Exploring Foreign Tourists’ Image of Tanzania: A Factorial Analysis Approach

Abstract

In the last decade, the economy of African continent and Tanzania in particular has witnessed a business boom of the tourism sector. While the sector has continued to grow and become a dependable source of direct and indirect employment to youths in urban and rural areas, the sector has been awash with challenges. These challenges include terrorism attacks, energy crises and poor infrastructure. However, the impact of these challenges on the image of Tanzania as a tourist destination has not received the deserved attention. This study explores the perception of visitors towards Tanzania as a tourist destination after they have completed their tourist visit. This study employs factor analysis technique to explore country destination image. Questionnaires were administered to visitors at some of the tourists’ hotels and Julius Kamabarage Nyerere International Airport (as a major exit point) in the country. Frontline employees, various tourist sites and access to services emerged to be strong tourist destination image factors. This implies that the efforts of marketing tourism destination should focus on promoting all the sites the country has.     

Predictability and Persistence of the Price Movements of the S&P/Case-Shiller House Price Indices

This paper examines persistence in price movements and predictability of the US housing market both on a local level across 20 cities in the US and on a nationwide level. We use a time series approach instead of often applied multivariate approaches to exclude potential biases across local markets and provide trading strategies to compare predictability across markets and to test whether or not the detected persistence can be exploited by investors to earn excess returns. The results from the monthly and quarterly transaction-based S&P/Case-Shiller house price indices from 1987 to 2009 provide empirical evidence on strong persistence. This is confirmed by both parametric and non-parametric tests for nominal and real house prices based on expected inflation. Furthermore, the empirical findings suggest that investors might be able to obtain excess returns from both autocorrelation-based and moving average-based trading strategies compared to a buy-and-hold strategy, although the results depend on the transaction costs individual investors face.     

A Blessing and a Curse: Institutional Embeddedness of Longstanding MNE Subsidiaries in Emerging Markets

This article examines the institutional strategies of multinational enterprises (MNEs) operating in an emerging market, drawing attention to how longstanding foreign subsidiaries proactively negotiate their involvement with socio-political actors. We build on institutional logics to explain how MNE subsidiaries develop sustained political, cultural, and cognitive embeddedness. Using an inductive, interpretive study of four century-old Dutch MNE subsidiaries with a colonial legacy in Indonesia, we examine these three dimensions of the institutional environment, finding that local employees embedded in both the MNE and the host country sets of logics ‒ rather than expatriate managers ‒ most effectively facilitated sustained institutional embeddedness. Our findings also suggest that embedding practices in host institutional contexts and developing structures that align with host institutional expectations provided a platform for the unfolding of institutional strategies by local employees. However, MNE subsidiaries face contrasting logics between home and host country institutions, placing significant strains on MNEs’ ability to enact change.     

Digitalisierung im Gesundheitswesen — zwischen Datenschutz und moderner Medizinversorgung

The digital transformation of the healthcare branch is important and unstoppable. The enormous possibility of digitalisation to redesign and enhance processes has been shown in other branches. Digital technologies offer the similarly large potential to improve the quality and efficiency of healthcare services. However, in terms of digitalisation, the German health system lags behind other European countries. But given a lack of available evidence, the effects of the digitalisation of the healthcare system cannot be reliably evaluated. Digital access to patient data necessitates constructive error cultures in organisations in order to limit defensive medicine. And digital access to health information necessitates individual competence in searching and using this information for participatory decision-making. As with all technological progress, information security is very important in order to gain citizens’ confidence in a digital healthcare system. Thus, it is necessary to simultaneously pursue both enhanced privacy standards and state-of-the-art medical technology.     

Market Orientation: Scale Invariance and Relationship to Generic Strategies Across Two Countries

This article presents a scheme for investigating scale invariance for the market orientation construct across different countries by examining the psychometric properties of the operationalisation of market orientation (Narver and Slater, 1990). We investigate the measurement of market orientation in two countries (Australia and Zimbabwe—one being an example of a developed economy, the other of a developing economy). We then proceed to test the relationship between market orientation and Porter's (1980) generic strategies. The results suggest that the psychometric properties of the market orientation construct differ in important respects across countries. However, tests for convergent, predictive and discriminant validity using the generic strategies are fully supported for Zimbabwe while for Australia they are supported mutatis mutandis.     

Sentiment and stock returns: The SAD anomaly revisited

Widely-cited research by Kamstra et al. (2003) argues that changes in mood resulting from Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) drive changes in investor risk aversion and cause seasonal patterns in aggregate stock returns around the world. In this paper we reexamine the so-called SAD effect by replicating and extending Kamstra et al. (2003). We study the psychological underpinnings of the SAD hypothesis and show that the time-series predictions of the SAD model do not correspond to the seasonal patterns in depression found in the general population. We also investigate the cross-sectional prediction that SAD has a greater effect on stock markets in countries where SAD is more prevalent and find no relation between the prevalence of SAD and stock returns. Finally, we document that the SAD effect is mechanically driven by an overlapping dummy-variable specification and higher returns around the turn of the year.     

Societal risks as seen by Chinese students living in Macao

The present study reports on mean risk magnitude judgements expressed by Chinese students living in Macao on 87 hazardous activities, substances and technologies. These judgements were compared with findings on African, American and European samples. Despite high similarity in mean results, standard deviations, and linear correlation with the other countries, Macao appears to be the country in which the level of risk perception was clearly the highest, and this seems largely due to five items connected with violence and crime. These results are explained by the exceptionally high level of crime in Macao and its crude display by the local media.     

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