International Journal of Business and Economic Development

Production planning is an area that is very important on the corporate strategy-level decision-making, especially in the manufacturing companies. The problems that often arise in the production planning are the factors that affect the decline of production and uncertainty that often complicate the decision-making in the production process. These factors are derived from the company’s internal and external factors. The purpose of this study is to introduce the Analytical Hierarchy Process as an effective method that can help to determine the priority of the production factors, so as to facilitate and accelerate decision-making. Other than the AHP methods, this paper will introduce the Tsukamoto Fuzzy Inference System as a method that can help to determine how much product to be manufactured by the company using the variables in the form of fuzzy numbers. These methods hopefully can assist in a better decision making process in the production process and manufacturing generally.

The aim of this paper is to provide a brief overview on innovation in services and their approach to the protection of intellectual property. The submitted article summarizes preparing part of a starting project mostly focused on investment environment. The area of interest is companies providing services in the territory of the Czech Republic. The aim of the project is supporting actions of promoting investment and innovative environment. It is necessary to exactly define innovation in services and to analyze innovative activity first so the aim could be achieved. A partial aim of the project will be finding out whether branches which report higher revenues from innovative activities are actively using the opportunity to patent their service because innovations are closely connected to the protection of intellectual property as well. The described part concerns innovations in selected branches of tertiary sector whereas all the branches which have been registered by Czech Statistical office, because of a validation of application for patent proceeding at least in two examined periods since 1993 are examined. Furthermore a possible dependency between an amount of patents in single regions and an amount of revenues coming from innovative companies to a region.

Electricity supply in Nigeria is often erratic. Consumers of electricity (residential, commercial and industrial consumers) suffer untold hardships as the State Owned Enterprise; the Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN) has been unable to supply reliable power. This is despite massive injections of funds by the Federal Government into the operations of the company over recent years. The failure has significantly impacted negatively on the operations of the business sector especially the small scale subsector that operates with little capital and are thus in most cases unable to afford a back-up facility to ensure un-interrupted power supply for their operations. The study examined the impact of deficient electric power supply on the operations of small scale businesses operating in north east of Nigeria. From the population of small scale businesses, a sample was selected through the use of stratified random sampling to ensure the effective representation of the population of small scale businesses in north east Nigeria. Results from data analysis indicates the severity of electricity supply outages and the costs imposed by power supply outages on the operation of this class of businesses in the region. The paper therefore recommends the need for policy attention towards revitalizing the electricity sector of Nigeria for enhanced supply of electricity to the national economy. When this is achieved, the small business sub-sector will be in a position to effectively lead i

The economic importance of the Indian Textile and Clothing (T&C) industry is unquestioned. It is one of the second largest employment generating industry, after agriculture, with direct employment of over 35 million people. Tamil Nadu accounts for over 65% of the total number spinning units in India and has been reported exploiting young women workers in the spinning and textile units what is called the “Sumangali Scheme”. “Sumangali” in Tamil means ‘happily married woman’. Globalization confronts decision-makers in connection with global conditions in identifying labour standards that can serve as guidelines for corporations producing or outsourcing outside of their home country. The Article shows that in a globalized business world the concept of a conventional corporate ethic system to put all energy into the development of codes of conduct, and ethical audits and sustainability reporting falls short. This applies to industries like the Tamil Nadu textile industry, as there is no clarity with regard to the causal factors and the key players in the supply chain of such a complex social system. The Integrative Social Contract Theory (ISCT) allows understanding the problem of Supply-Chain Responsibilities as a contractual relationship that denotes concrete moral responsibilities.

Diversification strategies adopted by oil-depended economies' played an important role in the economic development in these countries, which rely heavily on oil exports. UAE as an oil-dependency economy has the type of strategy to diversify the sources of its national income and reduce its dependence on oil to counter the instability in global oil prices. This paper seek to investigate whether the diversification strategies adopted by (UAE) is adequate to manage its economic development. The methodology employed in this study is to examine the contribution of diversified sectors based on the country's GDP especially during and after the global financial crisis (2008-2012) using statistical analysis procedure. The results confirm that investment in different sectors rather than oil would have substantially improved the performance UAE economy.

This study investigated the correlate of state government finances and the Nigerian economy. To achieve this purpose research question was raised, a review of literature was made and a hypothesis was developed. In generating the necessary data for the study, state government finances was operationalized as state internally generated revenue while the Nigerian economy was measured by Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The records were obtained from the Central Bank of Nigerian Statistical Bulletin of various years. In analyzing the data generated from this study, the simple percentages and regression analysis were adopted . The result of our analysis indicates that from 2010 to 2014, the percentage of SIGR to GDP is 41.64%, which means that the degree of state government finances in Nigeria is low. On the relationship between state government finances and the Nigerian economy, the analysis shows a correlation co-efficient of 0.493 and a p-value of 0.965. This suggests that though a moderate relationship exists between state government finances and the Nigerian economy, the impact is insignificant. Based on these findings, it is recommended that state governments in Nigeria should intensify efforts in their revenue mobilization and ensure that all sources of revenue stipulated in the 1999 constitution are adequately tapped. This in the long-run has the potential to bring about financial independence.

