Intangible capital and performance: Overview over previous models

Intangible capital represents all of the company's intangible assets: these are separately identifiable assets that contribute to the company's current and future profitability, but whose value does not appear on the balance sheet. Understanding intangible capital has become, today, a challenge for managers, financiers and accountants, because, in a context of increased competition, the role of this capital in the creation of value for all stakeholders is a recent concern. Similarly, the omnipresence of intangibles has accelerated reflection on the sources of business performance. The overall value of a company is based on a mix of different types of intangible resources, but also on its dynamic ability to combine, renew, develop, etc. Thus, it is not necessarily the company richest in physical resources that is competitive because intangible capital has become the economic concept associated with the essential of the value of the company. However, research from emerging nations reveals that there is a dearth of empirical study in Africa. Despite considerable contributions from experts overseas, the notion of intangible capital is still in its infancy in this emerging country. As a result, there is a strong need to investigate the idea of intangible capital and evaluate if existing metrics can be applied to all emerging nations. All these elements lead us to ask the following question. How intangible capital, through its human components, organizational and relational, contributes to the performance of companies?  To answer this question, we will attempt to analyze the mechanisms of interaction between the various components of the intangible capital of companies by presenting a narrative literature review that aims to investigate the relationship between intangible capital and business performance.   Keywords: Intangible capital; Performance; Human capital; Organizational capital; relational capital. JEL Classification: M50 Paper type: Theoretical Research Intangible capital represents all of the company's intangible assets: these are separately identifiable assets that contribute to the company's current and future profitability, but whose value does not appear on the balance sheet. Understanding intangible capital has become, today, a challenge for managers, financiers and accountants, because, in a context of increased competition, the role of this capital in the creation of value for all stakeholders is a recent concern. Similarly, the omnipresence of intangibles has accelerated reflection on the sources of business performance. The overall value of a company is based on a mix of different types of intangible resources, but also on its dynamic ability to combine, renew, develop, etc. Thus, it is not necessarily the company richest in physical resources that is competitive because intangible capital has become the economic concept associated with the essential of the value of the company. However, research from emerging nations reveals that there is a dearth of empirical study in Africa. Despite considerable contributions from experts overseas, the notion of intangible capital is still in its infancy in this emerging country. As a result, there is a strong need to investigate the idea of intangible capital and evaluate if existing metrics can be applied to all emerging nations. All these elements lead us to ask the following question. How intangible capital, through its human components, organizational and relational, contributes to the performance of companies?  To answer this question, we will attempt to analyze the mechanisms of interaction between the various components of the intangible capital of companies by presenting a narrative literature review that aims to investigate the relationship between intangible capital and business performance.   Keywords: Intangible capital; Performance; Human capital; Organizational capital; relational capital. JEL Classification: M50 Paper type: Theoretical Research&nbsp

Bayesian optimization for sparse neural networks with trainable activation functions

In the literature on deep neural networks, there is considerable interest in developing activation functions that can enhance neural network performance. In recent years, there has been renewed scientific interest in proposing activation functions that can be trained throughout the learning process, as they appear to improve network performance, especially by reducing overfitting. In this paper, we propose a trainable activation function whose parameters need to be estimated. A fully Bayesian model is developed to automatically estimate from the learning data both the model weights and activation function parameters. An MCMC-based optimization scheme is developed to build the inference. The proposed method aims to solve the aforementioned problems and improve convergence time by using an efficient sampling scheme that guarantees convergence to the global maximum. The proposed scheme is tested on three datasets with three different CNNs. Promising results demonstrate the usefulness of our proposed approach in improving model accuracy due to the proposed activation function and Bayesian estimation of the parameters

External debt, economic growth and investment in Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia

Most developing countries are dependent on external borrowing to achieve economic growth. However, external borrowing requires fixed payments independent of the actual return on the invested funds. If a country either invests the money inefficiently or is subject to unexpected difficulties, it may not be able to meet contracted service payments. Potential debt servicing problems have existed for many years, and recently, the actual occurrence of service interruptions has become more frequent. Despite the difficulty of servicing debt, it is optimal, in an economic sense, for selected Arab countries to borrow from abroad. Foreign capital goods are usually scarce in the selected countries, so their productivity is relatively high. External borrowing allows more imports of capital without forcing down consumption. As long as the productivity of the capital exceeds its cost, debt servicing problems should not arise. A study of three Arab countries indicates that, real GDP growth can be increased through external borrowing. However, a higher level of debt raises the likelihood of debt servicing difficulties. Even when the use of debt is efficient, a heavier debt burden makes these selected Arab countries more susceptible to unexpected shocks. However, if GDP growth is not overly ambitious, the debt servicing burden stabilizes and may eventually begin to decline. The greatest danger arises when future debt servicing requirements are ignored. A sharp increase in external debt may allow high GDP growth in the short run, but eventually the resulting debt service will become unsustainable. This study therefore, examines the impact of external debt on economic growth and external debt service on investment in three Arab countries from the middle income group in North Africa over the period 1982-2005. This study employs developed Chowdhury growth and investment models to determine the impact of external debt on economic growth during the period after the debt crisis. Moreover, a single equation model is inappropriate to analyze the relationship between external loans, economic growth, debt servicing and investment due to there being a circular relationship among them and other macroeconomic variables. Therefore, if only the output equation or investment equation are estimated, this is likely to understate the impact of external debt on economic growth. In addition, the relationship between external debt, investment and economic growth is not a simple one for a number of reasons. Firstly, the relationship between external debt, debt servicing, investment and economic growth, both indirectly and directly, must be viewed in terms of their impact on domestic savings and exports. Secondly, a complex relationship exists between external debt servicing and economic growth. Therefore, this study uses two equations to investigate the impact of external debt on economic growth and external debt service on investment in three Arab countries (Tunisia, Egypt and Morocco using a macro econometric model estimated for the period 1982-2005. The empirical findings reveal that external debt does not affect growth directly. The results indicate that external debt affects investment positively and is statistically significantly indicating external debt in selected countries encourages investment rather than depresses it. The findings of this research are consistent with the economic theory that external loans stimulate economic growth in less developed countries. Therefore, investment plays a very important role in the growth of selected Arab countries‟ economies. Furthermore, the result also confirms that there is no sign of a crowding out effect through which external debt service is hypothesized to affect investment. The important finding that external debt tends to have a relationship with investment and growth suggests that relying on external debt to enhance economic growth is a good policy. In addition, these countries need to supplement their lack of domestic saving with external loans and other forms of foreign capital such as foreign direct investment