Current Standing and Future Challenges of Dairying in Pakistan: A Status Update

Pakistan is considered among the leading raw milk producing countries. Unlike the production systems in the developed countries, milk production systems in Pakistan represent smallholding with subsistence- or market-oriented-level farming followed by peri-urban or commercial-level farming. Historically, dairy sector has been owned and managed by the private sector. During the past two decades, new initiatives have been taken because of the active involvement of corporate private sector. These efforts have resulted in improvements like enlargement of herds and import of high-quality milk germ plasm, the productivity per animal, milk collection, processing and marketing, the supply of dairy inputs (machinery, equipment, feeds, semen, and elite dairy animals), and farmers knowledge, and skills on modern management practices. Conclusively, the dairy sector is performing at some sustainable level to meet the food requirements of the growing population and helping save a handful of foreign exchange. Yet, challenges like local replacements of high genetic potential dairy animals, health hazards of β-casein proteins, antibiotics and aflatoxins, and uneconomical operational costs facing the dairy industry in the near future need to be addressed. The main objective of this chapter is to identify the current trends in dairy industry of Pakistan and describe those factors, which can influence the sustainability and profitability of dairying in the near future

Determinants of capital structure : an empirical study of KSE listed MNCs in Pakistan

Multinational Corporations (MNCs) are generally financed with a mixture of internal debt and equity from the parent corporation. Yet, financial theory has relatively little to say regarding the capital structure and its determinants in an international setting. This research empirically examines the major determinants of capital structure decisions of Multinational Corporations listed on the Karachi Stock Exchange for the period 2005-2017. The data was studied using panel data regression analysis. Results suggest that apart from traditional determinants such as profitability, tangibility, size, Non Debt Tax Shield (NDTS) etc., specific international factors such as political risk, exchange rate risk, agency costs and bankruptcy costs are relevant to the multinational capital structure decision. The results are broadly consistent with theory. It is therefore recommended that the management of listed MNCs in Pakistan should always consider their positions using these capital structure determinants as important inputs before embarking on debt financing decision.peer-reviewe

Salinity, livelihood and agricultural productivity: A case of Hafizabad District

Background: Soil salinity; concentration and or accumulation of salts may pose severe risk on soil productivity and in turn concerned population and farmers. Salt-influenced lands in Pakistan were spread over 6.63 million hectare which is diminishing the agrarian profitability. This study will explore the impact of salinity on livelihood of farmers in district Hafizabad.Methods: Data of 192 small, medium and large farmers was collected from four randomly selected villages of salinity affected area of Hafizabad district of Punjab province of Pakistan using multistage probability sampling technique. SPSS version 21.0 was utilized to analyze the data for generating logical results.Results: Farmers belonging to saline area communities were characterized on the basis of their education, experience, cultivated area, and method of irrigation and technological adoption for analyzing their livelihood typologies. Average yield of wheat was found to be 26mnds/acre, while marketable surplus was high for large farmers due to ownership of more area. Livelihood typologies were derived mainly from on-farm and off-farm income activities of the farmers. Agriculture farm earning in the saline area was estimated as Rs. 10 to 12 thousand per acre. Contribution of off-farm income in household cash flows was estimated in 79% of small, medium and large farmer as less than 15000 indicating the dependency status of the households.Conclusion: Major livelihood source in Salt-affected soils was still agricultural cash inflows beside their contribution to the food basket of consumers. Farmers were in favour of provision of farming inputs on subsidized rates i.e. lime and gypsum as a poverty alleviation strategy in the area for positive promotion of sharing culture with public sector.    Keywords: Salinity; Livelihood; Productivity; Farming experience; Farm size

A journey from Cure to Care- Wellness management for healthy lifestyle: Diabetes management a case study

Smart ubiquitous computing has a vital role to avoid and indicate the preventable lifestyle-based chronic diseases. It is focusing to adopt a healthy lifestyle by converging science and technology in this digital world for improving health and quality of life. From the last decade, the development of wellness applications has supported personalization and self-quantification. These applications facilitate the users through activity tracking and monitoring, based on the raw sensory data to adopt healthy behavior. The challenge of behavior change is not only to indicate the issues but also provides step-by-step coaching and guidance at real time. The realization of behavior change theories through digital technology has revolutionized the lifestyle change in a systematic and measurable manner. We have proposed a methodology to understand the behavior for generating just-in-time intervention for adopting a healthy lifestyle. Wellness platform based behavior analysis is performed using unbiased life-log and questionnaire for qualitative assessment of behavior. Behavior stage wise intervention is provided to adapt behavior for enhancing the quality of life and boost the socio-economic conditions. Personalized education is provided to understand the importance of healthy behavior and motivate the users, whereas just-in-time context-based recommendations have supported the stage-wise adaptation of unhealthy behavior. These capabilities require status evaluation of the activities and an efficient way to portray the comprehensive index of lifestyle habits. The real focus is to correlate the primarily linked habits in appropriate proportion through healthy behavior index (HBI) for personalized wellness support services. The healthy behavior index and behavior change theories through smart technologies

Impact of Corporate Governance on Firm Performance: Evidence from Sugar Mills of Pakistan

