Abstract: Maternal health outcome is one of the major population development challenges in Sub-Saharan Africa. The region has the highest maternal mortality ratio, despite the progressive economic growth in the region during the global economic crisis. It has been hypothesized that increase in economic growth will reduce the level of maternal mortality. The purpose of this study is to investigate the existence of the negative relationship between health outcome proxy by maternal mortality ratio and economic growth in Sub-Saharan Africa. The study used the Pooled Mean Group estimator of ARDL Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) and the Kao test for cointegration to examine the short-run and long-run relationship between maternal mortality and economic growth. The results of the cointegration test showed the existence of a long-run relationship between the variables considered for the study. The long-run result of the Pooled Mean group estimates confirmed the hypothesis of an inverse relationship between maternal health outcome proxy by maternal mortality ratio and economic growth proxy by Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita. Thus increasing economic growth by investing in the health care systems to reduce pregnancy and childbirth complications will help reduce maternal mortality in the sub-region.
Abstract: The Solidarity Economy (SE) acts in the re-articulation of the economic field to the other spheres of social action. The significant participation of women in SE resulted in the formation of a national network of self-managed enterprises in Brazil: The Solidarity and Feminist Economy Network (SFEN). The objective of the research is to identify factors of gender justice and feminist self-management practices that adhere to the reality of women in SE enterprises. The conceptual apparatus related to feminist studies in this research covers Nancy Fraser approaches on gender justice, and Patricia Yancey Martin approaches on feminist management practices, and authors of postcolonial feminism such as Mohanty and Maria Lugones, who lead the discussion to peripheral contexts, a necessary perspective when observing the women’s movement in SE. The research has a quantitative nature in the phases of data collection and analysis. The data collection was performed through two data sources: the database mapped in Brazil in 2010-2013 by the National Information System in Solidary Economy and 150 questionnaires with women from 16 enterprises in SFEN, in a state of Brazilian northeast. The data were analyzed using the multivariate statistical technique of Factor Analysis. The results show that the factors that define gender justice and feminist self-management practices in SE are interrelated in several levels, proving statistically the intersectional condition of the issue of women. The evidence from the quantitative analysis allowed us to understand the dimensions of gender justice and feminist management practices intersectionality; in this sense, the non-distribution of domestic work interferes in non-representation of women in public spaces, especially in peripheral contexts. The study contributes with important reflections to the studies of this area and can be complemented in the future with a qualitative research that approaches the perspective of women in the context of the SE self-management paradigm.
Abstract: Since the nineties, all Moroccan banking institutions have to respect an arsenal of prudential ratios. The respect of these prudential measures aims to ensure the financial system stability. In order to do so, regulatory authorities tried to reduce the financial and operational risks incurred by the banking entities. Meanwhile, regulatory authorities demanded a balance sheet management work from banks. They also asked them to establish a management control system to manage operational risk, as well as an effort in terms of incurred risk-based commitments. Therefore, the prudential approach has a macroeconomic nature and it is presented as a determinant of the operational, microeconomic approach. This operational approach takes the form of a strategy that each banking entity must develop to manage the different banking risks. This study seeks to analyze the problem of risk management between the prudential and the operational approaches. It was processed through a literature review followed by an analysis of the Moroccan banking sector’s performance. At first, we will reconcile the inductive logic and then, the analytical one. The first approach consists of analyzing the phenomenon from a normative and conceptual perspective, while the second one will consist of considering the Moroccan banking system and analyzing the behavior of Moroccan banking entities in terms of risk management and performance. The results identified a favorable growth in terms of performance, despite the huge provisioning effort made to meet the international standards and the harmonization of the regulations.
Abstract: The aim of this paper is to build a vision of the utilization of creative industry competences in industrial and services firms connected to Kymenlaakso region, Finland, smart specialization focus areas. Research indicates that creativity and the use of creative industry’s inputs can enhance innovation and competitiveness. Currently creative methods and services are underutilized in regional businesses and the added value they provide is not well grasped. Methodologically, the research adopts a qualitative exploratory approach. Data is collected in multiple ways including a survey, focus groups, and interviews. Theoretically, the paper contributes to the discussion about the use creative industry competences in regional development, and argues for building regional creative economy ecosystems in close co-operation with regional strategies and traditional industries rather than as treating regional creative industry ecosystem initiatives separate from them. The practical contribution of the paper is the creative vision for the use of regional authorities in updating smart specialization strategy as well as boosting industrial and creative & cultural sectors’ competitiveness. The paper also illustrates a research-based model of vision building.
