial practices. 128 responses from top management of technology-based companies in Malaysia were used as a sample. Three hypotheses were examined and the findings confirm that (a) there is no relationship between intuitive reasoning and organizational improvisation but there is a link between rational reasoning and organizational improvisation, (b) top level managers- individual characteristics as a whole affect organizational improvisation; and (c) organizational improvisation positively affects firm performance. The theoretical and managerial implications were discussed in the conclusions.

Keywords: Organizational improvisation, strategic reasoning, firm performance.

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Authors: R. Pastusiak, M. Jasiniak, A. Kaźmierska

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The impact of Special Economic Zones (SEZs) has been analyzed for many years by researchers. There are lot of theoretical studies proving the SEZs importance for regional development, however, there is lack of empirical studies (and they are mainly focused on China market) that are based on available data. The theoretical studies indicate the various impacts of enterprises operating within SEZs on the economy. The article proves that, in case of Poland, locating SEZs in municipalities is an important part of increasing municipalities’ income. Therefore SEZs have a positive impact on regional development. Municipality income is understood as taxes paid by taxpayers who depend on SEZ companies’ performance. The analysis includes the Corporate Income Tax (CIT), Personal Income Tax (PIT) and real estate tax. The effects of SEZs on regional development were narrowed to a few variables that are most significant for the financial system. The analysis indicates the significant impact of SEZs on the amount of taxes influencing the municipality budget.

Keywords: Government, local finance, municipal finance, Special Economic Zones.

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Authors: Y. Egercioglu, S. Yalciner

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With the development of technology, the growing trend of fast and safe passenger transport, air pollution, traffic congestion, increase in problems such as the increasing population and the high cost of private vehicle usage made many cities around the world with a population of more or less, start to build rail systems as a means of urban transport in order to ensure the economic and environmental sustainability and more efficient use of land in the city. The implementation phase of rail systems costs much more than other public transport systems. However, social and economic returns in the long term made these systems the most popular investment tool for planned and developing cities. In our country, the purpose, goals and policies of transportation plans are away from integrity, and the problems are not clearly detected. Also, not defined and incomplete assessment of transportation systems and insufficient financial analysis are the most important cause of failure. Rail systems and other transportation systems to be addressed as a whole is seen as the main factor in increasing efficiency in applications that are not integrated yet in our country to come to this point has led to the problem.

Keywords: Urban Transportation Projects, Urban Light Rail Systems, Urbanization, Izmir.

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Authors: Tina Vuko, Marija Maretić, Marko Čular

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The aim of this study is to analyze the role and effectiveness of internal mechanism (audit committee) of corporate governance on credit institutions performance in Croatia. Based on research objective, sample of 78 credit institutions listed on Zagreb Stock Exchange, from 2007 to 2012, has been collected and efficiency index of audit committee (EIAC) has been created. Based on the sample and created EIAC, conclusions are as follows: audit committees of credit institutions have medium efficiency, based on EIAC measurement; there is a significant difference in audit committee effectiveness, in observed period; there is no positive relationship between audit committee effectiveness and credit institution performance; there is a significant difference between level of audit committee effectiveness and audit firm type. Future research should contain increased number of elements in EIAC creation and increased sample, for all obligators who need to establish audit committee.

Keywords: Corporate Governance, Audit Committee, Financial Institutions, Efficiency Index of Audit Committee.

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Authors: S. Kamyabi, M. Salari, H. Shahabi

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One of the processes of slope that occurs every year in Iran and some parts of world and cause a lot of criminal and financial harms is called landslide. They are plenty of method to stability landslide in soil and rock slides. The use of the best method with the least cost and in the shortest time is important for researchers. In this research, determining the best method of stability is investigated by using of Decision Support systems. DSS is made for this purpose and was used (for Hasan Salaran area in Kurdistan). Field study data from topography, slope, geology, geometry of landslide and the related features was used. The related data entered decision making managements programs (DSS) (ALES).Analysis of mass stability indicated the instability potential at present. Research results show that surface and sub surface drainage the best method of stabilizing. Analysis of stability shows that acceptable increase in security coefficient is a consequence of drainage.

Keywords: Landslide, Decision Support systems, stability, Hasan Salaran landslide, Kurdistan province, Iran.

