Corporate Governance and Internationalization of Malaysia Public Listed Companies

The main purpose of this study is to examine the impact of the corporate governance on Internationalization for a sample 46 listed companies from 2008 to 2011 which have the reported international operations abroad. The study proposes that corporate governance mechanisms such as directors’ compensation and characteristics of the board could influence firms' decision to internationalization. The measurement for internationalization is foreign sales (FS) and foreign assets (FA). The empirical results indicate that Internationalization by measuring FS is negative and significant related to board size. While measuring by FA indicate the negative and insignificant result. On the other hand, FA and FS are positive and significant related to executive compensation. However, it also found insignificantly related to CEO duality and board independent. According to MCCG requirement, the role of CEO and chairman should remain as non-duality to avoid CEO overpower and board to consist of 1/3 of independent board directors. As result, corporate governance characteristics especially board size and director remuneration does influence firm internationalization

Hydrological and productive impacts of recent land-use and land-cover changes in the semiarid Chaco: Understanding novel water excess in water scarce farmlands

Over the last decades, the rapid replacement of native forests by crops and pastures in the Argentinean semiarid Chaco plains has triggered unprecedented groundwater level raises resulting from deep drainage increases, leading to the first massive waterlogging event on records (~25,000 Ha flooded in 2015 near Bandera, one of the most cultivated clusters of the Chaco). In this paper, we link this episode to the ongoing deforestation and cropping scheme shifts through the combined analysis of remote sensing data, agricultural surveys, local farmer information and hydrologic modelling. From 2000 to 2015, the agricultural area of Bandera increased from 21% to 50%, mostly at the expense of dry forests. In this period, agriculture migrated from more intensive (i.e., double-cropping) to more water-conservative (i.e., late-summer single crops) schemes as a general strategy to reduce drought risks. These changes reduced regional evapotranspiration and increased the intensity of deep drainage in wet years. Contrasting cropping schemes displayed significant evapotranspiration differences, but all of them experienced substantial drainage losses (~100–200 mm) during the wettest year (2014/2015), suggesting that cropping adjustments have a limited capacity to halt the generation of water excesses. Nearly 50% of the cropped area in Bandera could not be sown or harvested following the groundwater recharge event of 2014/2015. In the ongoing context of shallow and rising water tables, the introduction of novel cropping schemes that include deep-rooted perennials, to promote transpirative groundwater discharge, seems crucial to avoid the recurrence of water excesses and their associated dryland salinity risk in the region.Fil: Giménez, Raúl. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - San Luis. Instituto de Matemática Aplicada de San Luis "Prof. Ezio Marchi". Universidad Nacional de San Luis. Facultad de Ciencias Físico, Matemáticas y Naturales. Instituto de Matemática Aplicada de San Luis "Prof. Ezio Marchi"; ArgentinaFil: Mercau, Jorge Luis. Instituto Nacional de Tecnología Agropecuaria. Centro Regional La Pampa-San Luis. Estación Experimental Agropecuaria San Luis. Agencia de Extensión Rural San Luis; ArgentinaFil: Bert, Federico Esteban. Universidad de Buenos Aires; Argentina. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Agronomía; ArgentinaFil: Kuppel, Sylvain. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique; Francia. University of Aberdeen; Reino UnidoFil: Baldi, Germán. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - San Luis. Instituto de Matemática Aplicada de San Luis "Prof. Ezio Marchi". Universidad Nacional de San Luis. Facultad de Ciencias Físico, Matemáticas y Naturales. Instituto de Matemática Aplicada de San Luis "Prof. Ezio Marchi"; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de San Luis. Facultad de Ciencias Físico Matemáticas y Naturales. Departamento de Geología; ArgentinaFil: Houspanossian, Javier. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - San Luis. Instituto de Matemática Aplicada de San Luis "Prof. Ezio Marchi". Universidad Nacional de San Luis. Facultad de Ciencias Físico, Matemáticas y Naturales. Instituto de Matemática Aplicada de San Luis "Prof. Ezio Marchi"; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de San Luis. Facultad de Ciencias Físico Matemáticas y Naturales. Departamento de Geología; ArgentinaFil: Magliano, Patricio Nicolás. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - San Luis. Instituto de Matemática Aplicada de San Luis "Prof. Ezio Marchi". Universidad Nacional de San Luis. Facultad de Ciencias Físico, Matemáticas y Naturales. Instituto de Matemática Aplicada de San Luis "Prof. Ezio Marchi"; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de San Luis. Facultad de Química, Bioquímica y Farmacia. Departamento de Bioquímica y Ciencias Biológicas; ArgentinaFil: Jobbagy Gampel, Esteban Gabriel. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - San Luis. Instituto de Matemática Aplicada de San Luis "Prof. Ezio Marchi". Universidad Nacional de San Luis. Facultad de Ciencias Físico, Matemáticas y Naturales. Instituto de Matemática Aplicada de San Luis "Prof. Ezio Marchi"; Argentin

Zombie survival optimization in solving university examination timetabling problem

Timetabling is a task of assigning a set of events into a set of resources and satisfying predefined constraints. University timetabling is one of the most stdied timetabling problems among the timetabling domains. It is also a time consuming administrative task that need to be performed in all the academic institutions as there are many constraints needed to be considered. In this study, a zombie survival optimization (ZSO) has been applied to address university examination timetabling problem. The underlying idea of ZSO is based on the foraging behavior of zombies, where zombies represent searching agents (solutions) in searching for antidote (optimal solution). There are three modes in ZSO, namely exploration mode, hunter mode and human exploitation mode where zombies explore for solutions (randomly) in exploration mode, explore towards a human (promising search region) in hunter mode and turn into human to search (exploitation) for local optimum. The ZSO is tested on Carter's university un-capacitated examination benchmark dataset and results demonstrated that ZSO is capable of producing promising quality of solutions when compared with the published methods in the literature. In fact, ZSO managed to record new best-known results on 3 instances of the dataset