Analysing corporate insolvency in the Gulf Cooperation Council using logistic regression and multidimensional scaling

In this paper, we examine corporate insolvency in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region between 2004 and 2011. Data comprises 28 financial ratio variables from 112 firms. We use Logit regression with best-subset selection criteria to investigate the predictive value of the ratios in the GCC context, particularly cash flow-based ratios. We also examine the main dimensions of the ratios, and the weights firms attach to them, using 3-way Multidimensional Scaling (MDS). We find that a parsimonious Logit model with the profitability ratio EBITTL, the leverage ratio TLTA and the cash flow ratios CFFOTA and CFFOCL can predict insolvency, ex-ante, with 84.8, 95.6 and 73.9 % overall, type I and II accuracy, respectively. From MDS, we uncover four financial-ratio dimensions: (i) ‘Non-strategic sales activities’, (ii) ‘Profitability and financial stability balance’, (iii) ‘Sales activities against capital conversion’; and (iv) ‘Market value against cash generation’. Insolvent firms appear very specific and attach most salience to the ‘Non-strategic sales activities’ dimension, unlike solvent firms which attach more salience to the other three dimensions. Therefore, the results imply that, to reduce susceptibility to insolvency in the GCC, managers should focus less on non-strategic sales activities.     

Strategic foresight in public policy: Reviewing the experiences of the UK, Singapore, and the Netherlands

In an interdependent and complex world, only few public policy challenges can be confined to one particular policy area anymore. Many governments have realized that a single-issue focus is often insufficient in dealing with emerging threats and opportunities. They have therefore started to experiment with strategic foresight that deliberately cuts across the traditional boundaries of policy areas and government departments. This article reviews the foresight activities of three countries that have been at the forefront of this trend: the United Kingdom, Singapore, and the Netherlands. To this end, the article discusses the concept of strategic foresight and explains the two distinct ways in which it contributes to public policy-making: on the one hand, it informs policy by providing more systematic knowledge about relevant trends and developments in an organization's environments; on the other hand, it acts as a driver of reflexive mutual social learning processes among policy-makers that stimulate the generation of common public policy visions. The article concludes by drawing lessons with regard to the key success factors allowing strategic foresight to make an effective contribution to public policy-making.     

City foresight and development planning case study: Implementation of scenario planning in formulation of the Bulungan development plan

This article discusses the formulation of the Bulungan Development Plan (2002) that sought to formulate a 25 year city vision. The foresight process included how to prepared the process, implemented the scenario planning method, created consensus amongst stakeholders, and formulated graphic and narrative scenarios that explored alternative future for Bulungan. Based on these scenarios, the stakeholders formulated a vision for the city's preferred future. The vision is “excellence in agro industry supported by qualified human resources”.Project debriefing showed that unlike traditional forecasting or market research, the methods of foresight, especially scenario planning, is a more appropriate and powerful planning tool for integrated regional development. The main reason for this is that the future is unpredictable, and scenarios allow stakeholders to make sense of complexity.     

Governing the transition to low-carbon futures: A critical survey of energy scenarios for 2050

There is a growing scientific consensus that limiting the increase in global average temperature to around 2 °C above pre-industrial levels is necessary to avoid unacceptable impact on the climate system. This requires that the developed countries’ emissions are radically reduced during the next 40 years. Energy scenario studies provide insights on the societal transitions that might be implied by such low-carbon futures, and in this paper we discuss how a greater attention to different governance and institutional issues can complement future scenario exercises. The analysis is based on a critical review of 20 quantitative and qualitative scenario studies, all of relevance for meeting long-term climate policy objectives. The paper: (a) analyzes some key differences in energy technology mixes and primary energy use patterns across these studies; (b) briefly explores the extent and the nature of the societal challenges and policy responses implied; and (c) discusses a number of important implications for the design and scope of future scenario studies. Our review shows that in previous scenario studies the main attention is typically paid to analyzing the impact of well-defined and uniform policy instruments, while fewer studies factor in the role of institutional change in achieving different energy futures. We therefore point towards a number of strategies of integrating issues of transition governance into future scenario analyses, and argue for a closer synthesis of qualitative and quantitative scenario building.     