Abstract: Public sector budgeting, all over the world, is underpinned by some universally accepted principles of sound budget management such as budget unity, universality, annuality, and a balanced budget. These traditional principles, though fundamental, had, in recent years, been augmented by the more modern principles of budgeting within fiscal objective, alignment with medium-term strategic plans as well as the observance of such related concepts as transparency, openness and accessibility. In this paper, we have endeavored to shed light, from literature and practice, on the meaning and purposes of such fundamental budgeting principles. We have also assessed the extent to which the Government of Ghana’s budget complies with the four traditional principles of budget unity, universality, annuality, and a balanced budget and the three out of the ten modern principles of budgetary governance of Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). We did so by using a qualitative method of review and analysis of existing documents and the performance assessment reports on Ghana’s Public Financial Management (PFM) measured using such frameworks as the Public Expenditure and Financial Accountability (PEFA), the Open Budget Survey (OBS) and its Index (OBI), the reports and action plans of Open Government Partnership (OGP) and the Global Initiative for Fiscal Transparency (GIFT). Other performance assessment reports that were relied on included, but not limited to, the Joint Evaluation Report of PFM in Ghana, 2001-2010, and the Joint Evaluation of Budget Support to Ghana, 2005-2015. We have, through this paper, brought to the fore the lessons that could be learned on how those budgetary principles undergird the Government of Ghana’s budget formulation, execution, accounting, control, and oversight. These lessons include, but are not limited to, the need for both scholars and practitioners in the PFM space to be aware of the impact of those principles on public sector budgeting.
Abstract: This paper provides guidelines for what constitutes a knowledge worker. Many graduates from non-managerial domains adopt, at some point in their professional careers, management roles at different levels, ranging from team leaders through to executive leadership. This is particularly relevant for professionals from an engineering background. Moving from a technical to an executive-level requires an understanding of those behaviour management techniques that can motivate and support individuals and their performance. Further, the transition to management also demands a shift of contextual enablers from tangible to intangible resources, which allows individuals to create new capacities, competencies, and capabilities. In this dynamic process, the knowledge worker becomes that key individual who can help members of the management board to transform information into relevant knowledge. However, despite its relevance in shaping the future of the organization in its transition to the knowledge economy, the role of a knowledge worker has not yet been studied to an appropriate level in the current literature. In this study, the authors review both the contextual enablers and behaviour outputs related to the role of the knowledge worker and relate these to their ability to deal with everyday management issues such as knowledge heterogeneity, varying motivations, information overload, or outdated information. This study highlights that the aggregate of capacities, competences and capabilities (CCCs) can be defined as knowledge structures, the study proposes several contextual enablers and behaviour outputs that knowledge workers can use to work cooperatively, acquire, distribute and knowledge. Therefore, this study contributes to a better comprehension of how CCCs can be managed at different levels through their contextual enablers and behaviour outputs.
Abstract: Sustainability of construction projects is an important issue to be addressed since the sector will continue to be developed in the coming years, especially in developing countries. Thus, it is significant to discover approaches and solutions for improving sustainability. Currently, the construction industry is the largest consumer of natural resources. This is the same in other countries in the Gulf region, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has limited natural resources such as water, electricity, etc. Recently, the UAE has taken several actions in order to implement sustainable initiatives within its construction industry. Within the industry, the contractors’ role is significant in promoting sustainable development by taking the responsibility to minimize their negative impacts on the environment and society, and maximize their economic distribution. In this research, sustainability will be studied as an important key to bring competitive advantages to contracting organizations. The contractors should understand the need to improve their sustainable performance in order to expand their business competitiveness. Competitiveness at the construction project level refers to a contractor’s ability to compete for a project. There is less focus on how to improve contractors’ competitiveness by implementing sustainable construction practices. Based on an inclusive literature review on the relationship between sustainability performance and business competitiveness, this research will conduct a study of sustainable practice in the construction industry and the relationship between sustainability performance and business competitiveness in order to develop a framework for evaluating how contractors can improve their competitiveness in terms of more efficient processes, enhancements in productivity, and lower costs of compliance in order to reduce the initial project cost and obtain market opportunities in the UAE. The research findings will provide a framework that can be a useful guideline for contractors to develop their sustainability policy, strategy and practice for meeting the increased requirements for sustainable development in construction.