This paper examines the impact of corporate governance mechanisms (Board Size, Board Composition, and CEO/Chairman Duality) on firm performance (Return on Asset) in sugar industry of Pakistan. The data of corporate governance mechanisms (Board Size, Board Composition, and CEO/Chairman Duality) collected from 12 listed sugar mills of Pakistan from 2005 to 2010. Using panel data methodology as a method of estimation Arithmetic mean, ANOVA and t-test applied on data by using SPSS. The results raveled that there is a significant impact of corporate governance on firm performance. Results further reveal that there is a significant impact of board size, CEO/Chairman Duality on ROA, and there is insignificant impact of Board Composition on ROA. Keywords: Corporate governance, Board of director, firm performanc

Examining the contribution of fiscal policy on economic growth: Analytical insights from Pakistan

To better understand the influence of fiscal policy (FP) on economic growth (EG) in Pakistan, this study investigates the importance of the amount of output produced by different factors of production in Pakistan's economy. The annual time series data has been collected from the State Bank of Pakistan and World Bank Data-Base from the years (2001-2020). The Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model is used for empirical research to assess the significant factors of EG, and the Augmented Dickey-Fuller (ADF) unit root test is used to ensure that all of the variables are stationary. Using annual time series data from 2001 to 2020. Based on these findings, this study recommends adopting a proactive fiscal policy framework that incorporates expansionary measures. We argue that this strategy has the capacity to stimulate and maintain Pakistan's economic growth path, thereby fostering a more promising and prosperous future. Moreover, the study found the impact of government expenditures (GE), gross fixed capital creation (GFCC), and direct and indirect taxes on Gross domestic Product (GDP). Additionally, findings showed that government expenditures, gross fixed capital creation, indirect, and direct taxes have a strong effect on economic growth. It is argued that an expansionary fiscal policy in the future could greatly benefit Pakistan's economic growth

A Big Data analytics approach for construction firms failure prediction models

Using 693,000 datacells from 33,000 sample construction firms that operated or failed between 2008 and 2017, failure prediction models were developed using artificial neural network (ANN), support vector machine (SVM), multiple discriminant analysis (MDA) and logistic regression (LR). The accuracy of the models on test data surprisingly showed ANN to have only a slightly better accuracy than LR and MDA. The ANN’s number of units in the hidden layer and weight decay hyperparameters were consequently tuned using the grid search. Tuning process led to tedious machine computation that was aborted after many hours without completion. The state of art Big Data Analytics (BDA) technology was, for the first time in failure prediction, consequently employed and the tuning was completed in some seconds. Mean accuracy from cross-validation was used for selection of the model with best parameter values which were used to develop a new ANN model which outperformed all previously developed models on test data. Subsequent use of selected variables to develop new models led to reduced tuning computational cost but not improved performance. Since the real-life effect of a misclassification cost is greater than the tedious computation cost, it was concluded that BDA is the best compromise

2-(3-Methyl­but-2-en-1-yl)-1,2-benziso­thia­zol-3(2H)-one 1,1-dioxide

In the title compound, C12H13NO3S, a saccharin derivative, the dihedral angle between the aromatic and isothia­zole rings is 2.91 (12)°. The planar 3,3-dimethyl­allyl group [maximum deviation = 0.0086 (16) Å] is oriented at dihedral angles of 71.86 (7) and 74.35 (7)° with respect to the aromatic and isothia­zole rings, respectively. In the crystal structure, weak inter­molecular C—H⋯O inter­actions link the mol­ecules into chains along the c axis. A weak C—H⋯π inter­action is also present

Spatial Hazard Assessment Practices in Data Poor Areas: A Participatory Approach towards Natural Disaster Management

For the post assessments of flash flood disaster, Participatory GIS (PGIS) technique in a combination of spatial domain is developed for understanding the local communit

Factors Affecting Impulsive Buying Behavior with Mediating role of Positive Mood: An Empirical Study

This research which is guided by impulse buying literature and “Stimulus-Organism Response (S-O-R) model”, explores the relationship between individual differences and impulse buying behavior directly and indirectly through the mediating role of positive mood. Survey methodology was conducted in order to collect data from 300 customers in Lahore. Convenience sampling technique was used and the associations between the concepts were analyzed by using PLS based SEM analysis. Results of the study prove that the factors which significantly affect impulse buying behavior are positive mood, impulse buying tendency and fashion involvement while insignificant variables for impulse buying are self-esteem, shopping enjoyment and hedonism. SE, IBT, Hedonism and Self-esteem have a direct significant impact with the mediating variable positive mood whereas FI shows an insignificant relation with PM. Results regarding mediation demonstrated that the relationship between IBB and Shopping enjoyment is completely mediated by positive mood but the relationship between fashion involvement, self-esteem, Hedonism, Impulsive buying tendency and IBB is partially mediated by positive mood. This research paper will prove beneficial for marketing practitioners and researchers by developing a comprehensive knowledge and understanding about customer’s impulse buying behavior and its relationship with its determinants. This study validates and extends the “S-O-R model of Mehrabian and Russell (1974)” by incorporating personal traits’ influences  on impulse buying behavior