Financing Pattern of Multinational Enterprises in a Developing Country - The Sri Lankan Experience

Multinational enterprises (MNEs) have played a vital role in the economies of developing countries. However, empirical studies on some crucial aspects of MNE involvement in these economies appear to be inadequate. One such aspect is their financing pattern. This paper attempts to shed some light on this aspect through an analysis of balance sheet data of a sample of MNE affiliates operating in the manufacturing sector of Sri Lanka. The findings do not support the generally held view that MNEs gear themselves more highly than local firms and that they make use of a greater degree of domestic commercial bank credit. Further, the study reveals that the direct financial contributions of parent companies to equity capital of their affiliates are very small, indicating a low level of direct foreign inflow of capital into the host country

Colonialism of Accounting Education in Developing Countries: The Experiences of Singapore and Sri Lanka

This paper provides a comparative analysis of the nature of accounting education in Singapore and Sri Lanka. Both these countries were British colonies for nearly one hundred and fifty years and inherited their accounting education from the British. Consequently, even after nearly fifty years of independence, Sri Lanka is still following the colonial system for producing its accountants. Singapore, however, has successfully moved away from it within four years of independence. More importantly, the paper indicates that if a developing country continues to depend so heavily on foreign accounting bodies or produces accountants locally through education programmes based on the curricula of Western developed countries, the consequences can be disastrous

Accounting Education in Australia and Japan: A Comparative Examination

In recent years there has been a great concern among governments, professional bodies and educators for changes in accounting education. It seems useful for planners of such changes to consider the methods of training accountants in different countries as one country can learn from the experiences of another. In the existing literature, however, there is a dearth of comparative studies on this area of education in different countries. This paper presents an analysis of accounting education in Australia and Japan highlighting the major differences in the two countries. The analysis reveals that accounting education in Australia places emphasis on financial accounting while the emphasis is on cost and management accounting in Japan. It also shows that being firm-specific through comprehensive in-house training the Japanese system is in a better position to produce accountants capable of adapting accounting systems to the different work situations which result from technological changes and automation

Tea Collector: Web Based Data Tracking Solution for Tea Smallholders

The sustainability of a tea factory also depends on the trustworthiness of the data collection and finance management. Collection of tea leaves and tea processing are the main two processes done by a tea factory. In the process of tea collection, they must handle a large set of data about the tea collection, selling, and payments. Data processing and summarizing can be identified as critical process because these summarizations finally sent to the factory for further analyzes. All these documentation processes are still handled mostly in a manual way. This manual process may lead to malpractices sometimes, especially when handling payments. So, there is a need to develop an easy way to manage all the documentation processes online. In this specific research, our idea is to implement a web application with features like adding, updating, and deleting data with a generation of summary reports. The main reason we need to shift from a normal manual process to an online managed process is that they can consume their time by managing the data more secure and trustworthy way. We have implemented this by using MERN stack as the technology where we use react.js for the frontend and express.js for the backend developments. We used MongoDB as the database and Heroku to host the application

Relative Profitability of Multinational Enterprises in a Developing Host Country: The Sri Lankan Experience

Multinational enterprises (MNEs) have played a vital role in the economies of developing countries. However, empirical studies on some crucial aspects of MNE involvement in these economies appear to be inadequate. One such aspect is the profitability of MNEs vis a vis indigenous enterprises. Therefore, covering a wider spectrum of individual country situations is needed in order to broaden our understanding of this aspect of MNE operations. This paper attempts to shed some light on this aspect through an analysis of balance sheet data of a sample of MNE affiliates operating in the manufacturing sector of Sri Lanka. The empirical analysis of this study does not support the generally held view that MNEs are more profitable than their local counterparts. It reveals that profitability is not influenced simply by the origin of control or multinationality of investment when other factors such as the nature of industry and the age of firms are taken into account

Structure and Growth Performance of Small Industry in Sri Lanka

Because of the inability of the agricultural sector, due to its physical limitations, in continuing as the major contributor to the economic development of Sri Lanka the need to promote the industrial sector has increased greatly in recent years. Small-scale industrial enterprises, in particular, deserve more encouragement since their labour intensive character is consistent with the relative abundance of labour and the scarcity of capital in the economy. However, statistics reveal that the growth performance of the small industry segment has not been satisfactory after the year 1977. The main reason for this seems to be the unfavourable effect of the 1977 policy reforms. It is necessary, therefore, that while protecting small enterprises from the harmful effects of the said policy reforms, steps be taken to promote small industry on the basis of a well planned longterm strategy as a complementary segment in the overall industrial sector, if Sri Lanka is to succeed in her industrialisation effort

Determinants of Factor Proportions in Manufacturing in a Developing Country

Employment generation is a main objective of a developing country\u27s industrialisation policy. The realisation of this objective depends largely on the nature of factor intensity in its manufacturing industry. This has generated a considerable amount of academic discussion on the determinants of factor intensity. However, most of these studies have arrived at differing conclusions, creating a necessity for more extensive empirical investigation into a wider range of developing country situations. This paper presents results from an analysis of factor intensity in the Sri Lankan manufacturing industry. The results indicate that large firms tend to be more capital intensive than small firms. There is also evidence that locally owned firms are more labour intensive than foreign owned firms, Further, high-wage firms seem to use relatively more capital intensive production techniques than low-wage firms

Determinants of growth in small manufacturing firms: The Japanese experience

While previous studies have reported the causes of failure of small firms, little empirical research has examined the factors contributing to their success or growth. We attempt to shed some light on this aspect through a study of a sample of small manufacturing firms operating in the Kobe region of Japan. The purpose of this study is to examine a set of firm and industry-specific variables that may have an impact on the growth of firms. The results of the study suggest that the firm size has a significant impact on the growth of firms, with relatively bigger firms in the small-scale sector performing better than smaller ones. Similarly, firms with more skilled labour seem to have a superior performance record. The results also indicate that the growth of firms is heavily influenced by the type of industry

The development of accounting systems and accounting education in high income oil exporting countries: An overview

For a considerable length of time, the development of accounting in Third World countries (TWCs) has been identified by many writers on the basis of viewing these countries as a single economic group. As a result of the rapid economic changes taken place after the oil boom the development of accounting systems and accounting education in high income oil exporting countries (HIOECs) has been significantly different from that of other TWCs. Therefore, the unified view of Third World accounting is no longer appropriate and the economic differentiation needs to be taken into account in any realistic classification of accounting in this part of the world. Further, the \u27sphere of influence\u27 methodology used by Enthoven (1977) for classifying accounting systems in the Third World is not applicable to HIOECs because, unlike in other TWCs, the development of accounting and accounting education in this particular group of countries is not an outcome of such historical factors as colonial experience and/or colonial affinity