Agricultural Terms of Trade in Pakistan: Issues of Profitability and Standard of Living of the Farmers

Liberalisation policies have a major impact on the profitability, employment, and incomes in agriculture sector, as well as on living standards and the poverty levels in the rural areas. In the wake of the IMF structural adjustment programmes and the new emerging trade scenario, the Government of Pakistan, in addition to eliminating input subsidies, is also reluctant to increase support prices for various crops. This has initiated a debate. One view is that the Government must support agricultural prices and farmers must be protected from the decline in market prices of agricultural commodities. The contrasting view is that the subsidies have made the agriculture sector highly dependent on government support, and in order to survive in the WTO trade regime the sector must become highly competitive, efficient, and self-dependent. This paper computes relative price changes in the crop sector to explore whether profitability in this sector has improved or deteriorated. Another goal is to gauge the impact of price changes on the standard of living of the farmers. For this purpose, various terms of trade are calculated. The terms of trade for the crop sector are defined as the ratio of the index of prices received by the crop sector and the index of prices paid by the sector. The paper also probes how movements in international crop prices affect the profitability in the sector and the standard of living of the farmers. The empirical findings, based on the data from 1983-84 to 2002-03, show that the purchasing power and profitability of the farmers in the crop sector have not improved over the last twenty years.Agricultural Trade, Standard of Living, Pakistan

Determinants oF Recent Inflation in Pakistan

The expansionary economic policies of the government and of the central bank (State Bank of Pakistan – SBP), which on one side resulted in impressive economic performance, stimulated a rise in the Consumer Price Index (CPI) on the other. This initiated a debate on the determinants of the recent inflation. Some blamed fiscal policy or monetary policy, while others blamed imported inflation, administered prices or mismanagement and loose control of the government. This study, adopting an econometric framework, focuses on the identification of the main determinants of recent inflation trends. Using data from the 1972-73 to 2005-06 period, applying ordinary least square method and verifying results through Breusch-Godfrey Serial Correlation LM and Augmented Dickey-Fuller tests, it finds that the most important determinants of inflation in 2005-06 were adaptive expectations, private sector credit and rising import prices. Whereas, the fiscal policy’s contribution to inflation was minimal.Fiscal policy; monetary Policy; Inflation; Determinants

Empirical investigation of key business factors for digital game performance

Game development is an interdisciplinary concept that embraces software engineering, business, management, and artistic disciplines. This research facilitates a better understanding of the business dimension of digital games. The main objective of this research is to investigate empirically the effect of business factors on the performance of digital games in the market and to answer the research questions asked in this study. Game development organizations are facing high pressure and competition in the digital game industry. Business has become a crucial dimension, especially for game development organizations. The main contribution of this paper is to investigate empirically the influence of key business factors on the business performance of games. This is the first study in the domain of game development that demonstrates the interrelationship between key business factors and game performance in the market. The results of the study provide evidence that game development organizations must deal with multiple business key factors to remain competitive and handle the high pressure in the digital game industry. Furthermore, the results of the study support the theoretical assertion that key business factors play an important role in game business performance

Critical Success Factors to Improve the Game Development Process from a Developer’s Perspective

© 2016, Springer Science+Business Media New York. The growth of the software game development industry is enormous and is gaining importance day by day. This growth imposes severe pressure and a number of issues and challenges on the game development community. Game development is a complex process, and one important game development choice is to consider the developer’s perspective to produce good-quality software games by improving the game development process. The objective of this study is to provide a better understanding of the developer’s dimension as a factor in software game success. It focuses mainly on an empirical investigation of the effect of key developer’s factors on the software game development process and eventually on the quality of the resulting game. A quantitative survey was developed and conducted to identify key developer’s factors for an enhanced game development process. For this study, the developed survey was used to test the research model and hypotheses. The results provide evidence that game development organizations must deal with multiple key factors to remain competitive and to handle high pressure in the software game industry. The main contribution of this paper is to investigate empirically the influence of key developer’s factors on the game development process

A Reference Framework for Variability Management of Software Product Lines

Variability management (VM) in software product line engineering (SPLE) is introduced as an abstraction that enables the reuse and customization of assets. VM is a complex task involving the identification, representation, and instantiation of variability for specific products, as well as the evolution of variability itself. This work presents a comparison and contrast between existing VM approaches using qualitative meta-synthesis to determine the underlying perspectives, metaphors, and concepts of existing methods. A common frame of reference for the VM was proposed as the result of this analysis. Putting metaphors in the context of the dimensions in which variability occurs and identifying its key concepts provides a better understanding of its management and enables several analyses and evaluation opportunities. Finally, the proposed framework was evaluated using a qualitative study approach. The results of the evaluation phase suggest that the organizations in practice only focus on one dimension. The presented frame of reference will help the organization to cover this gap in practice.Comment: 24 page

A Consumer Perspective on Digital Games: Factors for Successful Game Development

© 2012 IEEE. Contemporary digital game development companies offer a variety of games for diverse consumer tastes. One important game-development factor is considering the consumer perspective. Game development is a complex task, and measuring the consumer experience of games poses an additional challenge. For the successful development of high-quality digital games, the developer must consider and explore all related dimensions as well as discuss aspects with the stakeholders involved. The main contribution of this article is to investigate key consumer factors for digital games that have been reported in studies from the literature

Security Issues in Data Warehouse

Data Warehouse (DWH) provides storage for huge amounts of historical data from heterogeneous operational sources in the form of multidimensional views, thus supplying sensitive and useful information which help decision-makers to improve the organization’s business processes. A data warehouse environment must ensure that data collected and stored in one big repository are not vulnerable. A review of security approaches specifically for data warehouse environment and issues concerning each type of security approach have been provided in this paper