Global Economic Meltdown Research Articles

TAKE IT OR LEAVE: AGILE/NOVELTY BUSINESS MODELS AND VALUE ADDITION IN THE PUBLISHING SECTOR AND FORCES IMPACTING ON THESE MODELS

INTRODUCTION:Despite many predictions about the possible extinction of the book and publishing industry, literary reading is on the increase just like reading on mobile devices is (Rainie, L., Zickuhr, K., Purcell, K., Madden, M. & Brenner, J. (2012). Globally, the publishing industry is estimated to contribute more than 80 billion Euros. This means- of all creative industries-the publishing industry is the second largest after television as reported by Publishing Perspectives (2016). Moreover, in the UK, it holds the first position as it contributes well over 4.4 billion GBP to the UK economy according to the Publishers Association (2016). Commenting, The Publishers Association Chief Executive, Stephen Lotinga, said:These figures show that the UK publishing industry continues to go from strength to strength and the UK's love for print is far from over. While digital continues to be an incredibly important part of the industry, Lotinga argues that it would appear there remains a special place in the consumer's heart for the aesthetic pleasure that printed books can bring.Ironically, with all these successes around, the publishing industry finds itself in a hard environment that is essentially different from the one it had previously survived, and this an environmental is enormously threatening its survival (Hanna, 2010; Cope, B and Phillips, A (2006).THE THREATS AND THE SIEGE:Recently, publishers have experienced enormous pressure particularly due to the increased numbers of innovative players (The Guardian, 2016). More similarly so, declining print sales, at the dawn of the global economic meltdown, which was once described as worse than the September, 9/11, according to Thompson (2010), corroborates such threats. Importantly, the disruptive influences of the internet, resultant reader expectations and the desire for free, affordable and accessible content have likewise brought enormous fears among publishers and booksellers (Faherty, 2014; Shelstad 2011). Because of these fears, traditional publishers have relentlessly fought Amazon- simply for utilising disruptive selling models such as those that have seen eBooks being sold at less than an USD (Jones, 2008). Moreover, these days, a week cannot pass without the media prophesying the extinction of the antediluvian publishers and the book as (Adams, 2012; Charman-Anderson, 2012 & Morrison, 2011) observes. Relative to this, new media scholar Clay Shirky considers publishing not as a job but rather a push button (Curtis, 2012). One thing that must be borne at the back of our minds is that threats to the publishing industry and the book are not necessarily new and inimitable. Well-known publishers have struggled for so many decades due to dwindling sales, pricy authors, poor supply chains and curious business models as (Lichtenberg, 2010) reports. Nevertheless, the rapidity of the recent changes has significantly taken the entire publishing industry by surprise so much so that the whole ecosystem has been shaken up (Cope, B. and Phillips, A. 2006; Mussinelli, 2011). This is the reason many organisations are now debating on what it now means to be a successful publisher in this era (Faherty, 2013). Likewise, Mussinelli (2011) have described the events in the contemporary publishing terrain as a discontinuity; while others have appropriated the weather-beaten analogy of the perfect storm (Shore, 2012). Central to the debates regarding the future of publishing, many business models are now accused of being broken as (Thompson, 2010; Tew, 2011; Greco, Rodriguez & Wharton, 2006) assert. While many traditional publishers passively waited for the coming of the Messianic business model in order for them to establish eBook markets, the business models of the start-ups are those that seemed captivating (Bennett, 2010; Osterwalder, 2010 Shelstad, 2011; Guirey, T., Horne, A., Skinner, B., & Spicer, M. (2012). This scenario may not be surprising considering that most publishers have relied on business models where the consumer buys the book once and for all and it ends there. …

Austerity in Civil Procedure

textabstractThe demand for and availability of civil justice procedures for small claims can neither be disentangled nor extricated from the health of the economic climate of the relevant country concerned. In this article, it is argued that despite not being a developed country, Ghana was not completely insulated from the hardships or implementation of austerity measures that were triggered by the global economic meltdown. The inevitability of behavioural changes on the part of the Government of Ghana as lawmaker and provider of the machinery for civil justice on the one hand and small claims litigants as users of the civil procedure on the other hand are also explored in the article. After properly situating the exploration in the relevant economic context, the article makes recommendations regarding how to minimise the impact of the austerity measures on small claims litigants.

