Evaluation of leasing as a method of funding Investments in greek agribusiness sector

Funding for acquiring assets in Greek agribusiness sector is very common and supports Greek agribusiness SME's production. Purpose of this study is evaluation of leasing as a method of financing in order to acquire assets used directly in the production process of a business of secondary Greek agribusiness sector or even vertically integrated business. Thus, research was held in December of 2012, collecting proper data from Greek banking sector and considering Tax Legislation. Selection decision of practices financing in the event of such an investment should be made after taking into consideration several factors. Proper financial evaluation of future investment is necessary, while it's too necessary to be compared the financing choices that are given in Greece. Considering Tax Legislation, Banking Practices, and Law on Leasing, financing methods were compared in reference period. Avoiding generalizations, typical examples are given, showing that leasing preceded against borrowing, considering conditions prevailing in Greece at the time. But decision making for selection of financing method is affected by factors, which may lead to either correct or incorrect conclusions for firm's interests, if evaluation is not correct or there are personal interests of decision-makers in the administration. Consequently, incentives to use leasing for financing a business can be a lot, but quite important are ownership structure, nature of investment opportunities, business risk and tax status.(original abstract

Female Entrepreneurship in Agricultural Sector. The Case of Municipality of Pogoni in the Period of Economic Crisis

Purpose of this field research is the study of the multifunctional role of rural women both in development and primary sector’s businesses. The survey was conducted in 2014, in Municipality of Pogoni, Greece, by personal interviews and questionnaire with women holding a small business in primary sector. Thus, the results about female entrepreneurship are unique for this specific rural area. It is concluded that within modernization of agricultural sector, the role of rural women has greatly improved in production and organization of agricultural labor. Female entrepreneurship networking, small businesses’ succession, and necessity and opportunity entrepreneurship in primary sector’s businesses are examined and also how these affect female entrepreneurship. Women entrepreneurs’ opinions were catalogued. Factors such as education and vocational training are important in enhancing the role of rural women. Finally, main problems woman entrepreneur faces, mainly economic and managerial, were pointed out, while economic crisis seems to affect negatively the agricultural sector of this region

Flow Annealed Kalman Inversion for Gradient-Free Inference in Bayesian Inverse Problems

For many scientific inverse problems we are required to evaluate an expensive forward model. Moreover, the model is often given in such a form that it is unrealistic to access its gradients. In such a scenario, standard Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithms quickly become impractical, requiring a large number of serial model evaluations to converge on the target distribution. In this paper we introduce Flow Annealed Kalman Inversion (FAKI). This is a generalization of Ensemble Kalman Inversion (EKI), where we embed the Kalman filter updates in a temperature annealing scheme, and use normalizing flows (NF) to map the intermediate measures corresponding to each temperature level to the standard Gaussian. In doing so, we relax the Gaussian ansatz for the intermediate measures used in standard EKI, allowing us to achieve higher fidelity approximations to non-Gaussian targets. We demonstrate the performance of FAKI on two numerical benchmarks, showing dramatic improvements over standard EKI in terms of accuracy whilst accelerating its already rapid convergence properties (typically in $\mathcal{O}(10)$ steps).Comment: 9 pages, 2 figues. Presented at MaxEnt 2023. Modified version to appear in MaxEnt 2023 proceeding

Corporate Social Responsibility in SMEs and MNEs. The Different Strategic Decision Making

The purpose of this paper is about how the strategic decisions are affected by CSR's factors, how different are the strategies that are being adopted by the SMEs compared to the MNEs. The SMEs represent a major share of economic value creation worldwide, and differ substantially from MNEs in terms of organizational characteristics, behavioral guiding principles, financial and human resources. The literature mainly is focusing on how large multinational corporations (MNEs) can address to environmental and social problems that arise globally. How the largest multinational enterprises (MNEs) engage Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs) in their (inclusive) business strategies, either as suppliers, distributors, customers, innovators or as a target of their CSR policies are searchable. We notice that SMEs possess several organizational characteristics that are favorable for promoting the implementation of CSR related practices. In the contrast, the MNEs possess several characteristics that are favorable for promoting external communication and reporting about CSR, but at the same time constrain the internal implementation. Topics, such as how different is the dedication of the personnel, the sensitivities of the enterprises upon social matters, the critical decisions of the management between SMEs and MNEs, and how the stakeholder engagement affect this strategic decision making are discussed hereafter