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Authors: Danielle Sandler dos Passos, Helder Coelho, Flávia Mori Sarti

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Analysing the world banking sector, we realize that traditional risk measurement methodologies no longer reflect the actual scenario with uncertainty and leave out events that can change the dynamics of markets. Considering this, regulators and financial institutions began to search more realistic models. The aim is to include external influences and interdependencies between agents, to describe and measure the operationalization of these complex systems and their risks in a more coherent and credible way. Within this context, X-Events are more frequent than assumed and, with uncertainties and constant changes, the concept of antifragility starts to gain great prominence in comparison to others methodologies of risk management. It is very useful to analyse whether a system succumbs (fragile), resists (robust) or gets benefits (antifragile) from disorder and stress. Thus, this work proposes the creation of the Banking Antifragility Index (BAI), which is based on the calculation of a triangular fuzzy number – to "quantify" qualitative criteria linked to antifragility.

Keywords: Complex adaptive systems, X-events, risk management, antifragility, banking antifragility index, triangular fuzzy number.

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Authors: Lorenzo Maiorino, Fabio Fortuna, Giovanni Panebianco, Marco Sanzari, Gabriella Arcese, Valerio Maria Paolozzi

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It is well known that sport is a factor of social cohesion and the breaking down of barriers between people. From this point of view, the aim is to demonstrate how, through the (re)generation of sustainable structures, it is possible to give life to a new social, cultural and economic pathway, where possible, in peripheral areas with problems of abandonment and degradation. The aim of this paper is therefore to study realities such as European programs and funds and to highlight the ways in which planning can be used to respond to critical issues such as urban decay, abandonment, and the mitigation of social differences. For this reason, the analysis will be carried out through the Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF) package, the next generation EU, the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF), the Cohesion Fund, the European Social Fund, and other managed funds. The procedure will rely on sources and data of unquestionable origin, and the relation to the object of study in question will be highlighted. The project lends itself to be ambitious and explore a further aspect of the sports theme, which as we know, is one of the foundations for a healthy society

.

Keywords: Sport, social inclusion, urban regeneration, sport facilities, European funds.

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Authors: A. Al Drees, A. Alahmari, R. Almuwayshir

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The advanced information technology is becoming an important factor in the development of financial services industry, especially the banking industry. It has introduced new ways of delivering banking to the customer, such as Internet Banking. Banks began to look at electronic banking (e-banking) as a means to replace some of their traditional branch functions using the Internet as a new distribution channel. Some consumers have at least more than one account, and across banks, and access these accounts using e-banking services. To look at the current net worth position, customers have to login to each of their accounts and get the details and work on consolidation. This not only takes ample time but it is a repetitive activity at a specified frequency. To address this point, an account aggregation concept is added as a solution. E-banking account aggregation, as one of the e-banking types, appeared to build a stronger relationship with customers. Account Aggregation Service generally refers to a service that allows customers to manage their bank accounts maintained in different institutions through a common Internet banking operating a platform, with a high concern to security and privacy. This paper presents an overview of an e-banking account aggregation approach as a new service in the e-banking field.

Keywords: E-banking, security, account aggregation, enterprise application development.

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Authors: F. Demir

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Innovation is highly critical for every company, especially for technology-based organizations looking to sustain their competitive advantage. However, this is not an easy task. Regardless of the size of the enterprise, market and location, all organizations face numerous challenges. Even though huge barriers to innovation exist in different countries, firm- and industry-specific challenges can be distinguished. This paper examines innovation strategies and obstacles to innovation in research and technology organizations (RTO) of Turkey. From the most important to the least, nine different challenges are ranked according the results of this survey. The findings reveal that to take the lead in innovation, financial constraint is the biggest challenge, which is consistent with the related literature. It ranked number one in this study. Beyond that, based on a sample of 40 RTOs, regional challenges such as underdeveloped regional innovation ecosystem plays a significant role in hampering innovation. Most of the organizations (55%) embrace an incremental approach to innovation, while only few pursue radical shifts. About 40% of the RTOs focus on product innovation, and 27.5% of them concentrate on technological innovation, while a very limited number aim for operational excellence and customer engagement as the focus of their strategic innovation efforts.

Keywords: Innovation strategies, innovation challenges, emerging economies, research and technology organizations.

