Economic Evaluation of Health Cost of Pesticide Use: Willingness to Pay Method

This study highlights the results of contingent valuation method to measure health cost of pesticide use from farmer’s point of view. Analysis shows that farmers have a positive willingness to pay for avoiding pesticide related health risks. Theoretical validity tests show that relevant indicators such as risk perception, previous experience of pesticide related poisoning, education and income are significant predictors for the Positive WTP. From the results it is evident that health effects of pesticide use provided motivation for farmers to pay more for practices like IPM that reduce dependence on pesticide use which in turn a strong motivation for policy makers to continue research on IPM and its implementation.Health cost, WTP, pesticide use, IPM.

Ethical human resource management: a critical analysis

In modern day, Human Resource Management (HRM) is seen as a mere variant of management control aiming intentionally to ‘colonize’ the identity of the individual employee which points to the contradictions between the idealised HRM theories and its practice commonly referred to as the difference between rhetoric and reality. These critical analyses suggest that HRM reflects a historical shift in the way work is defined and managed and research has to be undertaken on how morality and ethics may be represented in the discourse, lived experiences, practice and broader context of HR professionals. The HR function will continue to face challenges in balancing business imperatives and ethical values but as long as the corporate and HR leadership remains committed, no challenge may be insurmountable

Equal Sum Sequences and Imbalance Sets of Tournaments

Reid conjectured that any finite set of non-negative integers is the score set of some tournament and Yao gave a non-constructive proof of Reid's conjecture using arithmetic arguments. No constructive proof has been found since. In this paper, we investigate a related problem, namely, which sets of integers are imbalance sets of tournaments. We completely solve the tournament imbalance set problem (TIS) and also estimate the minimal order of a tournament realizing an imbalance set. Our proofs are constructive and provide a pseudo-polynomial time algorithm to realize any imbalance set. Along the way, we generalize the well-known equal sum subsets problem (ESS) to define the equal sum sequences problem (ESSeq) and show it to be NP-complete. We then prove that ESSeq reduces to TIS and so, due to the pseudo-polynomial time complexity, TIS is weakly NP-complete.Comment: Presented at the Retrospective Workshop on Discrete Geometry, Optimization and Symmetry, 25-29 Nov 2013, The Fields Institute, Toronto, Canad

Financial Sector Restructuring in Pakistan

In this paper an attempt has been made to review the financial restructuring process and its importance for economic growth and macroeconomic stability. The main focus is on the financial restructuring efforts undertaken by the government of Pakistan since 1990. We alsoanalyze the impacts of financial restructuring by using various financial indicators. The overallresults suggest that financial industry in Pakistan showing remarkable and unprecedented growth.Unlike 1990, the performance of financial sector is much better today. After the successfullycompletion of first generation of reforms, the introduction of second generation of reforms arerequired, which helps further strengthen the financial system and transform the benefits of the first generation of reforms to common man.

LONG-RUN AND SHORT-RUN DYNAMICS OF FOREIGN EXCHANGE RESERVES FLOWS AND DOMESTIC CREDIT IN PAKISTAN

This study formulates and examines the monetary approach to the balance of payments by incorporating the currency substitution version of money demand function for Pakistan over the period 1962-2005 using FM-OLS and Johansen-Juselius cointegration techniques. The results suggest that real output, real exchange rate and domestic credit play an important role in the determination of foreign exchange reserves in Pakistan in long-as well in short-run. Moreover, the monetary authorities sterilize foreign exchange reserves by 12% in long-run and 66% in short-run. The results support the evidence of long-run causality running from reserves to domestic credit. One important policy implication from the empirical analysis is that the validity of the monetary approach to the balance of payments and the effectiveness of monetary policy depend on the nature of the money demand function. As the specification of money demand has changes the evidence based on monetary approach has also changes.Monetary Approach, Foreign Exchange Reserves, Domestic Credit, Cointegration