中国企业家协会:中外企业家合作的桥梁

<正> 今年年初,我应施瓦布主席的邀请,出席了在瑞士达沃斯举行的世界经济论坛第30届年会及企业顾问集团专门会议。我们讨论了经济全球化日益加快和信息技术快速发展给各国所带来的影响,议论了南北差距和发展中国家的呼声,建议有关国际组织、国际金融机构和工业发达国家加强对发展中国家的援助,使他们能获得更多的发展机会,增强参与国际竞争的能力。同时,希望发展中国家的企业界加强合作,促进相互发展。达沃斯世界经济论坛第30届年会的声音已经传遍几大洲,受到各国的广泛关注。这次移师北京,是论坛第30届年会的继续和扩展。本次高峰会的主题是:“中国日益显著的全球角色:影响力、机遇与挑战”。     

Unravelling the complexity of collective mental models: A method for developing and analysing scenarios in multi-organisational contexts

In multi-organisational contexts, scenario building has been used to engage stakeholders in a critical discussion on issues of mutual importance, and to gain their support with regards to possible future responses. A review of existing literature suggests that much has been written regarding the process of scenario development and the benefits of the process, but the detailed analysis of scenario building outcomes, which encompass a large number of issues and their complex interconnections, has not been made explicit for studying and enhancing understanding of a complex societal problem. This paper presents a systematic method for analysing such complex outcomes in order to facilitate reflective thinking on important issues within the wider context for policy development. The method was employed in a series of participative scenario development workshops, which yielded several causal maps around the theme of construction industry skills. A collective map merging the individual subject-specific causal maps was created to help provide a more holistic overview of the pertinent issues surrounding the construction skills debate. The analysis of this collective map promotes a better understanding of the issue in the wider context, the consequence of possible future events and actions, and of the pre-requisition required for certain events/desired outcomes to take place. The main benefit that could be derived from the method is the opportunity to help facilitate and encourage debate and discussion amongst key stakeholders regarding scenario theme, in this case skills improvement within construction. Due to its flexibility and adaptability, the method could potentially be applied to other areas requiring longer range planning and which contain multiple stakeholder perspectives.     

Future visioning of local climate change: A framework for community engagement and planning with scenarios and visualisation

There is an urgent need for meaningful information and effective public processes at the local level to build awareness, capacity, and agency on climate change, and support planning and decision-making. This paper describes a conceptual framework to meet these requirements by generating alternative, coherent, holistic climate change scenarios and visualizations at the local scale, in collaboration with local stakeholders and scientists. The framework provides a template for a process to integrate emission scenarios with both mitigation and adaptation strategies, and to link local manifestations of impacts and responses with global climate change scenarios. The article outlines the empirical application of this framework in the Local Climate Change Visioning Project in British Columbia, Canada. The project collaboratively localized, spatialized, and visualized possible climate change effects and community responses in the community's ‘backyards’. The article concludes with lessons learned and suggested principles for future visioning efforts to engage communities in possible policy and behavioural choices.     

Client Focus,Cooperation, and Coherence: (Re)professionalising Processes for Elderly Care

This paper suggests the study of professionalism and the professionalising processes within public sector organisations. Sociologists propose that professionalism is changing into a new variant developing under the premise of organisational management and control. This paper disputes the perspective that the use of management control leads to deprofessionalisation in terms of the routinisation of reflective professional tasks or weakened professional values. This paper proposes that, with client focus, professionals and accountants can cooperate and create coherence between management control system elements and professional values. This dynamic contributes to the retention of professional values and more reflective work procedures.     

基于竞合博弈的中外资银行战略选择研究

面对金融业对外开放后日益激烈的竞争,中外资银行应如何进行其战略选择,是恶意竞争还是合作？本文分析了中外资银行各自的优势、劣势、机会与威胁,并从竞争与合作博弈的角度对两者的战略选择进行了论述。     

“双碳目标”下的新能源发电产业税收政策审视

我国已正式宣布二氧化碳排放力争于2030年前达到峰值,努力争取2060年实现碳中和。发展以风力发电和太阳能发电为代表的新能源发电产业是实现碳达峰、碳中和目标的主要举措。为此,在对我国现行新能源发电产业的税收政策进行重新审视的基础上,可以从构建统一、长期、有效的新能源发展税收支持政策,加大对新能源制造环节的税收优惠力度,规范新能源发电相关的税收政策等方面完善我国新能源发电产业税收政策,以促进新能源发电产业健康、可持续发展。     

Corruption,soundness of the banking sector,and economic growth: A cross-country study

This paper explores the impact of corruption on both the banking sector and economic growth; we determine the impact using 76 macroeconomic data from various countries over the period 2002–2004. The results of various cross-sectional regressions provide substantial evidence that corruption significantly aggravates the problems with bad loans in the banking sector. In this study, we also find some evidence of a new channel through which corruption lowers economic growth: Corruption distorts the allocation of bank funds from normal projects to bad projects, which decreases the quality of private investments, hence it decreases economic growth.     