Abstract: With the technology evolving every day and with the increase in global competition, industries are always under the pressure to be the best. They need to provide good quality products at competitive prices, when and how the customer wants them. In order to achieve this level of service, products and their respective supply chain processes need to be flexible and evolvable; otherwise changes will be extremely expensive, slow and with many combinatorial effects. Those combinatorial effects impact the whole organizational structure, from a management, financial, documentation, logistics and specially the information system Enterprise Requirement Planning (ERP) perspective. By applying the normalized system concept/theory to segments of the supply chain, we believe minimal effects, especially at the time of launching an organization global software project. The purpose of this paper is to point out that if an organization wants to develop a software from scratch or implement an existing ERP software for their business needs and if their business processes are normalized and modular then most probably this will yield to a normalized and modular software system that can be easily modified when the business evolves. Another important goal of this paper is to increase the awareness regarding the design of the business processes in a software implementation project. If the blueprints created are normalized then the software developers and configurators will use those modular blueprints to map them into modular software. This paper only prepares the ground for further studies; the above concept will be supported by going through the steps of developing, configuring and/or implementing a software system for an organization by using two methods: The Software Development Lifecycle method (SDLC) and the Accelerated SAP implementation method (ASAP). Both methods start with the customer requirements, then blue printing of its business processes and finally mapping those processes into a software system. Since those requirements and processes are the starting point of the implementation process, then normalizing those processes will end up in a normalizing software.
Abstract: The development of a qualitative method to profile jobseekers is needed to improve the quality of the Public Employment Services (PES) in Italy. This is why the National Agency for Active Labour Market Policies (ANPAL) decided to introduce a Qualitative Profiling Service in the context of the activities carried out by local employment offices’ operators. The qualitative profiling service provides information and data regarding the jobseeker’s personal transition status, through a semi-structured questionnaire administered to PES clients during the guidance interview. The questionnaire responses allow PES staff to identify, for each client, proper activities and policy measures to support jobseekers in their reintegration into the labour market. Data and information gathered by the qualitative profiling tool are the following: frequency, modalities and motivations for clients to apply to local employment offices; clients’ expectations and skills; difficulties that they have faced during the previous working experiences; strategies, actions undertaken and activated channels for job search. These data are used to assess jobseekers’ personal and career characteristics and to measure their employability level (qualitative profiling index), in order to develop and deliver tailor-made action programmes for each client. This paper illustrates the use of the above-mentioned qualitative profiling service on the national territory and provides an overview of the main findings of the survey: concerning the difficulties that unemployed people face in finding a job and their perception of different aspects related to the transition in the labour market. The survey involved over 10.000 jobseekers registered with the PES. Most of them are beneficiaries of the “citizens' income”, a specific active labour policy and social inclusion measure. Furthermore, data analysis allows classifying jobseekers into a specific group of clients with similar features and behaviours, on the basis of socio-demographic variables, customers' expectations, needs and required skills for the profession for which they seek employment. Finally, the survey collects PES staff opinions and comments concerning clients’ difficulties in finding a new job and also their strengths. This is a starting point for PESs’ operators to define adequate strategies to facilitate jobseekers’ access or reintegration into the labour market.
Abstract: Sentiment analysis is a broad and expanding field that aims to extract and classify opinions from textual data. Lexicon-based approaches are based on the use of a sentiment lexicon, i.e., a list of words each mapped to a sentiment score, to rate the sentiment of a text chunk. Our work focuses on predicting stock price change using a sentiment lexicon built from financial conference call logs. We present a method to generate a sentiment lexicon based upon an existing probabilistic approach. By using a domain-specific lexicon, we outperform traditional techniques and demonstrate that domain-specific sentiment lexicons provide higher accuracy than generic sentiment lexicons when predicting stock price change.
