HYBRIDITY IN PUBLIC MANAGEMENT: The Consequences of its Adoption in Public Sector Management in Ghana

Ghana’s Public Sector, which comprises the various Ministries, Municipalities, Departments and Agencies (MMDA’s), has come under intense criticism over the past decade over its bureaucratic and inefficient tendencies, comparable to the private sector. With the advantage of hindsight, contemporary political leaders are restructuring, retrenching, empowering and repositioning Public Sector Organizations to make them cost effective and business-like, and also meet its Millennium Development Goals. This development has led to a steady increase in hybrid features of some public institutions and hence, the preference for hybrid organizations to execute some key public policies and projects. The synergy of public, private as well as the voluntary sector values and ethos is essential for organizational growth and development. It is evident from current public policy choices and analysis that the country will soon witness substantial proliferation of hybrid organizations. However, the palpable prospects and challenges that are likely to emanate from this paradigm shift still remain oblivious. The quest for maximizing profit without losing sight of its fiducially public duties has bequeathed further obligations on public sector managers and inadvertently affected management style. The essay examined and expatiated the possible consequences the adoption of hybrid organizations will have on public management practices since the practicality of managing hybrids is quite problematic. The research also accounted for the various factors and developments that have led to this sudden preference for hybridity. Qualitative research method was adopted and the canonical use of face-to-face interviews was resorted to in soliciting data. In fine, it concludes that hybridity presents the country with enormous opportunities and its significance would be greatly realized when measures are taken by stakeholders to ameliorate old systemic practices. The Electricity Company of Ghana, Driver Vehicle Licensing Authority, Tema Oil Refinery, as well as Ghana Water Company constituted the primary cases in point of analysis and the final data was subjected to qualitative analysis in bridging the gap between theory and practice.fi=Opinnäytetyö kokotekstinä PDF-muodossa.|en=Thesis fulltext in PDF format.|sv=Lärdomsprov tillgängligt som fulltext i PDF-format

EXCHANGE RATE FLUCTUATIONS AND DOMESTIC INVESTMENT: EVIDENCE FROM GHANA

Exchange rate fluctuation is one of the critical determinants of domestic investment in Ghana. Though exchange rate fluctuations can have an asymmetric effect on domestic investment, other studies assumed a symmetric relationship between these variables. Using annual data from the period of 1980-2017, the Linear Autoregressive Distributed Lag Model (ARDL) and Non-linear Autoregressive Distributed Lag model (NARDL) was used to investigate the symmetric and asymmetric effect of exchange rate fluctuation on domestic investment by creating two new variables to substitute exchange rate fluctuations (appreciation and depreciation variables). From the first objective, fluctuation in the rate exchange was found to harm domestic investment. The second objective confirmed the asymmetric effect of exchange rate fluctuations on domestic investment. Income had a positive effect on domestic investment which affirms the assertion of the accelerator theory of investment. The other explanatory variables included in the study, foreign direct investment and interest rate differential were found to be detrimental to domestic investment while domestic credit to the private sector had a positive effect on domestic investment. The study recommends that the Bank of Ghana should put in place long-lasting, effective, and efficient measures to stabilise the exchange rate.JEL: F31, F41, E22, E44, E51, E52, E58  Article visualizations

An efficient 2D router architecture for extending the performance of inhomogeneous 3D NoC-based multi-core architectures

To meet the performance and scalability demands of the fast-paced technological growth towards exascale and Big-Data processing with the performance bottleneck of conventional metal based interconnects, alternative interconnect fabrics such as inhomogeneous three dimensional integrated Network-on-Chip (3D NoC) has emanated as a cost-effective solution for emerging multi-core design. However, these interconnects trade-off optimized performance for cost by restricting the number of area and power hungry 3D routers. Consequently, in this paper, we propose a low-latency adaptive router with a low-complexity single-cycle bypassing mechanism to alleviate the performance degradation due to the slow 2D routers in inhomogeneous 3D NoCs. By combining the low-complexity bypassing technique with adaptive routing, the proposed router is able to balance the traffic in the network to reduce the average packet latency under various traffic loads. Simulation shows that, the proposed router can reduce the average packet delay by an average of 45% in 3D NoCs

A survey of emerging architectural techniques for improving cache energy consumption

The search goes on for another ground breaking phenomenon to reduce the ever-increasing disparity between the CPU performance and storage. There are encouraging breakthroughs in enhancing CPU performance through fabrication technologies and changes in chip designs but not as much luck has been struck with regards to the computer storage resulting in material negative system performance. A lot of research effort has been put on finding techniques that can improve the energy efficiency of cache architectures. This work is a survey of energy saving techniques which are grouped on whether they save the dynamic energy, leakage energy or both. Needless to mention, the aim of this work is to compile a quick reference guide of energy saving techniques from 2013 to 2016 for engineers, researchers and students

