Description:
A key departure in this study from many earlier studies is that, on the continuum of financial stress from nil to very high, both very high levels of stress and very low levels are seen as being harmful and potential harbinger of a financial-market crisis. Specifically, a surfeit of stress can act as a tipping point into crisis and a dearth of stress can encourage hubris and increase a nation’s susceptibility to financial contagion from another nation; even one that is far removed by geographic and/or economic distance. This paper focuses on developing financial stress indices for the US and Australia using composite market indices, trade weight indices and yields on securities with different maturity dates. Monthly data from January 1989 to December 2011 was sourced from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA), the Federal Reserve Bank (FRB), the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis website, Bank of Canada, Reserve Bank of New Zealand and Yahoo finance website. For purposes of this study the aggregate measures of stress consists of inverted yield spreads, volatility measures for market indices, volatility measures of trade weighted indexes, risk spreads, credit risk spreads and a measures of risk in the equity market.
Description:
This paper uses quantitative and qualitative analyses to study the influence of socio-economic factors on the HIV/AIDS epidemic with the intent of providing insight on policies to mitigate that epidemic. After a brief synopsis of poverty and AIDS in Africa, this paper outlines key research questions, and reviews their treatment in the literature. Using published data from 6,350 individuals (drawn from the Kenya Demographic Survey of 37,000), a number of behavioural choices are analysed. Income, wealth level, occupations and location are considered under other variables. While the analysis suggests that poverty does not predispose people to HIV/AIDS, it did strongly indicate that AIDS can precipitate poverty. These findings provide insight as to how the spread of AIDS can be mitigated in Kenya and Sub-Saharan Africa.
Description:
This paper uses quantitative and qualitative analyses to study the influence of socio-economic factors on the HIV/AIDS epidemic with the intent of providing insight on policies to mitigate that epidemic. After a brief synopsis of poverty and AIDS in Africa, this paper outlines key research questions, and reviews their treatment in the literature. Using published data from 6,350 individuals (drawn from the Kenya Demographic Survey of 37,000), a number of behavioural choices are analysed. Income, wealth level, occupations and location are considered under other variables. While the analysis suggests that poverty does not predispose people to HIV/AIDS, it did strongly indicate that AIDS can precipitate poverty. These findings provide insight as to how the spread of AIDS can be mitigated in Kenya and Sub-Saharan Africa.
Description:
The form and means of corporate earnings management (CEM) have evolved and become ever more sophisticated; however, in substance, CEM remains the misinforming of the users of an organization's financial statements, via the strategic abuse of timing, reorganizing, reclassifying, and/ or omitting of material information. Thus, even though CEM rarely involves outright deception, it is a fundamental breach of trust. As such, CEM is immensely damaging to the primary role of financial statements (i.e., the creation and/ or maintenance of informed trust between organizations and their key stakeholders) .
Description:
This paper examines the empirical outcomes of the policies of nine monetary authorities (eight OECD nations and the Euro zone) so as to infer the strength and stability of the economic relationships behind those policies. Governments, responding to earlier rampant inflation, have in recent decades avowed to pursue monetary policies to maintain inflation at a low stable rate. In recent decades, the relationship between inflation and money supply, that is postulated in the received wisdom and confirmed by decades of observation, appears to be breaking down. In examining possible causes of this instability, this paper sees on-going changes in the velocity-of-money to be less plausible than shifting dominance in world currencies or the creative destruction of technological progress. This paper suggests the relative monetary stability of recent decades may be less achievable in the future.
Description:
While prospecting by junior mining companies (JMCs) is a vital contributor to modern wealth creation, attributes of the junior mining sector (JMS) limit JMC-fund raisings to external equity (shares). In considering responses by JMC principals to deep discounting and other JMC-investor strategies, potential responses were found to: increase returns to principals, increase JMS moral-hazard issues, and further deepen price discounts on JMC share offerings, especially IPOs. It is suggested that the attractiveness and moral-hazard consequences of these potential responses can be greatly diminished if mining-tenement fees are raised and JMC prospecting costs are allowed as an offset against those fees
Description:
Ever seeking to increase returns at a given or lower risk levels , investors are finding that globalization and market integration are making it more difficult to achieve their targets by diversifying their portfolios across nations. Australia moved from being a poor investment prospect in the last third of the 20th Century to becoming fourth in world competitiveness. In contrast, the New Zealand economy has become ever more dependent on volatile agricultural commodities and faces serious infrastructure issues that may hinder its efforts to enhance or even retain its competitiveness. This paper projects from the recent history of the Australian and New Zealand economies to consider how they are likely to fare in resolving the early 21st Century challenges of globalization and demography and asks if Australian investors should consider investing closer to home.
Description:
Participation in tertiary education in developed countries has dramatically expanded over the past few decades. The perceptions of academic researchers, policy makers, employers and the general public have contributed to expectations of significant socio-economic and political gains from that expansion. This study, using a descriptive analysis and looking at the trends in historical perspective, found significant indications of a rising gap between the expectations and the perceived performance of higher education in developed countries. It is suggested that the recent expansion in tertiary-education may need refocusing to avoid growing gap between expectations and perceived-performance in tertiary education.
Description:
Participation in tertiary education in developed countries has dramatically expanded over the past few decades. The perceptions of academic researchers, policy makers, employers and the general public have contributed to expectations of significant socio-economic and political gains from that expansion. This study, using a descriptive analysis and looking at the trends in historical perspective, found significant indications of a rising gap between the expectations and the perceived performance of higher education in developed countries. It is suggested that the recent expansion in tertiary-education may need refocusing to avoid growing gap between expectations and perceived-performance in tertiary education.