Internally Generated Revenue in Nigerian Local Governments: Lessons from Ibarapa East Local Government of Oyo

This study examined Internally Generated Revenue (IGR) in Ibarapa East Local Government of Oyo State with a view to looking at the problems being encountered while generating these revenues. This study was necessitated by the need to ensure improved revenue generation at the third tier of government in Nigeria. In the course of carrying out the study, data were collected primarily through questionnaires and oral interview. Respondents were drawn across the seven departments of the local government, thus 50 respondents were employed representing 10.86 percent of the 460 staff strength of the local government. The questionnaires wereadministered using stratified random sampling technique and later analyzed by the use of simple techniques such as frequency distribution and percentage. The study revealed that the collections of the paltry revenues were not but bedeviled by myriad of difficulties which made people at the grassroots not to see the dividends of democracy and thereby manifest uncooperative stand towards the local government. The study concluded that local government should intensify her efforts on increased revenue generation in order to withstand the challenges posed by global economic meltdown and ensure that the little hard earned resources are prudently spent so that the tax payers feel the impact of the taxes paid and this will also encourage them to pay all necessary taxes and rates as at when due.

Northern and southern Italian social cooperatives during the economic crisis: a multiple factor analysis

A multiple factor analysis is developed to assess the differences in the economic performance and employment levels of social cooperatives in three main geographical areas: North, Central and South Italy, between 2008 and 2011. The results showed that despite the global economic and financial meltdown, the social cooperatives in these areas increased their overall turnover and total assets between 2008 and 2011. Furthermore, the employment data showed a positive trend during this period. The analysis also found that the prolonged crisis in 2010 and 2011 affected mainly the southern regions, where conjunctural factors exacerbated long-term structural deficiencies.

Applications of Data Mining in Correlating Stock Data and Building Recommender Systems

Since the 2008 sub-prime mortgage crisis and the global economic meltdown of 2009, investors have understood the value of historical data affecting a stock during investment. The general skeptical tendency of an investor increased in cases of mortgage bonds and general equities. Since then, the investment banks and financial institutions have increased their reliability on the available stock market data and finding correlations from the history of a stock to determine future trends and analyze current trends before making a decisions on the action to be performed on a particular stock. Using data mining techniques like clustering and association rules has helped quantitative analysts to determine correlations between the trend a stock follows and the reaction of a customer to the change in trends. This proves to be crucial in making recommendations to a customer on a particular financial product. The proposed research paper and eventual system, aims at providing a platform for data entry of large data sets of stock data, a set of input variables (which can be two or more) upon which various clustering and associative algorithmic techniques are implemented, to produce a result, similar to the result of a recommendation system, which predicts the next possible choice of a user based on historical ratings. The difference being that the ratings will be replaced by certain data points which can be system or user fed, and a correlation will be drawn between two or more variables with respect to these specific data points. The following paper lists the principles to be followed, the architecture of the system and the algorithmic techniques to be implemented.

Research on life design in (South) Africa: a qualitative analysis

No country, including South Africa, has been left untouched by the global economic meltdown in 2008 and fears that another financial meltdown could be imminent. This article reports on the emergence of career construction and life design in response to changes in the world of work. It explains the essence of career construction and life design and discusses their value in 21st century (South) Africa. It also discusses the re-emergence of adaptability as a pivotal ‘survival skill’ in the 21st century and its importance in career counselling contexts. The second part of the article covers the analysis of six case studies on career construction and design counselling. Qualitative data analysis was used to identify common themes and subthemes in the case studies. It emerged that life design counselling enabled the participants to understand themselves better and construct new selves, broadened their perspectives on career-life issues, facilitated change in their lives, encouraged action, and imbued new hope in them. However, more research is needed on such counselling, especially in group contexts.