Effect of Some Commonly Used Herbicides on Soil Microbial Population

Herbicide application has become an integral part of vibrant agricultural productivity in the whole world since its benefit has been overwhelming over the years. However, its toxic impact on the non-target soil microorganisms which play roles in degrading organic matter, nitrogen and nutrient recycling and decomposition needs to be considered.  In the present study, the effect of four (4) most commonly used herbicides in Ghana; Atrazine, 2, 4-D amine, Glyphosate and Paraquat on soil microorganisms was assessed over a period of fifteen continuous days (exposure period). The herbicide treatments were the normal recommended field rate, (6.67 mg active ingredient per gram of soil for Atrazine, 6.17 mg for 2, 4-D amine, 5.56 mg for Glyphosate, and 2.46 mg for Paraquat), half and double of the recommended field rate. Bacterial and Fungal populations were then determined at a five-day interval up to the 15th day after treatment. The data gathered from bacterial enumeration was logarithmically transformed before graphs of mean bacterial were plotted against the exposure period for each selected herbicide. Bacterial population and percentage organic matter did not show any significant differences relative to the exposure period in this study (p < 0.05). However, the deleterious impact of the herbicides was seen as Paraquat treatment resulted in reduction in the bacterial population for five, ten and fifteen Days after treatment (DAT) in the treatment with half the recommended field rate. Glyphosate followed with 69.3%, 12.7%, and 18.0%; 2,4-D amine had 44.8%, 33.5%, and 21.6%; and lastly Atrazine had 41.8%, 44.5% and 13.6% bacterial population 5DAT, 10DAT and 15DAT respectively. The inhibition effect on the fungal population was very specific as some fungi (such as Aspergillus niger, Trichoderma viride, Collectotrichum gloeosporioides, Aspergillus flavus, Mucor, Penicillium, Curvularia lunata) which were present in the baseline determination (control) did not appear in the treatment. Percentage organic matter for the treatment did not vary much with the baseline determination (control) but the impact was observed in the various levels of treatments for all the herbicides. A similar study should be conducted on a normal field condition where herbicide treatments would be carried out on a normal field condition since most of the previous studies had the herbicide treatment carried out under laboratory condition. It will also be very appropriate if further research work is carried out to identify the specific components of these herbicides which favour the growth and development of certain beneficial microorganisms such as fungi and bacterial. Keywords: herbicides, microbial population, biomass, baseline, organic matter, treatments

Family Class Immigration: Implications for Post-Multiculturalism

This paper examines the implications of post-multiculturalism for family class immigration to Canada. The authors argue that the goal off acilitating family reunification is not facilitated by Canadian immigration policy. A new, more inclusive definition of ''family,'' one that reflects the cultural and social diversity of newcomer groups must be adopted in order for the reunification program to fulfill its mandate.Cet article examine les implications de l'Après-Multiculturalisme sur l'immigration des groupe familiaux au Canada. Les auteurs développent une argumentation selon laquelle l'objectif de réunification des familles n'est guère facilité par la politique canadienne d'immigration. Une définition nouvelle, plus intégrante, de la notion de "famille" reflétant la diversité culturelle et sociale des groupes de nouveaux arrivants doit être adoptée de manière à permettre au programme de réunification de remplir adéquatement son mandat

A study of FPGA-based System-on-Chip designs for real-time industrial application

This paper shows the benefits of the Field Programming Gate Array (FPGAs) in industrial control applications. The author starts by addressing the benefits of FPGA and where it is useful. As well as, the author has done some FPGA’s evaluation researches on the FPGA performing explaining the performance of the FPGA and the design tools. To show the benefits of the FPGA, an industrial application example has been used. The application is a real-time face detection and tracking using FPGA. Face tracking will depend on calculating the centroid of each detected region. A DE2-SoC Altera board has been used to implement this application. The application based on few algorithms that filter the captured images to detect them. These algorithms have been translated to a Verilog code to run it on the DE2-SoC boar

A study of recent contributions on performance and simulation techniques for accelerator devices

High performance computing platform is moving from homogeneous individual unites to heterogeneous systems where each unit is a combination of homogeneous cores and accelerator devices. Accelerators such as GPUs, FPGAs, DSPs, are usually designed for specific and intensive type of computing tasks. The presence of these devises have created fresh and attractive development platforms for developers and designers as well as novel performance analysis frameworks and optimization tools. This is the cutting edge in performance of some accelerator devices like: GPUs and Intel’s Xeon Phi. We outline some of the existing heterogeneous systems and their development frameworks. The core of this study is a review of performance modeling of these devices