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Authors: Frantisek Bozek, Pavel Budinsky, Ignac Hoza, Alexandr Bozek, Magdalena Naplavova

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A cleaner production project was implemented in a bakery. The project is based on the substitution of the best available technique for an obsolete leaven production technology. The new technology enables production of durable, high-quality leavens. Moreover, 25% of flour as the original raw material can be replaced by pastry from the previous day production which has not been sold. That pastry was previously disposed in a waste incineration plant. Besides the environmental benefits resulting from less waste, lower consumption of energy, reduction of sewage waters quantity and floury dustiness there are also significant economic benefits. Payback period of investment was calculated with help of static method of financial analysis about 2.6 years, using dynamic method 3.5 years and an internal rate of return more than 29%. The supposed annual average profit after taxationin the second year of operation was incompliance with the real profit.

Keywords: Bakery, best available technology, cleaner production, costs, economic benefit, efficiency, energy, environmental benefit, investment, savings.

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Authors: H. Ashrafi, S. Ebrahimi, H. Kamalzadeh

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With the development of business competition, it is important for healthcare providers to improve their service qualities. In order to improve service quality of a clinic, four important dimensions are defined: tangibles, responsiveness, empathy, and reliability. Moreover, there are several service stages in hospitals such as financial screening and examination. One of the most challenging limitations for improving service quality is budget which impressively affects the service quality. In this paper, we present an approach to address budget uncertainty and provide guidelines for service resource allocation. In this paper, a service quality improvement approach is proposed which can be adopted to multistage service processes to improve service quality, while controlling the costs. A multi-objective function based on the importance of each area and dimension is defined to link operational variables to service quality dimensions. The results demonstrate that our approach is not ultra-conservative and it shows the actual condition very well. Moreover, it is shown that different strategies can affect the number of employees in different stages.

Keywords: Service quality assessment, healthcare resource allocation, robust optimization, budget uncertainty.

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Authors: Rolf Katzenbach, Frithjof Clauss, Jie Zheng

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The final energy use can be divided mainly in four sectors: commercial, industrial, residential, and transportation. The trend in final energy consumption by sector plays as a most straightforward way to provide a wide indication of progress for reducing energy consumption and associated environmental impacts by different end use sectors. The average share of end use energy for residential sector in the world was nearly 20% until 2011, in Germany a higher proportion is between 25% and 30%. However, it remains less studied than energy use in other three sectors as well its impacts on climate and environment. The reason for this involves a wide range of fields, including the diversity of residential construction like different housing building design and materials, living or energy using behavioral patterns, climatic condition and variation as well other social obstacles, market trend potential and financial support from government.

This paper presents an extensive and in-depth analysis of the manner by which projects researched and operated by authors in the fields of energy efficiency primarily from the perspectives of both technical potential and initiative energy saving consciousness in the residential sectors especially in social housing buildings.

Keywords: Energy Efficiency, Renewable Energy, Retro-commissioning, Social Housing, Sustainability.

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Authors: M. Kasusse, M. Rosette, E. Burke, C. Mwangi, R. Batamwita, N. Tumwesigye, S. Aisu

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A cross-sectional survey to ascertain the capacity of laboratory persons in using ICTs was conducted in 15 Ugandan districts (July-August 2013). A self-administered questionnaire served as data collection tool, interview guide and observation checklist. 69 questionnaires were filled, 12 interviews conducted, 45 HC observed. SPSS statistics 17.0 and SAS 9.2 software were used for entry and analyses. 69.35% of participants find it difficult to access a computer at work. Of the 30.65% who find it easy to access a computer at work, a significant 21.05% spend 0 hours on a computer daily. 60% of the participants cannot access internet at work. Of the 40% who have internet at work, a significant 20% lack email address but 20% weekly read emails weekly and 48% daily. It is viable/feasible to pilot informatics projects as strategies to build bridges develop skills for e-health landscape in laboratory services with a bigger financial muscle.

Keywords: ICT Behavior, Clinical Laboratory persons, Sub-Saharan Africa, Uganda.

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Authors: Michal Christina Steven, Mohd. Yusof Hj Ibrahim, Haryati Abdul Karim, Prabakaran Dhanaraj, Kelly Alexius Mansin

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After 27 years, Malaysia reported polio cases in 2019 involving the children of the undocumented migrants living in Sabah. These undocumented migrants present a significant challenge in achieving the elimination of vaccine-preventable diseases (VPD). Due to the recent polio outbreak among the undocumented migrant children in Sabah, an in-depth interview was conducted among the caregivers of undocumented migrant children to identify the barriers and drivers towards vaccinating their children. Financial barriers, legal citizenship status, language barrier, the COVID-19 pandemic, and physical barriers have been the barriers to access vaccination services by undocumented migrants. Five significant drivers for undocumented migrants to vaccinate their children are social influence, fear of disease, parental trust in healthcare providers, good support, and vaccine availability. Necessary action should be taken immediately to address the problems of vaccinating the children of undocumented migrants to prevent the re-emergence of VPD.