Stock exchanges were traditionally run as cooperative venues. The globalization, the development of technology, and the increase of competition among stock exchanges forced these venues to change their structure and adopt a new one-demutualization- that can be a lifeline in facing these environmental changes in regards to stock exchanges. This new trend enables the exchange to expand their activities and supply the market with new products and services, therefore enhancing the value of the exchange itself. The main sources of revenue for traditional exchanges have been listing fees, transaction fees, membership fees and the sale of information services such as market data, quotations, and trade data. Due to the environmental changes the stock exchanges' services are now executed electronically, and in turn, this has led to an increase in the competition among exchanges. Furthermore, this increased competition has led to the re-adjustment of the regulation structure which gradually erodes the sources of revenues provided by the conventional stock exchanges. The paper divided the research plan into two sections: the first section is to highlight the concept of demutualization process; the phases of demutualization, the factors that push the stock exchanges to demutualize and the benefits of demutualization. The second section was based on statistical comparative analysis of the stock exchanges' revenues prior and after demutualization. The researcher used the regression anal

This study aimed at investigating the impact of value-added tax on corporate financial performance of quoted companies. To achieve this purpose, we developed some hypotheses and critically reviewed existing theoretical and empirical literatures. Agribusinesses quoted in the Nigerian Stock Exchange Factbook of 2009 were considered as the population for this study. The population elements include the General Managers, Chief Accountants, Finance Managers, Chief Internal Auditors, External Auditors, and Tax Administrators of the selected companies. A total of forty (42) respondents were considered for this study. A well structured questionnaire designed in five-point Likert Scale was administered on the respondents to elicit their responses. The data generated for this study were presented in tabular form and analyzed using frequencies and simple percentages while the stated hypotheses were statistically tested with the simple regression analysis and the t-test. Our findings indicated that Value-Added Tax (VAT) impacted negatively on the financial performance of agribusinesses though the impact is of insignificant value. Based on our findings, we recommended that agribusinesses should endeavour to keep appropriate source documents of all transactions for efficient VAT operations and that the governments should ensure that proper tax incentive scheme is designed and fully implemented to promote the growth of agribusinesses, in Nigeria.

The purpose of this research paper is to find the relationship between the knowledge of “Sufficiency Economy Principles” and the quality of life of the households. It is postulated that, the higher the level of the knowledge of the principles that the household has acquired, the better the quality of life of the household as measured by family’s income. A number of survey questionnaires have been sent out to families in rural areas in Northern part of Thailand. The sample families are from two types of village: one is under a pilot project called “sufficiency economy village”, the other is not. The sampled data have been used to estimate the parameters of the logit model. The results indicate that, the level of education, and the knowledge of the principles have significant influence on family’s income. The location of the family (i.e., whether or not it is in the Philosophy of Sufficiency Economy prototype village), however, has no significant relation with the family’s income.

According to the literature related to the movement of foreign direct investment (FDI) worldwide, there are two main causes for these flows. The first one is related to the decision taken by companies to invest in certain markets according to their own international strategy and, the second corresponds to the government’s policy designed to attract capital through the use of various factors such as infrastructure, skilled labour, cheap labour, industrial policy, natural resources, gross domestic product, the legal system, geographic location, cancellation fees, among others. Thus, governments attract capitals to certain types of industries using the attractiveness of their determinants. Considering the above approach, if a government wants to attract capital to an industrial sector different than to which traditionally it tries to attract, should it create new determinants to attract new investment flows? This paper proposes a new theory to attract new investment flows based on the creation of new determinants. To develop this new determinant creation theory, the case of Mexico is analyzed.

The rationale for this research survey is to establish the need for the third tier of government to embrace ICT to enhance its performance. The objective of this study is to ascertain the effectiveness of the role of Information Communication Technology (ICT) in enhancing productivity in the local government administration, in Benue State, Nigeria. The researcher adopted a quasi experimental research design technique. The population for this study consisted of all the 23 local governments in Benue State in which 5 employees were judgmentally sample using 5-point Likert scale questionnaire. Pearson chi-square test was employed in testing the two (2) formulated hypothesis. The findings from the research revealed that Information Communication Technology (ICT) have played a positive role in areas of computerization of Internal Accounting, payroll operations, word processing and Budget planning and administration, job costing, scanning documentation and mapping, decision support, online training/learning, urban planning amongst others in the 23 local government areas of Benue State, Nigeria. The study also found that there exist several problems militating against ICT effective applications. These problems include lack of technical skills, acquisition of obsolete equipment, erratic power supply, ineffective regulation amongst others. The research recommended that local government administrators should make further investment in Information Communication Technology (ICT) a top pri