Connotation for Career Opportunities to Management Graduates in Global Economic Meltdown

Connotation for Career Opportunities to Management Graduates in Global Economic Meltdown

The Role Credit Rating Agencies Played in the Financial Meltdown of 2008-2009

This is an area dear to the author’s heart, so is the role of Auditors in the global economic meltdown of 2008-2009, however, we this must admit that we were blind to the obvious, either for lack of knowledge, complacency, or just good all fashioned greed. The credit ratings of Standard and Poor’s, Moody’s and Fitch played a key role in the valuing of credit risk and in the explanation of investment strategies.

Supply Chain Strategies for the Indian Automotive Sector

The Supply Chain Management has received a great interest during the last few years. There is a concurrent view that a ‘save all’ strategy applicable to all circumstances is available to industrialists. This paper challenges the view and puts forward supply chain strategies in the automotive sector. The effect of the global economic meltdown increased the pressure on automotive executives to make right decisions about their supply chain for better performance. In a highly challenging and competitive environment such as today, where supply chain is a popular tool for improving the organizational competitiveness, an efficient and effective supply chain strategy is a must for automotive manufacturers and their component manufacturers so as to meet the changing consumer demands. The paper explores the concept of supply chain strategies for the automobile industry as a possible strategy to respond to changing consumer demand. Each strategy is explained in depth and the study concludes with a design to match different alternatives with different customer requirements. Thus, a tool is provided for selecting the right supply chain strategy given any type of customer requirements.

Introducing Mood Work

Abstract In this introduction we suggest a number of ways that, mood has been and, can be a productive way to approach, various forms of labour including: the emotional expenditure of those that, care either professionally or as 'voluntary' ' labourers; the pedagogic labour of teaching; and, the mood, work of the state and, the media. The introduction also introduces the main themes of the essays in this special issue.Keywords emotional labour, Heidegger, mood, seminarThe most obvious questions are still worth asking: why mood, why mood work, and why mood, work now? The mood-filled nature of the recent global economic meltdown is an obvious incentive: during those months in late 2007 and throughout 2008, months when the business news took centre stage, we were regularly told that 'the market' was suffering from depression, and afflicted with all the symptoms that came with that - anxiety, lack of confidence, panic. A mood of doubt rendered years of financial boosterism as little more than a mirage. But such vivid pictures of our economic structures (if so solid a sounding word as 'structures' can be applied to the world of stocks and shares, of futures and derivatives) don't articulate something new, rather they point us to the much longer history of the way that mood has been invoked as a central category for describing the states of the social and economic. As Jani Scandura reminds us: 'after the 1929 stock market crash, depression came to refer simultaneously (and without antecedent) to psychological ill health and financial collapse in American clinical and popular discourse'.1Alongside the moods of the market our title 'Mood Work' is also directed to the world of work, to various forms of labour. One feature of recent studies in the political sociology of labour, particularly as it has been changing throughout many Western countries, is the increased focus on work where the product of labour is connected in some way to mood. What social scientists and others call immaterial labour and affective labour is very often also mood work. In the pioneering work of the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild 'mood work' is called emotional management and emotional labour. Based on ethnographic work conducted in 1980, Hochschild's book The Managed Heart: Commercialization, of Human Feeling takes us into the moodful world of flight attendants. Hochschild's book is both about the physical and psychological cost of such labour and about how unevenly emotional labour is distributed (for instance within patriarchal family structures where women often perform the vast majority of care). She also points to the growing ubiquity of emotional labour:But most of us have jobs that require some handling of other people's feelings and our own, and in this sense we are all partly flight attendants. The secretary who creates a cheerful office that announces her company as 'friendly and dependable' and her boss as 'up-and-coming', the waitress or waiter who creates an 'atmosphere of pleasant dining', the tour guide or hotel receptionist who makes us feel welcome, the social worker whose look of solicitous concern makes the client feel cared for, the salesman who creates the sense of a 'hot commodity', the bill collector who inspires fear, the funeral parlor director who makes the bereaved feel understood, the minister who creates a sense of protective outreach but even-handed warmth - all of them must confront in some way or another the requirements of emotional labor.2If Hochschild terms this work emotional labour, then why replace these terms with the vaguer phrase 'mood work'? We don't set out to challenge Hochschild's important work by swapping mood for emotion; rather we think that a mood perspective might provide new insights about our social worlds that might be harder to grasp if the focus is entirely concentrated on emotion.If we stick with Hochschild's example of the experience of flight attendants, airline companies and flying, then we might initially suggest that mood incorporates the entire situation as well as the 'players' within it. …

