Evaluation of facilities performance on students’ satisfaction in Northern Nigerian Universities

Performance evaluation of academic facilities of HEIs is very critical to educational effectiveness. Presently, there is limited or no research/data in Nigeria to assess how extensively the use of or lack of academic facilities benchmarking practices. The aim of this research was to develop a facilities performance framework for HEIs academic facilities in order to serve as a reference model for policy makers while designing HEIs facilities standard targeted towards improving facilities performance for enhanced student satisfaction. Quantitative research approach using survey design was adopted. Data was collected using closed-ended questionnaires distributed to a sample of 1000 student randomly selected from three universities in the northern Nigeria out of which 735 were considered valid for the analysis. Research questions were answered by testing the proposed research hypothesis which were developed for the research. The descriptive analyses were conducted using the Statistical Package for Social Science Software (SPSS version 23) while the inferential statistics were analyzed using a Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modelling software (SmartPLS version 3.0). Overall, the result found that facilities performance significantly influenced student satisfaction. The R-square value indicated that performance of the HEIs component facilities explained 63 percent of the variance in students’ satisfaction. Furthermore, it was found that 66.7 percent of the performance of HEIs components facilities was explained by the performance of both physical and non-physical facilities that constitutes the HEIs academic facilities. The implication of this results points to the importance of including students’ feedback in the facilities management aspect of HEIs. This is for the fact that students’satisfaction was shown to be significantly related to the condition of the university facilities. It is recommended that future research should focus on identifying students satisfaction with academic facilities in the HEIs using experience as a measure of facilities performance to promote the concept of best practices benchmarking for the institutions to esterblished quality facilities in their institutions

Sustainability Practices And Corporate Performance: A Case Of Malaysia Companies

Kajian ini dijalankan adalah bagi mengkaji tahap dan faktor yang mendorong kepada amalan kelestarian yang dijalankan oleh syarikat-syarikat senaraian awam di Bursa Malaysia serta melihat perhubungan amalan tersebut dengan prestasi syarikat. This study investigates the extent of sustainability disclosure and also the factors of sustainable practices among Malaysian Public Listed companies on Bursa Malaysia as well as the relationship between sustainability practices and company performance

Bottleneck-based heuristic for permutation flowshop scheduling

The newly heuristic is developed by introducing the bottleneck-based concept that was applied at the beginning of initial solution determination. The heuristic is known as Bottleneck-Based (BNB) heuristic. The previous study found that the scheduling activity become complex when dealing with large number of machine, m > 2, it is NP-hardness. Thus, the main objective of this study are to propose and develop a new heuristic for solving permutation flowshop scheduling by considering four-machines and n-jobs (n = 6, 10, 15, 20). Three phases were applied into this study in order to boost the makespan performance of the proposed heuristic. Two phases (bottleneck identification phase and initial sequence arrangement phase) were newly introduced and combined with the existing famous Nawaz, Enscore and Ham (NEH) insertion technique. There are four potential dominant machines (M1, M2, M3, M4) clustered as bottleneck machines. A total 1000 set random processing time for each job sizes was tested using Excel simple programming with built in Visual Basic for Application (VBA). The heuristic performance was evaluated based on the average makespan ratio, average percentage error, and percentage of solution performance obtained. This study considered the NEH heuristic as the best and appropriate tool for comparison purpose since NEH heuristic is the best performing heuristic in minimizing the makespan. The heuristic evaluation result showed that the BNB heuristic is performing better than the NEH at bottleneck machines M1, M3 and M4. While, heuristic verification result showed that the bottleneck algorithms performed the best in minimizing the makespan for set of problems with bottleneck machine M4. However, the overall result showed fluctuate values over the size of jobs. The result of this study shown that the developed BNB heuristic achieved good performance in solving small sized problems however further modification is needed for medium and large sized problems

Forgotten status of many: Kosovo's economy under the UN and the EU administration

