Motivations for an organisation within a developing country to report social responsibility information : evidence from Bangladesh

Purpose – The aim of the paper is to describe and explain, using a combination of interviews and content analysis, the social and environmental reporting practices of a major garment export organisation within a developing country. Design/methodology/approach – Senior executives from a major organisation in Bangladesh are interviewed to determine the pressures being exerted on them in terms of their social and environmental performance. The perceptions of pressures are then used to explain – via content analysis – changing social and environmental disclosure practices. Findings – The results show that particular stakeholder groups have, since the early 1990s, placed pressure on the Bangladeshi clothing industry in terms of its social performance. This pressure, which is also directly related to the expectations of the global community, in turn drives the industry's social policies and related disclosure practices. Research limitations/implications – The findings show that, within the context of a developing country, unless we consider the managers' perceptions about the social and environmental expectations being imposed upon them by powerful stakeholder groups then we will be unable to understand organisational disclosure practices. Originality/value – This paper is the first known paper to interview managers from a large organisation in a developing country about changing stakeholder expectations and then link these changing expectations to annual report disclosures across an extended period of analysis

Phillips curve in a small open economy: A time series exploration of North Cyprus

The paper explores the existence and the stability of Phillips curve for North Cyprus, a small developing economy, using time series data. ADF unit root test is employed to check for stationarity. ARDL and DOLS approaches to cointegration have been used to explore the long run relation and ECM to understand short run dynamics. The predictive properties DOLS are better than those of the conventional methods. The estimates point to the existence of Phillips curve both in the long and the short run. CUSUM and CUSUMsq tests confirm a stable relation.Inflation, Unemployment, ADF, Cointegration, DOLS

Stocks as Hedge against Inflation in Pakistan: Evidence from ARDL Approach

The paper implements ARDL bounds testing approach to cointegration to explore whether or not stocks are good hedge against inflation in the case of a transition economy such as Pakistan, using annual data for the period 1971 – 2008. Ng-Peron (2001) unit root test is applied to determine the stationarity of the series. The results suggest that stocks act as good hedge against inflation in Pakistan both in the long and the short run. The findings should help formulate appropriate policy to encourage investment in financial markets and thereby promote economic growth.Stock Returns, Inflation, ARDL Bounds Testing, Ng-Perron Test

FINANCIAL DEVELOPMENT AND INCOME INEQUALITY IN PAKISTAN: AN APPLICATION OF ARDL APPROACH

The paper examines the relationship between financial development and income inequality; and also explores if the Greenwood and Jovianvich (GJ) hypothesis applies to Pakistan. Using data from 1971 to 2005, the paper implements the Auto Regressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) bounds testing approach to cointegration to examine the existence of long run relation ships; and the error correction model (ECM) for the short run relationships. Stationarity properties of the series are tested by the ADF unit root test. The findings indicate that financial development reduces income inequality while financial instability aggravates it. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, we find economic growth worsens income distribution and that the latter is deteriorated further by trade openness. The paper does not find support for the GJ relation. Appropriate reforms aimed at developing a well-organized financial sector in Pakistan can help reduce income inequality.Financial Development, Income Inequality

Adaptive Differential Feedback in Time-Varying Multiuser MIMO Channels

In the context of a time-varying multiuser multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) system, we design recursive least squares based adaptive predictors and differential quantizers to minimize the sum mean squared error of the overall system. Using the fact that the scalar entries of the left singular matrix of a Gaussian MIMO channel becomes almost Gaussian distributed even for a small number of transmit antennas, we perform adaptive differential quantization of the relevant singular matrix entries. Compared to the algorithms in the existing differential feedback literature, our proposed quantizer provides three advantages: first, the controller parameters are flexible enough to adapt themselves to different vehicle speeds; second, the model is backward adaptive i.e., the base station and receiver can agree upon the predictor and variance estimator coefficients without explicit exchange of the parameters; third, it can accurately model the system even when the correlation between two successive channel samples becomes as low as 0.05. Our simulation results show that our proposed method can reduce the required feedback by several kilobits per second for vehicle speeds up to 20 km/h (channel tracker) and 10 km/h (singular vector tracker). The proposed system also outperforms a fixed quantizer, with same feedback overhead, in terms of bit error rate up to 30 km/h.Comment: IEEE 22nd International Conference on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications (2011

Financial development and income inequality in Pakistan: An application of ARDL approach

The paper examines the relationship between financial development and income inequality; and also explores if the Greenwood and Jovianvich (GJ) hypothesis applies to Pakistan. Using data from 1971 to 2005, the paper implements the Auto Regressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) bounds testing approach to cointegration to examine the existence of long run; and the error correction model (ECM) for the short run relationships. Stationarity properties of the series are checked by the ADF method. The findings indicate that financial development reduces income inequality while financial instability aggravates it. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, we find economic growth worsens income distribution and that the latter is deteriorated further by trade openness. The paper does not find support for the GJ relation. Appropriate reforms aimed at developing a well-organized financial sector in Pakistan can help reduce income inequality.Financial Development, Income Inequality

Financial Development, Energy Consumption and CO2 Emissions: Evidence from ARDL Approach for Pakistan

The paper explores the existence of a long run equilibrium relationship among CO2 emissions, financial development, economic growth, energy consumption, and population growth in Pakistan. ARDL bounds testing approach to cointegration is implemented to the data for 1974-2009. The results confirm a long run relation among these variables. Financial development appears to help reduce CO2 emissions. The main contributors to CO2 emissions however are: economic growth, population growth and energy consumption. Our results also lend support to the existence of Environmental Kuznets Curve for Pakistan. Based on the findings we argue that policy focus on financial development might be helpful in reducing environmental degradation.Financial Development, CO2 Emissions, Cointegration

Devaluation and income inequality: Evidence from Pakistan

The paper examines the impact of nominal devaluation on income distribution in Pakistan. In the empirical model we include economic growth, measured per capita; trade-openness; foreign direct investment (FDI); unemployment and inflation rates which appear well justified in the particular context of the economy of Pakistan. The Auto Regressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) bounds testing approach to cointegration has been employed for the long run relation; and the Vector Error Correction Model (VECM) for the short run dynamics. We also test the Kuznets inverted-U relation between income inequality and economic growth. We find long run relationship among the series; and that nominal devaluation worsens income inequality. Though economic growth appears to deteriorate income distribution, the non-linear link between the variables depicts Kuznets’ (1955) type inverted-U relationship. This is reassuring for Pakistan in the long run. We also find FDI and trade-openness worsens income distribution. Inflation lowers income inequality but unemployment aggravates it in Pakistan.Devaluation, Income Inequality, EKC, ARDL