Policy Issues of e-Commerce Technology Diffusion in Southeast Nigeria: The Case of Small Scale Agribusiness

The benefits brought about by the emergence of e-commerce, e-business and other Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) applications have not been fully explored in the developing economies of the world. The less developed economies are still struggling to catch up with ICT application as opposed to its heavy deployment in the developed economies. Empirical evidence suggests that ICTs and other related technologies are increasingly emerging in the communities of the developing economies such as Nigeria. Rural actors engaged in the Agricultural industries (Agribusiness) feel that the implementation of ICTs can influence the development of new business processes and the way existing processes are organised. In the Southeast of Nigeria, which is a typical example of a less developed community, the impact of e-business technologies has yet to be determined. This paper identifies two classical traditional agribusiness supply chains and hence reports on the impact of e-commerce technology diffusion along the equilibrium of the supply chains, focusing on the elimination of intermediary actors from the chain. It provides an assessment of the Governments’ policies and strategies on e-commerce adoption for the sustainability of small-scale agricultural businesses. The paper examines the politics surrounding ICT implementations by actors engaged in the agribusiness sector. This research has motivated The South East State Government, in collaboration with the Federal Government, to give closer attention to their earlier policy of making Nigeria an ICT-enabled country

Bitcoin: a Money-like Informational Commodity

The question "what is Bitcoin" allows for many answers depending on the objectives aimed at when providing such answers. The question addressed in this paper is to determine a top-level classification, or type, for Bitcoin. We will classify Bitcoin as a system of type money-like informational commodity (MLIC)

The Theory of Money

Fiat money(1) is a creation of both the state and society. Its value is supported by expectations which are conditioned by the dynamics of trust in government, the socio-economic structure and by outside events such as wars, plagues or political unrest. The micro-management of a dynamic economy is not far removed in difficulty from the micro-management of the weather. However, money and the financial institutions and instruments of a modern economy provide the means to influence expectations and bound behavior.(2) Paper money emerges as a virtual commodity. The dynamics of the economy permits it to serve as an imaginary gold.Although it is an abstraction, it is meaningful to talk about its quantity. Closely related to but basically different from fiat money is credit.(3) Credit, unlike fiat money is not a virtual commodity but a two party contract. The fact that it is a two party contract set in a dynamic context implies that there are chances that the economy may reach a state where a debtor is unable to meet his or her obligations. When this happens the laws and customs of the society must provide default, bankruptcy and reorganization rules. These rules are usually denominated in terms of fiat and socio-economic penalties such as the confiscation of assets, garnishing of salary or time in debtors' prison. Thus the value of paper gold is determined in two ways by the dynamics of the system. First by acceptance in trade, based on the expectation that it will remain valuable and second by its role in the discharge of debts where failure to repay has unpleasant consequences. When taxes are present a third valuation appears in the penalties for failure to pay taxes. The control of the fiat money supply together with rules on the granting of credit and the bankruptcy, default and reorganization rules,in essence, provide lower and upper bounds for the price level in the economy. They also determine the innovation rate of the economy. An innovation may be regarded as an economic mutation; the less costly failure is, the more likely an innovation will be risked. The rates of interest for loans combined with the harshness of the bankruptcy and reorganization laws help to determine the rate of innovation in a society. Government controls only one among many interest rates. A host of institutional details involving risk and transactions cost determine the others. The velocity of both money and credit may vary. Even though velocity may vary, human decision-making takes a finite amount of time. This implies that velocity will remain bounded. Beyond some speed of circulation expectations will degenerate and the economy will break down. In order to appreciate the intrinsic dynamics of a high information and communication mass economy at least three agents must be distinguished. They are the highly visible government; other largely visible legal persons, such as banks and corporations and real persons. Their differences are characterized by their relative power and the size of their communication networks. The contrast between a market economy and a state economy is not a clean contrast. The distinctions are on a continuum. Among modern democratic market economies the size of the government sector is roughly anywhere from 15% to 50% of the economy. Thus the control description of virtually any modern economy is of one extremely large and visible player; at most a few hundred large corporate entities of reasonably high visibility and a mass of small agents known by and in direct communication with only a few others. The reconciliation of a dynamics oriented macro-economics with an equilibrium oriented micro-economics lies in the understanding that the economy is embedded in the polity and society. The institutions, customs and laws are the carriers of process and provide bounds to process. They limit the dynamics.The role of macroeconomic policy is to bound the dynamics of an evolving society. Individual behavior is local and necessarily myopic. Myopic local optimization is consistent with global evolution. An elementary understanding of history and the decision and game theory proliferation of strategies is enough to indicate that the search for a unique or even stationary economic dynamics is an essay in futility.In contrast the search for the correct carriers and bounds on process is feasible.The monetary structure provides the sufficient loose coupling to permit mass independent behavior to take place even somewhat chaotically within institutional bounds.(4) 1. I use the term fiat or abstract paper money interchangeably to stand for a government supplied means of payment of no intrinsic worth. 2. Phrasing this somewhat more technically they provide the bounds on the state space. A state space is the set of all feasible states which can be achieved by the system. 3. Credit such as bank credit from a well known bank may be referred to as "inside money" in the sense that it is a contract between two legal persons in the economy other than the government. Yet the bank credit, because of the visibility and reputation of the bank, may serve as a substitute in transactions for fiat money. 4. Technically the institutions and the monetary and financial structure fully define the state space, but do not describe the dynamics. There is a robust collection of local individual rules of behavior which are all sufficient to provide the dynamic support of expectations that money will be accepted as having value. The control system may be sufficient to guide or at least limit the overall macroeconomic behavior without necessarily providing for a precise or unique dynamics. Money is the only financial instrument without an offsetting instrument. This nonsymmetry appears to be critical in the introduction of time into the model of the economy.Money, macro-economics, strategic market games, general disequilibrium, bankruptcy