After eight years of the United Nations (UN) administration, Kosovo again is returned to the international centre of attention - this time about her future political status. The document presented by the UN Special Envoy for Kosovo, Martti Ahtisaari, proposed an ambiguous status settlement that is portrayed and understood as a supervised independence. Whatever expectations from political perspective will be, that is of secondary importance for this paper - the aim is in Kosovo's aggregate uncertainty about her economic sustainability, namely to investigate the relationship between fragile institutions, poor governance and weak economic performance. With a foreign aid since the second half of 1999 amounting to 22 billion, Kosovo still has massive unemployment and widespread poverty. How the UN's largest experiment ever undertaken, involving considerable resources and long time, left the economy in such a poor state? --Kosovo,UNMIK,Provisional Institutions of Self-government,poverty,political status settlement

Tax reform in emerging transition: Is Kosovo’s Government and NGOs mathematical economics rational?

Tax reform in small emerging democracies is difficult to measure what effects is likely to produce due to countries’ aggregate political and economic vulnerabilities. If both are taken as remaining relatively stable, then it is easier to discuss what impact the reform introduced may have in the economy and her stakeholders. In absence of a monetary policy, the Government of Kosovo in mid-2008 adopted the changes in tax rates taking effect from January 2009, with the aim to foster economic growth and improve business competitiveness at least in the regional market of the Balkans. This article critically assesses the proposed and approved changes by the Government that were in line with the proposals made by business community Non-governmental Organizations (NGOs), and concludes that this tax reform is not well thought-out and properly analyzed to expect the benefits for which it was too optimistically hoped for, especially in relation to key stakeholders such as the Government’s budget, business development, and consumers.Kosovo, Ministry of Economy and Finance, tax reform, business associations, value added tax

Self-management socialism compared to social market economy in transition: Are there convergent paths?

Despite considerable and miscellaneous research in transition economics, some of its aspects have yet to evolve and come up with a more standard theory. After the initial systemic change in two versions of socialist systems - centralist in the former Soviet Union (FSU), and self-management in the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY), and rush towards a market-based system, setbacks in economic performance were marked by a sharp decline in living standards for the majority of population. A soar in socio-economic trauma during economic transformation from self-management to a (full) market economy along with civil wars, has mostly hit the middle class bringing them around the poverty line. Although economic recovery and growth picked up after a decade of downturn to reach the pre-transition level, the rise in income differentiation has not changed much the situation of poverty which in the former SFRY countries (except Slovenia) remains widespread, whereas it has made a tiny minority better-off, namely private entrepreneurs, politicians and professionals. Yet, this polarisation may be natural after ownership transformation and privatisation in the short to medium run. But among majority who slide towards poverty, there were, and still are, nostalgic attitudes about economic welfare in the previous system. The pressure for more socially-oriented economic reforms has mainly come from this group, though policy makers too, were aware that this approach which is necessary to fix structural-adjustment problems, is more likely to be successful at aggregate level for sustainable and long term development, ceteris paribus. By looking back at the previous system and exploring current social and economic reforms in the former SFRY, this paper aims at investigating common points and theoretical convergences between self-management socialism and social market economy (SMEC) in line with the challenge of economic development. --SFRY,self-management socialism,transition,social market economy,development

Impacts and Losses Caused By the Fraudulent and Manipulated Financial Information on Economic Decisions

Nowadays the effects of the fraudulent and manipulated financial information have been more controversial. We should take into consideration that the financial losses caused by fraudulent or manipulated financial information are remarkable. Preventing the fraud in the financial information has been an important issue by auditors all over the world. As the American economy is the dominant economy may cause and affect the capital market mostly all over the world. In the last decade we can see the financial losses caused by the fraudulent and manipulated financial information rather big. Today’s world has been affected by frauds and manipulation of the financial information. An investment decision based on false financial information causes the investors to suffer losses as was experienced in Enron and WorldCom cases. Financial information has, certainly, an important positive or negative effect in economic decisions. Positive or negative effects of financial information on economic decisions depend on reliability of the financial information. This paper aims to show the impacts of fraudulent on the financial information, effects on economic decision and what we should do for preventing the fraudulent or manipulation on the financial information.Financial information, fraudulent, manipulation, decision.