Impact evaluation of structural adjustment program: a case of Pakistan

We analyzed the effect of Structural Adjustment Program (SAP) on macroeconomic variables of Pakistan using annual time series data for the years 1981-2001. The impact of four policy instruments of SAP, i.e. reduction in budget deficit, increase in indirect taxes,adjusting the exchange rate and sliding down of subsidies, on employment, income distribution, per-capita income and inflation has been analyzed. It is found that the first policy instrument, i.e. decrease in budget deficit has affected employment, income distribution and inflation adversely. The second policy instrument of imposition of indirect tax negatively affected the employment, income distribution, per capita income and positively affected the inflation. The third policy instrument of SAP was adjustment of exchange rate. It is estimated that adjusting exchange rate has resulted into increased unemployment and inflation. The fourth policy instrument of shrink in subsidies augmented the unemployment, unequal distribution of income and inflation and dwindled the percapita income. It appears that SAP has adversely affected the major socioeconomic variables of the economy. Currently the government is considering for loan from IMF, so it is proposed to avoid such type of policy directives from IMF.Structural Adjustment Program, Budget deficit, Indirect taxes, Exchange rate, Subsidies, Employment, Income distribution, Per-capita income, Inflation,Pakistan

Urdu News Clustering Using K-Mean Algorithm On The Basis Of Jaccard Coefficient And Dice Coefficient Similarity

Clustering is the unsupervised machine learning process that group data objects into clusters such that objects within the same cluster are highly similar to one another. Every day the quantity of Urdu text is increasing at a high speed on the internet. Grouping Urdu news manually is almost impossible, and there is an utmost need to device a mechanism which cluster Urdu news documents based on their similarity. Clustering Urdu news documents with accuracy is a research issue and it can be solved by using similarity techniques i.e., Jaccard and Dice coefficient, and clustering k-mean algorithm. In this research, the Jaccard and Dice coefficient has been used to find the similarity score of Urdu News documents in python programming language. For the purpose of clustering, the similarity results have been loaded to Waikato Environment for Knowledge Analysis (WEKA), by using k-mean algorithm the Urdu news documents have been clustered into five clusters. The obtained cluster's results were evaluated in terms of Accuracy and Mean Square Error (MSE). The Accuracy and MSE of Jaccard was 85% and 44.4%, while the Accuracy and MSE of Dice coefficient was 87% and 35.76%. The experimental result shows that Dice coefficient is better as compared to Jaccard similarity on the basis of Accuracy and MSE

Readability Analysis of Text in English Textbooks of Federal Board of Intermediate and Secondary Education for Higher Secondary Level

This study mainly focuses on the readability of the text of the HSSC-II textbook. Considering the importance of textbook evaluation, the study evaluated the English textbook of HSSC-II, which is taught at all the colleges affiliated with the Federal Board of Intermediate and Secondary Education (FBISE). Selected texts from the book have been analyzed so as to determine their readability. The texts were analyzed through an online text evaluation tool, the Text Readability Consensus Calculator (TRCC), which determines the grade level, text readability level, and age of the reader as well as the appropriation of the text. The readability scores of the text yielded by the TRCC were compared with the students\u27 results of the comprehension test. This comparison reveals that the original text is "fairly difficult to read" for 13–15-year-old native readers among 8th and 9th grade students, while the evaluator rates the simplified text as "fairly easy to read" for native readers among 12–14-year-old 7th and 8th grade students. While the results of the comprehension test for non-native readers show that the text is extremely difficult, non-native 12th graders with an average age of 17 could only get 39% in the original text and 47.6% in the simplified text. The research concludes with some suggestions for the text designer to consider various features for making text readability compatible with the grade level of the students

