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Consumer-Side Decision Factors on Their Selection of Bottled Water Brands: Statistical Method Study in a Kosovo Sample
Get PDFNowadays, to meet people’s needs in daily life for drinking water, many companies provide bottled drinking water. As this industry grows and more competition occurs, the companies should know the aspects that influence people to buy the products that are bottled drinking water. Although this increase in several bottled water producers can be attributed to market demand and technology modernization, the fact that consumers migrate from one brand to another is significant and indicates that there are factors that affect the consumer’s decision when choosing the bottled water brand. The aim of this paper is to identify and analyze the factors that influence consumers the most when choosing a bottled water brand in the market, using Kosovo as a case study. To define factors based on the consumer’s preferences and valuations of the importance, the principal component analysis was applied based on a correlation matrix, using a component extraction method with a varimax rotation and a Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin adequacy test. The findings show that the consumer’s decision is influenced mostly by six key factors, namely quality, marketing, consumer perception, price, preference and practicality. The research provides new insights into the bottled water manufacturing industry and marketers in positioning themselves in a competitive environment
The International Entry Choices of Italian SMEs in Emerging Markets: a Case-based Analysis
Get PDFThe paper addresses the factors influencing the SMEs’ entry choices in international markets and explores two factors: one related to the external environment and one dependent on firms. The first factor is the institutional context as the whole of formal and informal rules of the country target. The second is the market commitment, intended as resources committed in a particular market area: the experience firms get in foreign markets and a general attitude to maintain the international presence for a long period are the main sources of market knowledge.The aim of the study is to understand the effect of company-specific factors and of context-specific factors, namely the market commitment and institutional context, on SMEs’ entry choice mode in foreign markets. The paper develops a multiple case study analysis of four small international Italian firms. Built on the institutional theory and on the market commitment construct, the paper offers a conceptual model that shows that the institutional context strongly influences the amount of resources involved in the internationalization process, while the market commitment affects more the complexity – and intensity – of the process
Forecasting Firm Performance: Evidence from Romanian Furniture Firms
Get PDFThe aim at this paper is to propose an econometric model for analyzing economic performance in the furniture industry in Romania, conducted on a sample of 293 firms. The net profit was considered as a dependent variable and the turnover, expenses with employees, value added, current liabilities and inventories as independent variables. Five hypotheses were proposed, tested and validated by using multiple linear regression. The most significant results show that there is a positive significant relationship between net profit and value added and a negative significant relationship between net profit and expenses with employees. Since the model has been validated statistically, we consider that it can provide useful predictions in terms of economic performance analysis in the furniture industry.Keywords: multiple linear regression, ANOVA, Durbin-Watson test, net profit estimation, value adde
Determining the Relation between the Business Environment and Companies Solvency Factors in the Post – crisis Period
Get PDFIn scientific literature, there aren’t clearly enough formulated reasons behind causing the solvency component elements changes that would help all companies to prepare for possible insolvency changes. Methods of analysis evaluate following variables: corporate income flows, liabilities amounts, short-term and long-term changes in assets, capital amount, their relative indicators. However, little attention is given to external environmental factors affecting the development of these indicators. The aim of this research is to establish the impact of business environmental factors for companies’ solvency indicators. The business environmental impact assessment seeks to determine just the external – macroeconomic business environment influence for companies’ solvency changes. After identifying the key changes of business environment factors and basic companies’ solvency trends, variables were calculated the dependency was expressed in Pearson correlation coefficients. The evaluation of environmental factors, the main solvency indicators in the sector of warehousing and transport services companies and of the correlation relation determined a statistically significant relationship between companies’ solvency and gross domestic product, inflation, the tax burden, shadow economy, corruption control, number of companies in the sector and interest rate changes. The study identified following dependencies: interest rates, the growth of inflation reduces the debt-to equity ratio, the decrease of the extent of shadow economy and the growth of corruption control increases companies’ debt ratio value, an increased number of companies reduces companies’ debt ratio values. The received statistical relationships and their evaluation of the reliability confirmed the study hypothesis about the statistical significance of the business environment economic factor effect for companies’ solvency changes
Investments in Agricultural Machinery and its Efficiency in Ukraine
Get PDFOne of the major conditions of effective agriculture production is sufficient farm mechanization. However, the unstable economic situation in Ukraine, combined with bureaucratic problems, an unstable currency exchange rate, and sharply changed trade routes (which has caused major losses to a number of farms and traders working with the Custom Union) created significant obstacles for investing in machinery in Ukraine. It is especially topical for small and medium farms that usually function in poor economic conditions without any adequate access to the credit market. Consequently, Ukrainian agriculture producers often have an inadequate mechanization rate. As a result, the productivity of Ukrainian farms is significantly lower as compared to other countries that have similar natural conditions in terms of temperatures, precipitation and quality of agricultural lands.A no less important problem is the lack of awareness of small and medium farms, which may not realize the effect that investment has in agriculture machinery. Thus, in order to provide specific numbers for potential investors and prove the efficiency of this fund placement, an expected direct economic effect from machinery investment (as an increased profit from higher yield) was estimated. The first step was to define those types of agricultural machinery that have significant impact on the yield and productivity levels for each of the most important crop types: grain, oil crops, vegetables, fruits, etc. Then, an impact of additional investment in various machinery means on crops yield was estimated. Finally, based on fixed prices and a discount rate, an expected additional profit generated by newly purchased machinery on an average farm was estimated. The model proved especially high profitability of investment in such machinery as ploughs, fertilizers spreaders, harvesters, tractors, and machines for irrigation – most of them are paid off (on a land parcel with area around 2000 ha) in three years or less