Abstract: The market for "functional foods" and "foods with functional claims" that are effective in maintaining and improving health, has expanded year by year due to the entry of major food and beverage manufacturers following the introduction of the specified health food system in 1991 in Japan. To bring health claims related products or services to the market, it is necessary to let consumers to learn about these products or services; an effective marketing through advertising are important. This research proposes a framework for an effective advertisement medium for the food supplement industry by using survey data of 2,500 people.
Abstract: Digital technology is transforming the landscape of the industrial sector at a precedential level by connecting people, processes, and machines in real-time. It represents the means for a new pathway to achieve innovative, dynamic competitive advantages, deliver unique customers’ values, and sustain critical relationships. Thus, success in a constantly changing environment is governed by the ability of an organization to revolutionize their business models, deliver innovative solutions, and capture values from big data analytics and insights. Businesses need to re-strategize operations and develop extra capabilities to cope with the necessity for additional flexibility and agility. The traditional “command and control” leadership style is structurally and operationally incompatible with the digital era. In this paper, the authors discuss how transformational leaders can act as a glue in the social, organizational context, which is crucial to enable the workforce and develop a psychological attachment to the digital vision.
Abstract: This paper highlights the empirical results of analyzing the correlation between accounting information and systematic risk. This association is analyzed among financial ratios and systematic risk by considering the financial statement of 39 companies listed on the Tehran Stock Exchange (TSE) for five years (2014-2018). Financial ratios have been categorized into four groups and to describe the special features, as representative of accounting information we selected: Return on Asset (ROA), Debt Ratio (Total Debt to Total Asset), Current Ratio (current assets to current debt), Asset Turnover (Net sales to Total assets), and Total Assets. The hypotheses were tested through simple and multiple linear regression and T-student test. The findings illustrate that there is no significant relationship between accounting information and market risk. This indicates that in the selected sample, historical accounting information does not fully reflect the price of stocks.
Abstract: Recently, online marketplaces in the e-commerce industry, such as Rakuten and Alibaba, have become some of the most popular online marketplaces in Asia. In these shopping websites, consumers can select purchase products from a large number of stores. Additionally, consumers of the e-commerce site have to register their name, age, gender, and other information in advance, to access their registered account. Therefore, establishing a method for analyzing consumer preferences from both the store and the product side is required. This study uses the Doc2Vec method, which has been studied in the field of natural language processing. Doc2Vec has been used in many cases to analyze the extraction of semantic relationships between documents (represented as consumers) and words (represented as products) in the field of document classification. This concept is applicable to represent the relationship between users and items; however, the problem is that one more factor (i.e., shops) needs to be considered in Doc2Vec. More precisely, a method for analyzing the relationship between consumers, stores, and products is required. The purpose of our study is to combine the analysis of the Doc2vec model for users and shops, and for users and items in the same feature space. This method enables the calculation of similar shops and items for each user. In this study, we derive the real data analysis accumulated in the online marketplace and demonstrate the efficiency of the proposal.
Abstract: Recently, the system of quick response (QR) code is getting popular. Many companies introduce new QR code payment services and the services are competing with each other to increase the number of users. For increasing the number of users, we should grasp the difference of feature of the demographic information, usage information, and value of users between services. In this study, we conduct an analysis of real-world data provided by Nomura Research Institute including the demographic data of users and information of users’ usages of two services; LINE Pay, and PayPay. For analyzing such data and interpret the feature of them, Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (NMF) is widely used; however, in case of the target data, there is a problem of the missing data. EM-algorithm NMF (EMNMF) to complete unknown values for understanding the feature of the given data presented by matrix shape. Moreover, for comparing the result of the NMF analysis of two matrices, there is Discriminant NMF (DNMF) shows the difference of users features between two matrices. In this study, we combine EMNMF and DNMF and also analyze the target data. As the interpretation, we show the difference of the features of users between LINE Pay and Paypay.