Teacher Education and the Challenges of Global Economic Meltdown

The global economic meltdown is a serious worldwide malfunctioning economic activity that started in the United States of America in December, 2000 but became obvious in 2007 and full-blown between 2008 and 2009. The meltdown is characterized by drastic streamlining, rightsizing and downsizing of human and financial resources in both public and private sectors of the American economy. This paper sets out to identify the challenges the global economic meltdown poses to teacher education in Nigeria and also seeks means of handling such challenges. To have a broad understanding of the challenges the global economic meltdown have posed to teacher education, the next section of this paper highlights the meltdown as part of the global radical changes in environmental, economic, political, technological and social spheres since the beginning of this millennium. The paper concluded with recommendation of how teacher education can be made relevant for sustainable development.

Zakat as a Poverty Reduction Mechanism Among the Muslim Community: Case Study of Bangladesh, Malaysia, and Indonesia

Poverty reduction remains the most important challenge for policy makers in Islamic communities. The World Bank (2010: Poverty profile in Muslim world, from http://www.worldbank.org) estimates that approximately 3 billion people are living in poverty and 46 million more people will come under the income level of US$1.25 a day due to the recent global economic meltdown and slow economic growth rates. Thirty‐five percent of these people are Muslims from Islamic countries. The global Muslim community has an essential role to play in addressing the injustice of global poverty through zakat. Zakat is an Islamic faith‐based institution and is being underutilized for poverty reduction in many of these poor Muslim countries. Since zakat constitutes one of the pillars of Islam, it is logical to assume that policy makers among Muslims should pay serious attention to it. However, that is not the case for many Muslim countries and this paper will show that not all Muslim countries are seriously applying zakat in its strategy of combating poverty. This paper will specifically examine the role and effect of zakat in three Muslim countries (Bangladesh, Malaysia and Indonesia) providing the facts of countries that practise zakat in comparison with those that do not.

A Model for Screening Vulnerability in the Loan Market in the Context of Credit Rationing

The loan market has contributed to the success and failure of economies. Examples of such failures are the US subprime mortgage crisis as well as the global economic meltdown that followed. Many factors influence the loan market, making it volatile and vulnerable. As such, it is important to understand the extent of its vulnerability. Such uncertainties emerge from asymmetric information in the loan market that may lead to credit rationing. Many studies have been devoted to exploring theoretical aspects of the credit market. However, before delving into the theory, it is important to understand and analyze empirical data. Having said that, the literature has yet to provide reliable methodologies for analyzing the empirical data of the loan market. Therefore, given an empirical survey, this study provides a model describing borrowers' behavior in the loan markets. Borrowers are faced with a variety of loan contracts with different terms and conditions from different banks. Logit models can be used to capture the borrowers' choice of bank. Credit is not easily available rather it is rationed and borrowers compete to obtain their required credit via best suited banks offers. The competition is guaranteed by developing a mathematical programming formulation (an objective function subject to constraints) integrated with the logit models for which a solution algorithm using Successive Coordinate Descent was developed. Numerical results of the methodology are presented. Loan terms and conditions as well the borrowers characteristics and preferences are captured in the logit models as explanatory variables. The methodology allows sensitivity analysis on the explanatory variables demonstrating the fluctuation and vulnerability of credit flow.