Adjustable-rate mortgages,household mobility,and homeownership: A simulation study

A semi-Markov model is used to evaluate the effects of adjustable-rate mortgages on housing tenure decisions of recent movers and steady-state homeownership rates. Simulations were undertaken based on household data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics together with information on FRM-ARM rate spreads and Treasury yield curves. Results suggest that under most interest rate patterns that prevailed in the 1980s, ARMS had little effect on the relative cost of owning to renting and, as a result, had little effect on mover tenure choice and home sales. Moreover, despite some minor projected increase in the percentage of movers that choose to own when ARMs are available, ARM effects on steady-state owner-occupancy rates appear to be largely mitigated by an ARM-induced tilt toward a relatively more mobile steady-state pool of owner-occupiers.     

Identity, appropriateness and the construction of regulatory space: the formation of the Public Accountant's Council of Ontario

Practice rights legislation in Canada continues to be contested 50 years after its first enactment. In Ontario, one of the earliest provinces to enact restrictive legislation, the challenges have focused on how the legislation has been implemented rather than on whether or not public accounting should be regulated. To better understand the contested issues in this field, we examine the process undertaken by the Public Accountants Council of Ontario to implement the Public Accountancy Act of 1950. Our analysis is based on the first 15 years of the minutes of the meetings of the Public Accountants Council for Ontario, augmented by other archival sources such as court cases, newspaper clippings, correspondence and reports. Our intent is to document the process and “logic of appropriateness” used by the Council to construct its identity and stake out its “regulatory space” in the face of the ambiguity of the law and pressure from interest groups. We also identify the contradictions that were institutionalized in this field resulting in repeated challenges to the Council. We conclude by relating the historical insights from this analysis to the continuing challenges to practice rights legislation in Ontario.     

Accounting for the Apple Inc business model: Corporate value capture and dysfunctional economic and social consequences

In this special issue the authors account for the Apple Inc innovative business model in terms of its capacity to create and capture value from its global supply chain. The authors argue that there are a number of reasons why the Apple business model may not be sustainable and more broadly explore the dysfunctional social and economic aspects of corporate behavior that seeks to fragment and elongate global value chains to capture value within the firms financial reporting boundary whilst displacing cost and risk.     

银信合作:私人银行服务的有效实现模式

私人银行业务是国内多家商业银行开展金融服务的新领域,信托产品机制与私人银行业务之间内在的契合性决定了两者之间可以展开良好的合作,这对于我国正处于起步中的私人银行业务而言,无疑是一个有意义的新思路。     

Strategy, performance-measurement systems, and performance: A study of Chinese firms

Numerous studies in developed Western countries have shown that firms' strategic choices are responsive to attributes of their external environment. In turn, performance-measurement systems are used to support strategy implementation, which then affect firm performance. However, institutional factors may limit the extent to which these linkages exist in the transitional Chinese economy. We analyze survey and publicly available data for 104 listed Chinese manufacturing firms and find that, despite a number of identifiable impediments, these firms' strategic emphasis on growth is responsive to the competition and uncertainty that they face. In the case of uncertainty, the relationship goes in the opposite direction to that found in Western firms. Like their Western counterparts, Chinese firms with greater emphasis on growth also tend to make greater use of balanced/integrated performance measurement systems, and, in turn, they perform at a higher level.     

票据理财产品的银信合作模式、市场概况与政策思考

2008年,在从紧的货币政策下,银行和信托公司合作创新票据理财产品成为市场的关注点。票据理财产品基本采用的是票据资产集合资金信托计划模式,产品具有的一般特征是短期投资收益较高且稳定,流动性好,同时还具有简化资产打包过程、无需信用增级和实现资产真实销售的其他信托产品不具备的优点,但在票据背书和追索权上具有特殊性。银行开展票据理财产品可以缓解信贷规模压力和获得中间业务收入,银行票据理财产品发展正迈入系列化和规模化的方向。但从监管与政策层面思考,银行开展票据理财产品减弱了从紧货币政策调控的效应,并反映了我国票据市场制度建设有待完善。