Description:
Microfinance (MF) has demonstrated great success in poverty-relief in less-developed countries (LDCs) and is experiencing rapid growth and interest in developed countries (DCs). However, the current literature on DC MF leaves a general impression that DC MF is failing and its original core intent of poverty relief is being diluted by survival concerns. Descriptive analysis is used in this chapter to infer that DC MF must be redesigned to meet DC socio-economic conditions, if it is to avoid a reputation of being too poorly focused, ineffective, and inefficient for use in DCs. After demonstrating that poverty in LDCs is harsher than in DCs, this chapter reviews current-performance concerns of DC MF, discusses how it can still effectively relieve poverty in DCs, examines how regulatory and other socio-economic factors affect micro-enterprise, and concludes that MF should be refocused before DCs commit to further developing/adapting MF infrastructure
Description:
Micro-Finance (MF) is popular as a cost-effective means to reduce poverty by enhancing the access to financial services of fmancially-disadvantaged individuals and families. While its roots extend back to (at least) 136ICE, MF's common popularity occurred after the Grameen Bank introduced programs to Bangladesh, in the mid-1970s. The popularity and much-acclaimed successes of MF in less developed countries (LDCs) encouraged the implementation of MF programs in developed countries (DCs). However, after some initial success, DC MF programs tend to founder in a morass of financial and operating issues that centre on those programs having to provide much larger loans and far more entrepreneurial support than what is normally required in LDCs. An exploratory descriptive-analysis methodology is used in this study to review and assess the history and dynamics of MF programs in DCs with the intent of identifying patterns and trends in those programs. It appears that in responding to sustainability (a widely identified key issue), many DC MF institutions are shifting from the MF core ideal (of assisting society's most financial vulnerable) and are refocusing on facilitating the entrepreneurial aspirations of the working poor. The study suggests that this refocus may achieve sustainability, but at the cost of further disadvantaging the original intended-DC-MF beneficiaries. Recommendations in this study include: the use of macro-economic axioms to study MF programs and their constituent communities and that (to ensure that their programs add value) MF programs should measure their outcomes and impacts in terms of communities, rather than by individuals.
Description:
This paper draws attention to a commercial struggle that, after simmering over many centuries, has in recent decades progressively intensified into an all-out competitive brawl. The rising intensity in this conflict is evidenced by firms having to divert an ever-larger share of budgets and management resources avoid being overwhelmed by information. Even though few accountants and managers are aware of the nature, extent, or even history of this struggle, it increasingly constrains and defines their jobs. In this conflict, the few firms that think they have won, sooner or later, find their victory to be a pyrrhic, temporary delusion- as they are forced back, to re-join the mass of firms that have to do all they can, in struggle to avoid joining the ranks of the dazed, over-whelmed, information losers. After reviewing the roots, nature, and history of this intensifying struggle, this paper extrapolates from extant strategies (that reduce information toward the know-who/-minimum), to postulate how accountants and other information specialists are likely to prosecute the near to intermediate future of their portion of the ever-escalating information wars.
Description:
The incidence and virulence of global and regional financial crises has encouraged analysts to re-examine extant economic policies and tools. An issue of concern is how beneficial financial links can turn malignant and transmit a financial crisis across borders. This study explores financial contagion processes in financial markets with an emphasis on Australia. Monthly data from Jul/97-Jun/14 was obtained from Yahoo Finance for the composite-stock-market indices of Australia and its key trading partners. Eviews7 software was used to explore the relationship between stock indices of those countries via co-integration and pair-wise Granger Causality (GC) tests. This study found that stock returns in Australia are co-integrated with returns of the other countries. However, when appropriate lagged variables were used, only past values of returns in the Chinese, Singapore and US stock-indices have predictive value in terms of future Australian-stock-index values. This study should be of interest to policy makers, especially in terms of its suggestion of the flow-on effects of sharp discontinuities in the Chinese, Singapore and US stock markets on the Australian stock market. Bilateral trade links appear to be a key linkage in the transmission of financial contagion. However, more research is needed to identify and understand other factors that contribute to the spread of financial crises.
Description:
This paper is a speculative discussion on the accounting foundation principles of cost equals value and money is the basic unit of measure for value. Over the last 10 millennia, the social institution of accounting has created value by facilitating the flow of information and the formation of trust between those with wealth and those claiming to be to put that wealth to its best use. While the form and function of money changed and evolved many times, Accounting has for thousands of years given money place-of-pride in measuring value. The contribution of this study is in its warning, to accounting, that continuing double exponential growth in incomes may cause what money currently measures to be an increasingly poor proxy for society's evolving sense of value. If that occurs and if accounting fails to evolve apace with the society it serves, it risks becoming socially irrelevant. Thus, it may be prudent for accounting theorists to join the budding debate on the nature of money and value.
Description:
Globalization and urbanization are making the employment-and-wealth-distribution roles of regional small businesses (SBs) increasingly important to regional-socio-economic-and-political stability. This study in contrasting the outcomes of a survey of 220 regional SBs in Canada and New Zealand (NZ) found that: regional SB continuity is significantly higher than commonly presumed; tax-and-life-style differences may have skewed continuity in NZ SBs; female NZ SB entrepreneurs tend to have under half the sales of their male counterparts (a relationship not found in Canada); SB entrepreneurs are slow in adopting the internet for marketing. These findings should interest policy makers, creditors, and the general business community.