Trade and access to finance of SMEs: is there a nexus?

Limited resources and barriers to entry are critically higher for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) than for large companies. One of the reasons explaining why the resources of SMEs are scarce is their limited access to financial services. This in turn reduces the likelihood of exporting. For this reason, using the census of SMEs done by the Central Bank of Egypt and the Egyptian Banking Institute, we try to examine the impact of access to finance on their export performance. We measure the latter by the extensive margin that means the probability of becoming an exporter and the probability of serving several markets. We found a significant and positive impact of dealing with banks and having banking facilities on the probability of exporting and that of exporting to more than one destination. Thus, wider and more efficient financial services are likely to increase the number of exporters and boost exports’ diversification.     

Ethiopia’s Challenge to Egyptian Hegemony in the Nile River Basin: The Case of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam

Home to more than 160 million people, the Nile River Basin has become one of the hotspots of the global quest for food, water and energy security. Moving closer to its completion, the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) highlights the interplay between the food, water, and energy sectors and their implications on geopolitical power relations in the region. Despite Ethiopia having the highest volumetric contribution to the Nile river flow, Egypt has maintained hydro-hegemony over the basin for several decades on the basis of historical claims and colonial agreements. Egypt has stated that its volumetric share of the Nile’s water is not sufficient to sustain its growing population, declaring water availability a matter of national security. However, for Ethiopia, the GERD represents a crucial moment in its development agenda, acting as both a counterhegemonic power play, as well as a means to improving the hydropower capacity of the country, and ensuring future food security. This paper explores the various hegemonic and counter-hegemonic strategies employed by Egypt and Ethiopia respectively, highlighting the various ways in which food, water, and energy concerns are intrinsic components of the asymmetric power configurations of the Nile River Basin. By navigating the debate surrounding the GERD, this paper highlights the necessity of incorporating the food, water, and energy nexus into studies of hydro-hegemony and counter-hegemony. This allows the future policy direction for nexus management and governance in the Nile River Basin to move beyond benefit sharing, instead steering towards power sharing.     

The cost-effectiveness of biologic versus non-biologic treatments and the health-related quality of life among a sample of patients with inflammatory bowel disease in a tertiary care center in Saudi Arabia

Abstract

Aims

This study’s objectives were to examine and compare the cost-effectiveness of biologic and non-biologic therapies in the improvement of the health-related quality of life (HRQoL) of patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) in Saudi Arabia.     

Social Media as the Missing Link: Connecting Communities of Practice to Business Strategy

Communities of Practice (CoP) have long been considered powerful Knowledge Management (KM) mechanisms. CoP, however, are often viewed independently from organizational goals and structures, as they are primarily seen as a means of individual knowledge sharing and learning. In this article, we argue that CoP supported by social media have great potential to contribute to organizational goals, such as business strategy. We seek to support this statement through an embedded case study that includes 54 CoP within a prominent multinational engineering firm. This investigation explores the extent to which CoP contribute to business strategy. The paper's contribution is in providing five guidelines for practice that outline how CoP can be best designed to contribute to business strategy and how social media can serve as the “missing link” to execute those guidelines.     

Modeling producer responses with dynamic programming: a case for adaptive crop management

Past research found agricultural producers’ conditional responses during the growing season are important adaptations to weather and other stochastic events. Failing to recognize these responses overstates the risks confronting producers and understates their ability to respond to adverse circumstances. Dynamic programming (DP) provides a means for determining optimal long‐term crop management plans. However, most applications in the literature base their analysis on annual time steps with fixed strategies within the year, effectively ignoring conditional responses during the year. We suggest an alternative approach that captures the strategic responses within a cropping season to random weather variables as they unfold, reflecting farmers’ ability to adapt to weather realizations. We illustrate our approach by applying it to a typical cereal farm in Karak, Jordan. The results show that including conditional within‐year responses to weather reduces the frequency of fallowing by 23% and increases expected income by 9%.