Global Grids and Software Toolkits: A Study of Four Grid Middleware Technologies

Grid is an infrastructure that involves the integrated and collaborative use of computers, networks, databases and scientific instruments owned and managed by multiple organizations. Grid applications often involve large amounts of data and/or computing resources that require secure resource sharing across organizational boundaries. This makes Grid application management and deployment a complex undertaking. Grid middlewares provide users with seamless computing ability and uniform access to resources in the heterogeneous Grid environment. Several software toolkits and systems have been developed, most of which are results of academic research projects, all over the world. This chapter will focus on four of these middlewares--UNICORE, Globus, Legion and Gridbus. It also presents our implementation of a resource broker for UNICORE as this functionality was not supported in it. A comparison of these systems on the basis of the architecture, implementation model and several other features is included.Comment: 19 pages, 10 figure

Cloudbus Toolkit for Market-Oriented Cloud Computing

This keynote paper: (1) presents the 21st century vision of computing and identifies various IT paradigms promising to deliver computing as a utility; (2) defines the architecture for creating market-oriented Clouds and computing atmosphere by leveraging technologies such as virtual machines; (3) provides thoughts on market-based resource management strategies that encompass both customer-driven service management and computational risk management to sustain SLA-oriented resource allocation; (4) presents the work carried out as part of our new Cloud Computing initiative, called Cloudbus: (i) Aneka, a Platform as a Service software system containing SDK (Software Development Kit) for construction of Cloud applications and deployment on private or public Clouds, in addition to supporting market-oriented resource management; (ii) internetworking of Clouds for dynamic creation of federated computing environments for scaling of elastic applications; (iii) creation of 3rd party Cloud brokering services for building content delivery networks and e-Science applications and their deployment on capabilities of IaaS providers such as Amazon along with Grid mashups; (iv) CloudSim supporting modelling and simulation of Clouds for performance studies; (v) Energy Efficient Resource Allocation Mechanisms and Techniques for creation and management of Green Clouds; and (vi) pathways for future research.Comment: 21 pages, 6 figures, 2 tables, Conference pape

Device-Based Isolation for Securing Cryptographic Keys

In this work, we describe an eective device-based isolation approach for achieving data security. Device-based isolation leverages the proliferation of personal computing devices to provide strong run-time guarantees for the condentiality of secrets. To demonstrate our isolation approach, we show its use in protecting the secrecy of highly sensitive data that is crucial to security operations, such as cryptographic keys used for decrypting ciphertext or signing digital signatures. Private key is usually encrypted when not used, however, when being used, the plaintext key is loaded into the memory of the host for access. In our threat model, the host may be compromised by attackers, and thus the condentiality of the host memory cannot be preserved. We present a novel and practical solution and its prototype called DataGuard to protect the secrecy of the highly sensitive data through the storage isolation and secure tunneling enabled by a mobile handheld device. DataGuard can be deployed for the key protection of individuals or organizations

MANAGEMENT AND INFORMATION AT U.S. AGRIBUSINESSES: PERSPECTIVES FROM THE CATTLE-BEEF SECTOR

Agribusinesses in the cattle-beef sector use information from both external sources and proprietary sources in the management decision making process. This research reports the results of personal interviews with employees at all levels of the beef market channel, covering the information resources that they value and the priority their firms place on information. Respondents used data on prices and cattle inventories collected by the public sector, data on retail grocery sales made available through private firms, and data and analysis from trade associations. Companies involved in meat packing and retail distribution use information technologies to automate delivery and billing for products and they are investing in improved systems. A barrier to a more efficient supply chain in beef is the incomplete implementation of retail scanner systems for fresh meat.Livestock Production/Industries,