Global Economic Meltdown on Nigerian Capital Market

Global Economic Meltdown on Nigerian Capital Market Biokoro Clifford, Hasret Balcioglu Abstract The intensification of the crisis has noticeably exposed the vulnerability of the international financial system to short-term capital flow; the Nigerian capital market is not left out. This study therefore focuses on the effect of Global Economic Meltdown on the Nigerian Capital market. An econometric model is specified using market capitalization as a proxy for Nigerian capital market. The emphasis is on the quantitative influence of each of the predetermined variables on the endogenous. Data for regression analysis are collected from various secondary sources. The data used in this study covers the period of 1997-2008 to make the findings more recent and applicable to the present state of the Nigerian economy. The method of analysis includes the use of Ordinary Least Square (OLS), and other statistical test like F-test, T-test, R2 and Durbin-Watson Statistic (DW). It has been concluded that market capitalization is positively influenced by FDI and external reserves. Full Text: PDF DOI: 10.15640/jeds.v2n4a11

Russia's Emerging Multinational Companies Amidst the Global Economic Crisis

Internationalisation of Russian companies has become a distinctive phenomenon and has drawn attention of scholars, practitioners and policy-makers alike. Newly emerged Russian companies have extended their presence from the nearest former Soviet republics to the advanced markets of Western Europe and Northern America. As most companies in the world, in 2008-2010, Russian multinationals faced the global economic meltdown. Despite the broad interest in this topic, its scholarly examination remains limited so far. This is precisely the objective of the paper. It analyses the impact, effects and consequences of the global economic crisis on international activities and internationalisation strategies of emerging Russian multinationals. The study combines quantitative and qualitative methods. Available secondary data from international financial and business databases and reviews is used. To broaden the insight gained through these quantitative analyses, the paper also present qualitative data – several practical examples of Russian multinationals’ responses to the crisis. Further, the interplay between foreign expansion and the Russian government’s policies is explored. A number of conclusions are derived.

Developing Entrepreneurial Skills and Transforming Challenges into Opportunities in Nigeria

The paper considers developing entrepreneurial skills and transforming challenges into business opportunities in Nigeria.Today, the twin challenges of unemployment and poverty are facing graduates of tertiary institutions and professionals owing to the global economic meltdown and economic recessions in most countries including Nigeria. While the government braces up to these challenges through the various programmes and entrepreneurial initiatives, a key solution is the equipping of graduates and professionals with entrepreneurial skills which can make them employable and become employers of labour. Again the paper advocates that besides the possession of entrepreneurial skills, knowledge and hard work, the would- be entrepreneurs must have the right attitude if they are to succeed in transforming challenges into profitable business opportunities. Moreover, the governments and corporate bodies in Nigeria must support by investing in entrepreneurial education in Nigerias. DOI: 10.5901/jesr.2013.v4n3p289

English

This study investigates the impact of bank capital adequacy ratios, management and performance in the Nigerian commercial bank (1986 - 2006). The objectives of this paper are: to determine to what extent bank capital adequacy ratios impact on bank performance and also to investigate the extent to which operation expenses has impacted on the return on capital. The study captured their performance indicators and employed cross sectional and time series of bank data obtained from Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and Annual Report and Financial statements of the sampled banks. The formulated models were estimated using ordinary least square regression method. The overall capital adequacy ratios of the study shows that Shareholders Fund/Total Assets (SHF/TA) which measures capital adequacy of banks (risk of default) have negative impact on ROA. The efficiency of management measured by operating expenses indice is negatively related to return on capital. The implication of this study, among others, is that adequate shareholders fund can serve as a veritable stimulant in strengthening the performance of Nigerian commercial banks and also heighten the confidence of customers especially in this era of global economic meltdown that has taken its toll in the Nigerian financial system. Key words: Buffer capital theory of capital adequacy, expense theory, capital adequacy ratios

A genetic type-2 fuzzy logic based system for the generation of summarised linguistic predictive models for financial applications

