COMPLIANCE TO HACCP AND COMPETITIVENESS OF OMAN FISH PROCESSING

Exports of fish products are very important for the Sultanate of Oman to diversify sources of income and achieve higher standards of living to fishermen. In the past government regulations and support were sufficient to reach markets such as the European Union and the United States. During the last decade, however, there has been more focus on the application of more stringent quality regulations according to international norms namely Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point (HACCP). This paper investigates the perception and compliance of Oman fish companies to HACCP and consequences for corporate success and competitiveness. The paper provides and overview of international and national fish market regulations and the development of seafood regulations in Oman. It also develops an empirical framework to investigate empirically the relation between the adoption of international quality control procedures and success in export markets using an export penetration index. The paper findings show that up to 1998, Oman fish quality regulations differ in scope and objectives from HACCP. For instance, there is no requirement of plant-level quality management system equivalent to HACCP. Also, Oman regulations were based on regular inspections by government agents whereas HACCP is a system-based approach aiming at reducing repeated inspections. Empirical results support the hypothesis put forward; variables reflecting on the quality of fish products, that is, HACCP and sanitation were found to be positively correlated to the export index.Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety,

THE USEFULNESS OF MANAGEMENT ACCOUNTING SYSTEMS, FUNCTIONAL DIFFERENTIATION AND MANAGERIAL EFFECTIVENESS

~tis study examines the role of broad scope information, made available by management accouming system* (MAS), in enchanging mamgerial performance. It is proposed that differentiation of activities into area such us marketing and production in an organizational response to manage uncertainty. The paper argues that such different of activities moderates the association between the extent to which managers use broad scope MAS information and peffornmnce. A study off 75 managers indicated that the association between the extent of use of broad scope MAS inf0rmmion and performance was strottger for managers of marketing than production activities

American Options Based on Malliavin Calculus and Nonparametric Variance Reduction Methods

This paper is devoted to pricing American options using Monte Carlo and the Malliavin calculus. Unlike the majority of articles related to this topic, in this work we will not use localization fonctions to reduce the variance. Our method is based on expressing the conditional expectation E[f(St)/Ss] using the Malliavin calculus without localization. Then the variance of the estimator of E[f(St)/Ss] is reduced using closed formulas, techniques based on a conditioning and a judicious choice of the number of simulated paths. Finally, we perform the stopping times version of the dynamic programming algorithm to decrease the bias. On the one hand, we will develop the Malliavin calculus tools for exponential multi-dimensional diffusions that have deterministic and no constant coefficients. On the other hand, we will detail various nonparametric technics to reduce the variance. Moreover, we will test the numerical efficiency of our method on a heterogeneous CPU/GPU multi-core machine

Citation Analysis: A Comparison of Google Scholar, Scopus, and Web of Science

When faculty members are evaluated, they are judged in part by the impact and quality of their scholarly publications. While all academic institutions look to publication counts and venues as well as the subjective opinions of peers, many hiring, tenure, and promotion committees also rely on citation analysis to obtain a more objective assessment of an author’s work. Consequently, faculty members try to identify as many citations to their published works as possible to provide a comprehensive assessment of their publication impact on the scholarly and professional communities. The Institute for Scientific Information’s (ISI) citation databases, which are widely used as a starting point if not the only source for locating citations, have several limitations that may leave gaps in the coverage of citations to an author’s work. This paper presents a case study comparing citations found in Scopus and Google Scholar with those found in Web of Science (the portal used to search the three ISI citation databases) for items published by two Library and Information Science full-time faculty members. In addition, the paper presents a brief overview of a prototype system called CiteSearch, which analyzes combined data from multiple citation databases to produce citation-based quality evaluation measures