FEAR OF FAILURE AS A BARRIER TO START-UP AND ITS EFFECTS ON ASPIRANT ENTREPRENEURS

Researchers have looked into the theory of planned behaviour from many angles as it has a number of applications. Its role in explaining the entrepreneurial intention has widely been acknowledged. Keeping in view, that the area still needs to be explored. Keeping this need in mind, this article investigates the association between entrepreneurial education and entrepreneurial intentions among university students in Pakistan. Besides, the direct relationship between these two constructs, the study also examines the moderating role fear of failure of social embarrassment between the EE-EI link. In all, 223 questionnaires from first- and second-year students were analyzed using hierarchal regression. The prior studies on the EE-EI relationship have mainly focused on the developed economies and have overlooked the potential effect of FF that prevents the university students to create their own venture, even though they take the entrepreneurship course as compulsory subject. Thus, this study fills the gaps in the EI literature and examines the moderating role of FF in the subject relationship in the context of a developing country Pakistan. The findings of the study reveal that EE is positively and significantly linked with the EI. The findings also report that FF negatively moderates the well-established link between EE and EI. The study provides several avenues for future research on EI and EE

Pathogenicity of two seed-borne fungi commonly involved in maize seeds of eight districts of Azad Jammu and Kashmir, Pakistan

This study was aimed to evaluate the pathogenicity of two mostly prevailing fungal species on maize (Zea maize L.) from different localities of Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK), Pakistan. Pathogenic fungi deteriorate food grains by producing mycotoxins and aflotoxins during storage consequently shedding menace on its nutritive quality. There were 12 species of mycoflora associated with maize seeds in the analyzed samples. Fusaium and Aspergillus species were the largest group of seed-borne fungal species present in all localities (87.25% and 82.50%, respectively). Fusarium moniliforme causes ear rot, kernel rot, stalk rot, seedling blight, seed rot, wilt and stunt and Aspergillus niger is responsible for rot of stored grain. These species were tested to determine their pathogenicity to maize seed germination and seedlings. Pathogenicity findings depicted that maize variety under cultivation in the area was highly susceptible to these fungal pathogens as Bhimber (61.5%) and Mirpur (60.25%) zones had more prevalence than other areas of AJK (23.5%). Results show that Fusarium moniliforme had 50.2% pathogenicity on seeds and 6.55% on seedlings, whilst Aspergillus niger had 62.87% on seeds and 11.24% on seedlings. These depicts that mycoflora had significant detrimental impacts on seeds and seedling’s life of maize.Keywords: Pathogenicity, seed-borne, mycoflora, maize, germination, Azad KashmirAfrican Journal of Biotechnology Vol. 12(12), pp. 1363-137

Impact of Sparse and Dense Deployment of Nodes Under Different Propagation Models in Manets

Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET) is the most emerging and fast-expanding technology in the last two decades. One of the major issues and challenging areas in MANET is the process of routing due to dynamic topologies and high mobility of mobile nodes. The efficiency and accuracy of a protocol depend on many parameters in these networks. In addition to other parameters node velocity and propagation models are among them. Calculating signal strength at the receiver is the responsibility of a propagation model while the mobility of nodes is responsible for the topology of the network. A huge amount of loss in performance is occurred due to the variation of signal strength at the receiver and obstacles between transmissions. In this paper,it has been analyzed to check the impact of different propagation models on the performance of Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR) in Sparse and Dense scenarios in MANET. The simulation has been carried out in NS-2 by using performance metrics as average packet drop average latency and average Throughput. The results predicted that propagation models and mobility have a strong impact on the performance of OLSR in considered scenarios

Investigation of Cloud Scheduling Algorithms for Resource Utilization Using CloudSim

