GATS Impacts on Entry Modes and Defensive Marketing Strategies in the Egyptian Banking Sector

This research examines the effects of GATS agreements, both on entry modes and defensive marketing strategies in the Egyptian banking sector. The research population is the Egyptian banking sector, employing a total of 83179, from which a representative sample (equal to 800 responses) was selected. As the research aims are diversified, this sample was divided into two main groups i.e. local banks and foreign branches, investigated using different questionnaires. The latter population includes all the foreign branches working in the Egyptian market; the former includes all banks working in Egypt regardless of their ownership status. Four objectives have been pursued in this research: - (1) Exploring GATS impacts on the Egyptian banking sector as well as identifying variables that affect their perception; (2) Identifying the appropriate defensive marketing strategies for each entry mode and evaluating the marketing practices of the Egyptian banking sector; (3) Identifying pattems of relationships between defensive marketing strategies and four sets of variables (demographics, objectives, rivals, and rivals' competitive advantages); and (4) Determining the factors that affect the selection of each entry mode. Regarding the first research objective, the findings reveal that GATS agreements have positive impacts on the Egyptian banking sector, with significant relationships observed between the perception of GATS impacts and the respondents backgrounds. Secondly, an "Entry Modes- Defensive Marketing Strategies Model" was designed, recommending specific defensive marketing strategies for each bundle of entry modes. Thirdly, strong and significant relationships appear, between selected defensive marketing strategies and four sets of variables i.e. demographics, bank's objectives, perceived competitors, and competitors' competitive advantages. Finally, the selection of entry modes is affected by both bank and target market characteristics. The latter include political stability as well as instability, language differences, religious similarities, values differences, severe competition, and moderate levels of competition; the former include greater as well as less financial resources, and less international experience. The applicability and suitability of these findings for other similar Afiican and Middle East countries are identified

Towards Adaptive Design Strategies for Zero-Carbon Eco-Cities in Egypt

Eco-cities concepts are relatively new initiative launched by the World Bank, to help cities in developing countries realise ecological, social and economic sustainable future. Furthermore, with growing severe climatic events such as the rise in global temperature, flooding, wild land fires, and sea level rise, there is an urgent need to adopt sustainable and ecological design principles for the development of future cities. Egypt, one of the developing countries and third largest populated nation in Africa, is currently facing a series of threats. These include limited access to natural resources in relation to the population size and economic growth. In addition to the continuous challenging climate change implications. Despite that, till now there are no clear laws or legislation for eco-city design and construction. In this manuscript, we are trying to lay hands on hidden potentials and analysing successful private initiatives for existing eco-communities in Egypt. We adopted the analytical case study method tackling different aspects like renewable energy, permaculture, eco-sanitation, solid waste management, vernacular architecture, green transportation and green economy. The research contributes by critically analysing such attempts and concludes with design recommendations and strategies on how to reach an environmentally enriched, healthier, resilient and socially rewarding zero-carbon cities, running on their own locally available resources for the Egyptian cities

Cascaded Multifunctional Metasurfaces for Single-shot Quantitative Phase Gradient Microscopy

We experimentally demonstrate a single-shot quantitative phase gradient microscope by two cascaded multifunctional metasurfaces. Experiments with various specimens show the capability to capture quantitative phase gradient images with single-cell resolution and low noise levels

Computational holographic camera with a dielectric metasurface diffuser

We experimentally demonstrate computational complex optical field imaging by a metasurface diffuser and the speckle-correlation scattering matrix method. Thus, we show that the metasurface diffuser can outperform conventional scattering media in context of computational imaging