The Influence of Consumption and Investment on Unemployment in Turkey: a SVAR Approach
Get PDFThe aim of this paper is to examine the dynamic relationship between consumption, investment and unemployment in Turkey using structural VAR (SVAR) models. The four different SVAR models are estimated by using quarterly observations of dynamic and contemporaneous relations for the mentioned macroeconomic variables, covering the 2005-2016 period for the Turkish economy. Four different unemployment rates are used in the study to represent the unemployment rate in the Turkish economy, which are overall, young (15-24 age), male and female unemployment rates. Impulse response functions and variance decomposition results obtained from the study show that consumption shocks have a significant impact on both the unemployment rate and the investments, in support of the basic hypothesis that is argued in the study. Investment shocks also have a similar effect on unemployment rates and positive investment shocks have reduced unemployment rates. Moreover, another result obtained in all four models suggests that a shock in consumption increases investment through the accelerator effect
Does the Global Competitiveness Index Demonstrate the Resilience of Countries to Economic Crises?
Get PDFThe concept of a country’s competitiveness still does not have a clear and straightforward meaning and remains ambiguous. Different economists stress various aspects of the concept and use a number of different methods to evaluate how competitive a country is. This paper focuses on the Global Competitiveness Index, which is calculated by the World Economic Forum and is one of the most well-known measures of competitiveness. The World Economic Forum (2015) defines the competitiveness of a country as a “set of institutions, policies and factors that determine the level of productivity of a country” and argues that productivity “is the main long-run engine for growth, living standards and prosperity”. The definition suggests that a higher competitiveness ranking shows higher productivity of the country’s economy, which should lead to higher and more sustainable economic growth. In addition, economic growth leads to higher living standards and prosperity of the country’s citizens. In the light of the definition, the paper forms the hypothesis that if a country is ranked to be more competitive (i.e., its Global Competitiveness Index is higher), it should have greater resilience to an economic crisis than less competitive countries. In other words, more competitive countries should have higher and more sustainable economic growth rates than the less competitive countries. In order to check this hypothesis, the paper uses the graphical analysis method and examines the relationship between the Global Competitiveness Index and the economic growth of countries during the period of 2006-2015. The research findings show that there is a weak or no relationship between the Global Competitiveness Index and the GDP growth of countries; however, it is a negative relationship between the Global Competitiveness Index and the standard deviation of the country’s GDP growth. The results argue that the Global Competitiveness Index is not capable of forecasting the future GDP growth rates of a country; however, the Global Competitiveness Index indicates if the country avoids sharp fluctuations in its GDP growth rates and maintains sustainable economic growth throughout the period
The Challenges of Big Data Analytics in the Mobile Communications Sector
Get PDFThe activities of the MNO (Mobile Network Operator) feature rapid development and business model innovations; one of their principal results is the communications infrastructure that is vital for economic growth. This dynamic and changing mode of operation (modus operandi) introduces high requirements for business decisions and overall informing to maintain competitiveness. One of the principal success factors in MNO activities is the application of contemporary information technologies, in particular technologies of business intelligence and analytics.The activities of MNO create large data volumes, leading to a significant potential discovery of insights from data. As a result, MNOs have been using analytical technologies to mine large data volumes for several decades, and experience accumulation started long before the term “big data” emerged in academia and business. The growing dynamics of activities drive the efficient use of analytical experience to boost competitive advantage. The goal of this paper is to define the most important features of the use of big data analytics in MNO business and any possible related challenges
Bank Vulnerability and Financial Soundness Testing: the Bank Resilience Index
Get PDFThe paper presents a stochastic method to test the soundness of accounting based solvency of banks, over a five-year period, and to define a proper capital adequacy level inductively, from a very limited subset of balance sheet indicators. A review of the literature about stress testing and capital adequacy is provided first, aimed to give evidence of the existing approaches in use and their critical aspects. Then, starting from a sample of 246 listed banks, a few balance sheet indicators are considered. Having set a critical threshold for each of them, according to the regulatory prescriptions, their effective values are forced according to different confidence levels, and two separate kinds of vulnerabilities are defined for the individual banks. These values allow to build a “bank Resilience index” (bRi), which is a measure of the capability to stay within the threshold limits (in other words, to remain solvent). We conclude that the approach could constitute a new, powerful alternative to test “financial soundness”, inasmuch it can give evidence of which banks are solvent, actually, as a consequence of a temporarily efficient mix of ratios, and which banks show a higher resilience for being truly much stronger. In effect, the bRi candidates itself to be a major health check indicator, suitable for surveillance purposes