Compute Cloud comprises a distributed set of High-Performance Computing (HPC) machines to stipulate on-demand computing services to remote users over the internet. Clouds are capable enough to provide an optimal solution to address the ever-increasing computation and storage demands of large scientific HPC applications. To attain good computing performances, mapping of Cloud jobs to the compute resources is a very crucial process. Currently we can say that several efficient Cloud scheduling heuristics are available, however, selecting an appropriate scheduler for the given environment (i.e., jobs and machines heterogeneity) and scheduling objectives (such as minimized makespan, higher throughput, increased resource utilization, load balanced mapping, etc.) is still a difficult task. In this paper, we consider ten important scheduling heuristics (i.e., opportunistic load balancing algorithm, proactive simulation-based scheduling and load balancing, proactive simulation-based scheduling and enhanced load balancing, minimum completion time, Min-Min, load balance improved Min-Min, Max-Min, resource-aware scheduling algorithm, task-aware scheduling algorithm, and Sufferage) to perform an extensive empirical study to insight the scheduling mechanisms and the attainment of the major scheduling objectives. This study assumes that the Cloud job pool consists of a collection of independent and compute-intensive tasks that are statically scheduled to minimize the total execution time of a workload. The experiments are performed using two synthetic and one benchmark GoCJ workloads on a renowned Cloud simulator CloudSim. This empirical study presents a detailed analysis and insights into the circumstances requiring a load balanced scheduling mechanism to improve overall execution performance in terms of makespan, throughput, and resource utilization. The outcomes have revealed that the Sufferage and task-aware scheduling algorithm produce minimum makespan for the Cloud jobs. However, these two scheduling heuristics are not efficient enough to exploit the full computing capabilities of Cloud virtual machines

Nexus of Transformational Leadership and Employees’ Job Performance in Telecom Sector Pakistan

Transformational leadership is credited to inspire, motivate and support their employees in order to achieve organizational objectives. These leaders maintain the quality of workforce by inculcating visionary skills and abilities in their subordinates. This paper aims to examine the nexus of transformational leadership with employees’ job performance in telecom sector of Pakistan. The data is collected from the employees of PTCL (Pakistan Telecommunications Company Limited) head quarter, Islamabad through questionnaire. Sampling was made using purposive sampling technique. 150 questionnaires were distributed among the employees, out of which 120 were received back recording a response rate of 80 percent. It was hypothesized that transformational leadership is positively associated with employees’ job performance. Data is analyzed using correlation and regression analysis through SPSS. Results of the study indicate that majority of the PTCL employees agree that transformational leadership style has significant positive impact on employees job performance. In the light of the findings of this research it is recommended for PTCL management to adopt transformational leadership style to tackle today’s dynamic environment

The Effect of Total Quality Management on Firm Performance with the Mediating Roles of Innovation and Knowledge Management in Small Medium Enterprises

In the present era, the policy and decision makers are quite concerned regarding quality, hence the firms are more intricate and facing questions concerning which quality management practice would be adopted to increase the firm’s performance. The primary objective of this paper was to identify the effect of total quality management on firm’s performance through the mediating roles of innovation and knowledge management in the SME’S of Pakistan. A sum of 280 respondents was selected for data collection from various SME’S and employing a structural equation modelling for data analysis. It was summed up that a statistically significant causal correlation has been found among the TQM, innovation, knowledge management and firm’s performance. This article is established on theories like resource based theory and institutional theory. The results give cognitive understandings regarding how the modern as well as present SME’s would accomplish higher performance and consistent competitiveness through the interplay of these variables in the local and international market

The Moderating Effect of Employee Satisfaction on the Relationship of Goal-Setting and Purposes, Fairness and Rating Scale Format with Employee Job Performance

The aim of this article is to explore the moderating effect of employee satisfaction on the relationship of goal-setting and purposes, fairness and rating scale format with employee job performance in the academic setting. Data were collected through survey questionnaire from 300 employees working in six public sector universities of KP, Pakistan. Multiple regression analysis has been used to test the hypothesis. The dimensions of the performance appraisal were found to be significantly correlated to employee job performance and employee satisfaction played a crucial role in moderating this relationship. Potential reasons and suggestions for managers and employees are discussed. The paper adds to the current pool of knowledge on the links among goal-setting and purposes, fairness, rating scale format, employee satisfaction and employee job performance. Various facets of these constructs were analyzed, so as to give an extensive and more ample understanding of the determinants that influence employer and employee