Keywords: Malaysia, polio, Sabah, undocumented migrants.

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Authors: Paula Ferreira, Filipa Vieira

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The use of wind energy for electricity generation is growing rapidly across the world and in Portugal. However, the geographical characteristics of the country along with the average wind regime and with the environmental restrictions imposed to these projects create limitations to the exploit of the onshore wind resource. The best onshore wind spots are already committed and the possibility of offshore wind farms in the Portuguese cost is now being considered. This paper aims to make a contribution to the evaluation of offshore wind power projects in Portugal. The technical restrictions are addressed and the strategic, environmental and financial interest of the project is analysed from the private company and public points of view. The results suggest that additional support schemes are required to ensure private investors interest for these projects. Assuming an approach of direct substitution of energy sources for electricity generation, the avoided CO2 equivalent emissions for an offshore wind power project were quantified. Based on the conclusions, future research is proposed to address the environmental and social impacts of these projects.

Keywords: Feed-in tariff, offshore wind power, project evaluation.

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Authors: Elmamy Ahmedsalem

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The world has witnessed the collapse of many corporate giants as a result of unethical behavior in recent decades. This has induced a series of questions by the global community on why such occurrences could happen, even with corporate governance in place. This paper attempts to propose a philosophical approach from an Islamic perspective to be consolidated with current corporate governance in order to confront contemporary dilemmas. In this paper, ethical theories are presented as a discussion followed by their applications to modern cases of financial collapses. Virtue ethics by Aristotle, justice and fairness by John Rawls, deontology by Immanuel Kant, and utilitarianism by John Stuart Mill, are the four theories which can then be contrasted with the paradigm of Muslim scholars. Despite the differences between the fundamental principles of Islamic and Western worldviews, their ethical theories are aimed at making right decisions and solving ethical dilemmas based on what is good for society. Therefore, Islamic principles should be synthesized with Western philosophy to form a more coherent framework. The integration of Islamic and western ethical theories into business is important for sound corporate governance.

Keywords: Business ethics, Islamic philosophy, western philosophy, Western and Islamic Worldview of Ethics.

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Authors: Mazila Md-Yusuf, Fauziah Mohamad Yunus, Nur Zahraatul Lail Md Supaat

Abstract:

Capital structure is one of the most important financial decisions in corporate financing strategy. It involves the choice of debt and equity level in financing a company-s operations. This study aims to investigate whether the capital structure choice of Malaysian electrical and electronic manufacturing companies that are listed in the Bursa Malaysia can be explained by factors that have been found by most studies as dominant determinants of capital structure (company size, profitability, asset tangibility, liquidity and growth). Using debt ratio as the proxy for capital structure and applying pooled ordinary least square multiple regression estimation, the results showed that on average, Malaysian electrical and electronic manufacturing companies used less debt in funding their business operations. The findings also showed that size and asset tangibility has a significant positive relationship with debt level, while liquidity has a negative significant relationship with leverage.

Keywords: Capital structure, capital structure theories, leverage, manufacturing companies.

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Authors: Chalermwut Wijit

Abstract:

This research is conducted in order to 1) study the result of applying “Active Learning” in general education subject to develop creativity 2) explore problems and obstacles in applying Active Learning in general education subject to improve the creativity in 1780 undergraduate students who registered this subject in the first semester 2013. The research is implemented by allocating the students into several groups of 10 -15 students and assigning them to design the activities for society under the four main conditions including 1) require no financial resources 2) practical 3) can be attended by every student 4) must be accomplished within 2 weeks. The researcher evaluated the creativity prior and after the study. Ultimately, the problems and obstacles from creating activity are evaluated from the open-ended questions in the questionnaires. The study result states that overall average scores on students’ ability increased significantly in terms of creativity, analytical ability and the synthesis, the complexity of working plan and team working. It can be inferred from the outcome that active learning is one of the most efficient methods in developing creativity in general education.

Keywords: Creative Thinking, Active Learning, General Education.

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