The impact of cash holding, and exchange rate volatility on the firm’s financial performance of all manufacturing sector in Pakistan

Exchange rate movement is a mostly debatable issue amongst economists and strategic financial planners in the economies as a vital phenomenon, of every economy in the developing the world. This study sets out to examine the impact of cash conversion cycle, Size, Age, and exchange rate movement on firms’ financial decisions. The estimation used techniques of static panel data analysis in this study; pooled OLS, random effects, and fixed effects. Interaction techniques are applied to check the impact of the exchange rate by multiplying this variable with the main variables of cash conversion cycle, that is receivable in days and payables in days. The results depict there is a significant negative relationship between return on assets and exchanger rate during the period of review while the beta of cash conversion cycle has negative value; age and size are positive and significant at 1% level with return on assets. Therefore, it is recommended that organizations that have some measure to agreement in foreign currencies can adopt some advanced hedging technique to occupy the exchange rate movements risk to improve firm’s performance

Perceptions of returnees concerning their rehabilitation and reinstatement in Swat District, Pakistan: an evaluative study

This article examines the perception of returnees about their reinstatement and rehabilitation in the Swat District of Pakistan. A satisfaction tool, consisting of various domains and indicators, was used for measuring the returnee’s perceptions at two periods, i.e., before rehabilitation (BR) and after rehabilitation (AR). Data were elicited through a self-administered structured questionnaire from 382 samples drawn from the 47,943 Kabal Tehsil, Swat population. Data were analyzed through descriptive and inferential statistics. The findings depict that the value of all the domains increased by 25.7%. The paired sample t-test results show a rejection of all the null hypotheses, indicating a significant increase in the overall satisfaction of returnees in the AR period. The findings indicate that in the AR period, the highest increase occurred in SWL (Satisfaction with Life) domain and the lowest in GOV (Government). This study concludes that the satisfaction of returnees can be further improved by focusing on the domains with a lower level of satisfaction, such as the Government and Social Support domains. Additionally, the tool adopted in this study is significant for measuring the satisfaction level of the distressed population in Pakistan and beyond

Cash conversion cycle sensitivity by moderating role of exchange rates volatility on firm’s financial performance

The cycle of cash conversion relates to the time spread between the value of cash paid for purchases and the cash receipt from turnover. Using the State Bank of Pakistan data, this study introduces the direct and moderating role of the exchange rate, effective through the efficient execution of the cash conversion cycle between Pakistani 302 manufacturing companies from 1999–2015. Using the fixed effect as the static panel model and system GMM as a dynamic panel, it is observed that the exchange rate plays an authoritative moderating role between the cash conversion cycle and the financial performance. Results of the investigation have shown that in static panel analysis with the cash conversion period, the exchange rate has a positive and substantial moderating effect on return on assets and return on equity whereas that ER has a major negative impact on return on assets and return on equity using dynamic panel data analysis GMM. The issue of endogeneity in the static panel is addressed using the advanced approach of the standard error of the panel correction standard error method that changed the position of the significance of the moderator variable. Observers, therefore, intend to evaluate the fluctuations in the exchange rate as one of the variables of the financial output moderator in the context of current metrics such as asset’s returns, equity’s returns and gain more practical expression within their investigated results. © 2021 The Author(s)

The reinstatement of returnees in district swat, Pakistan: An evaluative study of the rehabilitation initiatives

This study attempted to develop a happiness index tool for evaluating rehabilitation initiatives used to reinstate returnees at district Swat, Pakistan. The Happiness Index (HI) tool compares two periods, i.e., HI before rehabilitation (BR) and HI after rehabilitation (AR). The returnees’ happiness index (RHI) is also compared with Pakistan’s Happiness Index to identify the difference. Data for this study were elicited from 382 respondents through a structured survey questionnaire. The results show that after rehabilitation (AR), the returnees’ happiness index improved from 3.89 to 5.36, which is still less than the world happiness index of Pakistan, i.e., 5.65 in 2019. This study concluded that rehabilitation projects had a significantly positive impact on the HI of the returnees. However, more effective and sustainable initiatives are required to align the RHI to the HI of Pakistan. Further, the RHI tool adopted by this study is significant for measuring the happiness of the marginalized and affected people in Pakistan and beyond

Microservices in web objects enabled IoT environment for enhancing reusability

In the ubiquitous Internet of Things (IoT) environment, reusing objects instead of creating new one has become important in academics and industries. The situation becomes complex due to the availability of a huge number of connected IoT objects, and each individual service creates a new object instead of reusing the existing one to fulfill a requirement. A well-standard mechanism not only improves the reusability of objects but also improves service modularity and extensibility, and reduces cost. Web Objects enabled IoT environment applies the principle of reusability of objects in multiple IoT application domains through central objects repository and microservices. To reuse objects with microservices and to maintain a relationship with them, this study presents an architecture of Web of Objects platform. In the case of a similar request for an object, the already instantiated object that exists in the same or from other domain can be reused. Reuse of objects through microservices avoids duplications, and reduces time to search and instantiate them from their registries. Further, this article presents an algorithm for microservices and related objects discovery that considers the reusability of objects through the central objects repository. To support the reusability of objects, the necessary algorithm for objects matching is also presented. To realize the reusability of objects in Web Objects enabled IoT environment, a prototype has been designed and implemented based on a use case scenario. Finally, the results of the prototype have been analyzed and discussed to validate the proposed approach

Generation of Bangla text from universal networking language expression

This paper presents a work on generating Bangla sentences from an interlingua representation called Universal Networking Language (UNL). UNL represents knowledge in the form of semantic network like hyper-graphs which contains disambiguated words, binary semantic relations, and speech act like attributes associated with the words, assisted by the semantically rich lexicon and a set of analysis and generation rules. We have developed a set of generation rules for converting UNL expression to Bangla sentences. Our experiment shows that these rules successfully generate correct Bangla sentences from UNL expressions