The global economic meltdown of the late 2000s exposed many organisations around the world, this drove the need to build robust frameworks for predicting and assessing risks in financial applications. Such predictive frameworks helped organisations to increase the quality and quantity of their transactions hence increasing the revenues and reducing the risks. Many organisations around the World still use statistical regression techniques which are well established for many problems such as fraud detection or risk analysis. However, recent years have seen the application of computational intelligence techniques to develop predictive models for financial applications. Some of the computational intelligence techniques like neural networks provide good predictive models, nevertheless they are considered as black box models which do not provide an easy to understand reasoning about a given decision or even a summary of the generated model. However, in the current economic situation, transparency became an important factor where there is a need to fully understand and analyze a given financial model. In this paper, we will present a Genetic Type-2 Fuzzy Logic System (FLS) for the modeling and prediction of financial applications. The proposed system is capable of generating summarized models from a specified number of linguistic rules, which enables the user to understand the generated financial model. The system is able to use this summarized model for prediction within financial applications. We have performed several evaluations in two distinctive financial domains, one for the prediction of good/bad customers in a financial real-world lending application and the other domain was in the prediction of arbitrage opportunities in the stock markets. The proposed Genetic type-2 FLS has outperformed white box models like the Evolving Decision Rule procedure (which is a white based on Genetic Programming and decision trees) and gave a comparable performance to black box models like neural networks while the proposed genetic type-2 FLS provided a white box model which is easy to understand and analyse by the lay user.

Global Turmoil: Role of Monetary and Fiscal Policy

The global Economic meltdown has effect on all the countries in the world. The Indian economy is also not exception to this situation because world economy cannot perform in seclusion in today's faster growing world. All the economies are interlinked to each other and any major ebb and flow in economic conditions causes numerous impacts for all other economies. The global economic crisis started with Subprime disaster in the US. Many strong economies are suffering from the crisis of credit and liquidity due to the interconnectedness of each other in international trade relations. This situation has the negative impacts on GDP, Employment, exports, FDI and economic development of the nation. Government and Policy makers are always taking precautionary measures for maintaining the economic stability and corrective actions in inflationary and recession situations. The striking balance of Monetary and Fiscal policies may help to overcome the situation to some extent. Monetary and Fiscal policies can be framed and implemented according to the economic situations. Central Banks of countries can influence the economy through the use of monetary policy by controlling the monetary variables such as rate of interest, the money supply and the volume of credit. The fiscal policy can be used to help on economy out of recession or reduce demand pressures in a boom. Monetary and fiscal policies are complementary to each other. Monetary policy influences the level of aggregate income and spending in the economy by influencing the money supply and cost of borrowing. Fiscal policy affects income and spending through its effects on size, composition and timing of government revenue and spending. These two policies can play the role in a perfect balancing for promotion of inclusive growth. This paper will focus on the important and balanced role of monetary and fiscal policy in economy with reference to the current scenario in Indian Economy.

Ensuring Supply Chain Resilience: Development and Implementation of an Assessment Tool

In today's tightly connected global economy, traditional management practices that rely on “steady‐state” conditions are challenged by chaotic external pressures and turbulent change. Just in the last few years, the world has experienced a string of catastrophic events, including a global economic meltdown, a volcanic eruption in Iceland, an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, a disastrous tsunami and power blackout in Japan, and political upheavals in Africa and the Middle East. Managing the risk of an uncertain future is a challenge that requires resilience—the ability to survive, adapt, and grow in the face of turbulent change. This research develops a measurement tool titled the Supply Chain Resilience Assessment and Management (SCRAM™). Data gathered from seven global manufacturing and service firms are used to validate SCRAM™, using qualitative methodology with 1,369 empirical items from focus groups reviewing 14 recent disruptions. Critical linkages are uncovered between the inherent vulnerability factors and controllable capability factors. Through mixed‐method triangulation, this research identified 311 specific linkages that can be used to guide a resilience improvement process. Pilot testing suggests a correlation between increased resilience and improved supply chain performance.