Abstract: This paper examines the relationship between on-board environmental factors and customer overall satisfaction in the context of the cruise on-board experience. The on-board environmental factors considered are ambient, layout/design, social, product/service and on-board enjoyment factors. The study presents a data-driven framework and model for the on-board cruise experience. The data are collected from 893 respondents in an application of a self-administered online questionnaire of their cruise experience. This study reveals the cruise passengers’ on-board experience through the customer decision journey based on the publicly available data. Pearson correlation and regression analysis have been applied, and the results show a positive and a significant relationship between the environmental factors and on-board experience. These data help understand the cruise passengers’ on-board experience, which will be used for the ultimate decision-making process in cruise ship design.
Abstract: Business-to-Customer (B2C) delivery options have improved to meet increased demand in recent years. The change in end users has forced logistics networks to focus on customer service and sentiment that would have previously been the priority of the company or organization of origin. This has led to increased pressure on logistics companies to extend traditional B2B networks into a B2C solution while accommodating additional costs, roadblocks, and customer sentiment; the result has been the creation of the omnichannel delivery network encompassing a number of traditional and modern methods of package delivery. In this paper the many solutions within the omnichannel delivery network are defined and discussed. It can be seen through this analysis that the omnichannel delivery network can be applied to reduce the complexity of package delivery and provide customers with more options. Applied correctly the result is a reduction in cost to the logistics company over time, even with an initial increase in cost to obtain the technology.
Abstract: In Japan, taxi is one of the popular transportations and taxi industry is one of the big businesses. However, in recent years, there has been a difficult problem of reducing the number of taxi drivers. In the taxi business, mainly three passenger catching methods are applied. One style is "cruising" that drivers catches passengers while driving on a road. Second is "waiting" that waits passengers near by the places with many requirements for taxies such as entrances of hospitals, train stations. The third one is "dispatching" that is allocated based on the contact from the taxi company. Above all, the cruising taxi drivers need the experience and intuition for finding passengers, and it is difficult to decide "the destination for cruising". The strong recommendation system for the cruising taxies supports the new drivers to find passengers, and it can be the solution for the decreasing the number of drivers in the taxi industry. In this research, we propose a method of recommending a destination for cruising taxi drivers. On the other hand, as a machine learning technique, the embedding models that embed the high dimensional data to a low dimensional space is widely used for the data analysis, in order to represent the relationship of the meaning between the data clearly. Taxi drivers have their favorite courses based on their experiences, and the courses are different for each driver. We assume that the course of cruising taxies has meaning such as the course for finding business man passengers (go around the business area of the city of go to main stations) and course for finding traveler passengers (go around the sightseeing places or big hotels), and extract the meaning of their destinations. We analyze the cruising history data of taxis based on the embedding model and propose the recommendation system for passengers. Finally, we demonstrate the recommendation of destinations for cruising taxi drivers based on the real-world data analysis using proposing method.
Abstract: This research aims to explore how well the extended model of internet commerce adoption (eMICA) model is often used to determine the extent of internet commerce adoption in the travel agencies sector in both Egypt and Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). The web content analysis method was used to analyze the level of adoption of Egyptian travel agencies and Saudi travel agencies according to data immensely available on their websites. Therefore, each site was categorized according to the phases and levels proposed. In order to achieve this, 120 websites were evaluated by the two authors over a three-month period, from August to October 2020, and then categorized according to the phases and levels of (eMICA). The results show that there are deficiencies in the application of the eMICA model by both KSA and Egyptian travel agencies, generally, updating their websites, the absence of quality certification, offering secure online payment, virtual tours, and videos using Flash animation. In general, the Egyptian companies slightly outperformed the KSA ones in applying eMICA model.
Abstract: The Brazilian economic projections and social indicators show a future of crisis for the country. Solutions to avoid this crisis scenario are necessary. Several developed countries implement initiatives linked to sustainability, mainly related to the circular economy, to solve their crises quickly - green recovery. This article aims to assess social gains if Brazil followed the same recovery strategy. Furthermore, with the use of data presented and recognized in the international academic society, the number of jobs that can be created, if Brazil took the first steps towards a more circular economy, was found. Moreover, in addition to the gross value in the number of jobs created, this article also detailed the number of these jobs by type of activity (collection, processing, and manufacturing) and by type of material.