Diabetes is associated with increased risk for in-hospital mortality in patients with COVID-19: a systematic review and meta-analysis comprising 18,506 patients

© 2020, Hellenic Endocrine Society. Purpose: Infectious diseases are more frequent and can be associated with worse outcomes in patients with diabetes. The aim of this study was to systematically review and conduct a meta-analysis of the available observational studies reporting the effect of diabetes on mortality among hospitalized patients with COVID-19. Methods: The Medline, Embase, Google Scholar, and medRxiv databases were reviewed for identification of eligible studies. A random effects model meta-analysis was used, and I2 was utilized to assess the heterogeneity. In-hospital mortality was defined as the endpoint. Sensitivity, subgroup, and meta-regression analyses were performed. Results: A total of 18,506 patients were included in this meta-analysis (3713 diabetics and 14,793 non-diabetics). Patients with diabetes were associated with a higher risk of death compared with patients without diabetes (OR 1.65; 95% CI 1.35–1.96; I2 77.4%). The heterogeneity was high. A study-level meta-regression analysis was performed for all the important covariates, and no significant interactions were found between the covariates and the outcome of mortality. Conclusion: This meta-analysis shows that that the likelihood of death seems to be higher in diabetic patients hospitalized with COVID-19 compared with non-diabetic patients. Further studies are needed to assess whether this association is independent or not, as well as to investigate the role of adequate glycemic control prior to infection with COVID-19

Measurement of residual nucleus cross sections and recoil energies in p + Fe collisions at 300, 500, 750, 1000 and 1500 MeV

The production of residual nuclei in p + Fe collisions has been measured at GSI on the FRS facility by means of the reverse kinematic techniques at 300, 500, 750, 1000 and 1500 MeV/A. The cross-sections larger than 0.01 mb of all isotopes with Z larger than 8 have been obtained. Velocity distributions were also measured. Comparisons to models describing spallation reactions and some empirical formulae often used in astrophysics are presented. These data are directly used to calculate impurety production and DPAs in a thin window as foreseen in spallation sources or accelerator-driven systems

Spallation Residues in the Reaction 56Fe + p at 0.3, 0.5, 0.75, 1.0 and 1.5 A GeV

The spallation residues produced in the bombardment of 56}Fe at 1.5, 1.0, 0.75, 0.5 and 0.3 A GeV on a liquid-hydrogen target have been measured using the reverse kinematics technique and the Fragment Separator at GSI (Darmstadt). This technique has permitted the full identification in charge and mass of all isotopes produced with cross-sections larger than 10^{-2} mb down to Z=8. Their individual production cross-sections and recoil velocities at the five energies are presented. Production cross-sections are compared to previously existing data and to empirical parametric formulas, often used in cosmic-ray astrophysics. The experimental data are also extensively compared to different combinations of intra-nuclear cascade and de-excitation models. It is shown that the yields of the lightest isotopes cannot be accounted for by standard evaporation models. The GEMINI model, which includes an asymmetric fission decay mode, gives an overall good agreement with the data. These experimental data can be directly used for the estimation of composition modifications and damages in materials containing iron in spallation sources. They are also useful for improving high precision cosmic-ray measurements.Comment: Submited to Phys. Rev. C (10/2006

Measurements of high-energy neutron-induced fission of (nat)Pb and (209)Bi

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial License 3.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any noncommercial medium, provided the original work is properly citedThe CERN Neutron Time-Of-Flight (n_TOF) facility is well suited to measure low cross sections as those of neutron-induced fission in subactinides. The cross section ratios of (nat)Pb and (209)Bi relative to (235)U and (238)U were measured using PPAC detectors and a fragment coincidence method that allows us to identify the fission events. The present experiment provides first results for neutron-induced fission up to 1 GeV. Good agreement is found with previous experimental data below 200 MeV. The comparison with proton-induced fission indicates that the limiting regime where neutron-induced and proton-induced fission reach equal cross sections is close to 1 GeV