The Textile Industry in the Philippines and Thailand: A Comparison

Comparison of the Philippines and Thailand textile industry in terms of output, export and TFP growth indicates a better performance of the latter. This paper brings into focus the differences between a pioneer and a latecomer to the industry.garments and textile industries, total factor productivity

El último lector de David Toscana o la lectura como revelación

_En este texto se busca examinar la lectura como eje temático de la novela El último lector (Anagrama, 2004a),1 del escritor regiomontano David Toscana (1961). Asomarse a la propuesta metaliteraria de uno de los exponentes más distinguidos de la narrativa mexicana actual permite un acercamiento a diversas cuestiones asociadas al acto de leer, por ejemplo, el placer estético, los tipos de lectores, la novela como género literario, el paso de la realidad a la ficción, la impostación, así como la relación entre vida y literatura, por señalar algunos. Sobre todo, se está al alcance de una visión de mundo fincada en cierta medida en la asunción de la lectura como descubrimiento y revelación

An eGovernment Platform for Improving Communication among Municipalities and Citizens in the North of Chile

Government and its further development has been increasingly associated with the use of IT and communication. This interconnection is also happening in developing countries such as Chile. This study is designed to assess the e-government infrastructure and the use of IT and communication among some municipalities in Chile in order to implement a platform that allows government to government (G2G), government to employees and government to citizens (G2C) communication. The proposed platform will allow these municipalities to share information about citizens and corporations in the region. This study is conducted in second region of Chile and considered eight municipal governments. The findings suggest that while all the municipalities are highly interested in e-government initiatives, their infrastructure are different and in a very early stage of development. Thus, the study suggested e-government platform highly flexible to incorporate the differences in infrastructure among the municipalities, as secure as possible to allows government interactions, and implemented using an Application Service Provider (ASP) solution. As a result a distributed system using a Java system (J2EE) was the technology chosen e implemented for the ARM2 e-government platform

Ontological Review of Smart City Research

The meaning of the word “city” has evolved since the first urban civilization was labeled as such more than 5,000 years ago. The concept of Smartness in Cities appeared initially because of the advancements in information technology; now cities are working diligently towards being considered “Smart”. However, the term Smart City is still conceptually vague and sometimes biased towards the use of information technology, and not on the city. This article a) presents an ontological framework of Smart City which is logically constructed but grounded in the literature of Smart Cities, and b) maps 373 journal articles—published in 2016 on the topic “smart city”—onto the framework. The mapping reveals that Smart City research in 2016 mainly focuses on the Smart part of the framework, specifically the structural elements, while the City part remains largely unexplored

a review of the instruments of the EU, Germany, France, and Italy

This paper explores how the idea of resilience has made its way into the external action of the European Union (EU) and selected member states (Germany, France and Italy) as a means to address areas of limited statehood and contested orders. It examines the debates informing the development of the EU’s external action and current concerns in economic, political, and migration instruments. The main findings are that the EU’s economic and political instruments have become gradually dominated by resilience framings, with an emphasis on multilateralism, adaptation, and long-term and bottom-up responses. Resilience also increasingly drives the humanitarian assistance and development cooperation policies in Germany and to a lesser extent France, which have gradually moved away from top-down administrative and centralized models of governance. The EU and member states like Italy, however, have been more reluctant to foster resilience to address migration issues. Instead, they have prevented flows of irregular migrants into Europe by means of containment strategies such as improving border management, policing, and surveillance and combating smuggling networks

Testing a model of the relationships among organizational performance, IT-business alignment and IT governance.

Information Technology (IT) is often viewed as a resource that is capable of enhancing organizational performance. However, it is difficult for organizations to measure the actual contribution of IT investments. Despite an abundance of literature, there is an insufficiency of generally applicable frameworks and instruments to help organizations definitively assess the relationship among organizational performance, IT-business alignment, and IT governance. Previous studies have emphasized IT-business alignment as an important enabler of organizational effectiveness; however, the direct and indirect effects of IT governance have not been incorporated into these studies. The purpose of this study was (1) to propose a new model that defines the relationships among IT governance, IT-business alignment, and organizational performance, (2) to develop and validate measures for the IT governance and IT-business alignment constructs, and (3) to test this IT Governance-Alignment-Performance or "IT GAP" model. This study made some novel contributions to the understanding of the factors affecting organizational performance. The quest for IT-business alignment in the MIS literature has been based on the presumption that IT contributes directly to organizational performance. However, this study found that although IT-business alignment does contribute to organizational performance, IT governance is an important antecedent of both IT-business alignment and organizational performance. The major contributions of this work are the development and validation of uni-dimensional scales for both IT-business alignment and IT governance, and the confirmation of the validity of the IT GAP model to explain the hypothesized relationships among the three constructs. Future studies may improve upon this research by using different organizations settings, industries, and stakeholders. This study indicates that in order for organizations to improve the value, contribution, and alignment of IT investments they first need to improve the ways in which they govern their IT activities and the processes and mechanisms by which IT decisions are made

Importance of a Teacher's Racial/Ethnic Background as a Factor in a Student's Academic Achievement: A Study of Mexican Americans in Laredo, Texas

The purpose of this study was to determine the importance of a teacher's racial/ethnic background to a student's academic achievement. The study involved three groups in a minority school population: teachers, college students, and high school seniors. It is hoped that the results of this study will provide useful data which can be used by those involved in the teaching of Mexican Americans and which will also stimulate further research in this area.Curriculum and Instructio

The Content of the Basic/Required MIS Course in a Latin-American MBA

The panel is about the basic/required MIS course in Latin-American MBA programs. Given the current insufficiency of qualified MIS faculty in Latin-America this course is frequently taught by faculty from other areas and its content is often highly technical. The panel (introduced and moderated by Dr. Carlos Ferran) will discuss the current and the ideal content of this course as well as avenues to move forward. Two panelists are resident faculty in Latin-American universities (Dr. Aurora Sanchez –UCNA in Chile– and Dr. David Montesinos –INCAE in Costa Rica–), one visits Latin-America regularly to teach MIS in MBA programs (Dr. Enrique Mu), and one is completely unrelated to Latin-America (Dr. Janis Gogan) who will question why the course should be any different to the ones taught elsewhere. The panel is of interest to Latin-American academics but also for any academic interested on what should be included in the basic/required MIS course in MBA programs regardless of geography