Internationale Zeitschrift für Wirtschafts- und Managementwissenschaften

The aim of this study is to determine the role of service quality, customer satisfaction and bank image on customer loyalty and recommendation of the Islamic banks in Palestine. The confirmatory factor analysis was used to determine the different variables that were being studied in this research paper and their relationship with customer loyalty and recommendation. The research findings showed that customer satisfaction normally has an impact on the bank image a customer will create, ultimately affecting his or her customer loyalty and recommendation to a certain bank. Customer satisfaction is determined by the quality of services that he or she experiences in a bank. Therefore, if a customer receives service quality that meets or exceeds his or her expectations, then he or she will have a positive image of the bank, become satisfied and then will highly likely be loyal to a particular financial institution and recommend it to his or her friends

The cluster excellence and the ways of achieving it have become the main questions of scholars and practitioners in recent years. Despite the on-going debate there are still only a few studies that investigate cluster initiatives (CI) performance and management phenomena, identify the success factors underlying cluster initiatives management success and compare their influence. The objective of this study is to identify Critical Success Factors of cluster initiatives management. The proposed Analytic Hierarchy Process framework identifies the relative importance of different success factors to cluster initiative management and determines the key areas of activity and management focus. The AHP based interviews conducted among European cluster managers representing 19 cluster initiatives located in 10 countries allowed to identify the following Critical Success Factors: ‘Assuring sustainability of financing’, ‘Development of CI mission, vision, strategy and operational action plan’, ‘Integration building partnerships inside the CI, creation of interpersonal links, social networks, trust’ and ‘Development of cluster’s critical mass and management of partners’ complementarities and interdependencies’. Their joint importance for cluster initiative management success reached 40%, while the remaining 60% was distributed among 16 other factors.

The purpose of this study is to unveil the relationship between commodity prices of Banaadir region, Lower Shabelle, the World food prices, and world agricultural prices between the period of 2000M01 to 2016M12. The study will elucidate if the composite commodity prices of Banaadir region has an association with the world commodity prices (food and agriculture) and Lower Shabelle as well. Johansen cointegration test along with VECM and Pairwise Granger Causality are applied. For the cointegration, trace statistics indicate one cointegrating equation, therefore, there a long run association for about in 4 month equilibrium. VECM supported the existence of long run relationship with a speed of adjustment of 19%. For Granger Causality, the results show, no causality between Lower Shabelle CCPI and Banaadir region CCPI, unidirectional causality between world food index and Banaadir CCPI, unidirectional causality for world agricultural commodity price index and Banadir CCPI, unidirectional causality for world food price index and Lower Shabelle CCPI, unidirectional causality for world agric index and Lower Shabelle CCPI and finally no causality between world food index and agricultural index.

Gender disparity has been a highly debated topic in many discusses and opinion circles for a very long time, yet, this contentious topic continues to re-vibrate every now and then in many debates. How gender disparity has affected agricultural cooperative activities in Rivers State has not yet been captured in any literature. More so, the viability of these cooperatives has never been a front burner in the government’s agricultural policies over time. This research work was designed and aims to deliberately draw the attention of stake holders to the contentious topic of gender disparity and financial viability of the agricultural cooperatives that may have retarded its growth and development in the state. A multistage approach was adopted in data collection and analysis. 30 agricultural cooperative societies were randomly sampled from the registered council of Nigerian farmers and some unregistered cooperative societies of agric bias using structured questionnaire. Descriptive statistics such as averages and percentages were employed in analysis. The result showed evidences of gender disparity and financial insolvency. The injection of credit and elimination of gender disparity were suggested as the way forward. 

There have been a lot of studies on Chief Executive Officers’ (CEO) influence on firm performance. The studies have mainly focused on the Chief Executive Officers as a whole. Despite the various studies on the role of CEO as critical characters in the performance of firms, there does not seem to be specific focus on the influence of celebrity CEOs on firm performance. This study addresses the gap by reviewing existing theory and empirical literature and identifying the research gaps. The researcher has also developed a theoretical framework that explains the relationship between celebrity CEOs and firm performance. The review suggests that celebrity CEOs are under immense pressure as they are considered intangible assets and are expected to have high performance standards. This high expectation of celebrity status could have a negative influence on the firm performance.

The contribution of Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) in economic development has been recognized worldwide. The main challenge of the sector to contribute fully is a limited access to finance. This study examined the factors influencing access to credit by SMEs operators. Since the study was explorative in nature it employed survey method of which the data were thought to meet descriptive and inferential analysis. Therefore the study intended to collect data through questionnaires to 300 SMEs owners in Dar es Salaam city in Tanzania. The results of descriptive analysis which were presented in percentages showed that the major challenges that lenders encounter when lending among SMEs include; high interest charged and collateral requirement as the decisive factor for loan approval. Furthermore the main reasons for bad loans among SMEs operators in the region are credit management, high interest rate, short term repayment and poor business skills. The logistic results indicated that business information is the critical factor that largely influences credit access by SMEs in the region. The government should strategically regulate the stringent conditions and requirements posed to SMEs operators while education should be offered to SMEs operators in the region to improve their business operations. 

The objective of this approach is to study the determinants of the entrepreneurial triggering for engineers who obtained their diplomas from the National School of Engineering of Sfax during the academic year 2012/2013. Three months are needed to collect our data from a questionnaire established and administered to all graduates through their emails. 665 graduates are aimed to study. However, only 84 who have not started a career in a liberal profession have responded to the questionnaire. In accordance with the literature presented, it is argued that entrepreneurial triggering is driven by entrepreneurial intent and external factors such as positive and negative displacements and inhibitors. A simple linear regression model accompanied with the ordinary least squares method is used to analyze the data. The findings show that there is a strong relationship between intent on the one hand and the onset of the entrepreneurial triggering on the other. It is also proved that external factors are likely to impact triggering occasionally at both the positive and the negative sides. 

This study explains conceptual model that elucidates how work based learning strategies are playing mediating role between the knowledge characteristics of a job and employee innovation process. Knowledge characteristics of job are playing role as independent variable and the key component of this variable is problem solving. . The work based learning strategies is mediating variable and the key factor of this variable is cognitive learning strategies. The dependent variable is innovation process. A survey methodology is adapted for this research. Population frame is the software engineers. Simple random sampling technique is used. The questionnaire is used as a research instrument. For analyzing the data, apart from descriptive statistics, the regression analysis is conducted for testing hypotheses. The result shows that problem solving has positive impact on the innovation process during direct relationship. The problem solving also has positive impact on the innovation process through the mediation of cognitive learning strategies. 

Today, everyone has at least heard of organic and organic agriculture. Organic farming is an agricultural system that is fully consistent with sustainable development approach. It is an agricultural production management system that uses no chemical fertilizers, pesticides, an industrial synthetic product or a genetically modified organism. Organic agriculture is a factor of sustainable development: for society (health, employment…), the environment (methane emission, water resource…) and the economy (Source of Wealth…). The general objective of the proposed research is to theoretically and empirically evaluate the contribution of organic farming to sustainable development via the three pillars. We will deal with the case of the countries in the Mediterranean surrounding and then we will study the case of Tunisia.

 The aspect of investment especially foreign and industrial investor is among the major subjects in economic and financial growth and development of countries. Thus, the factors affecting investment are considered to increase the ability of countries in their competitiveness in international markets. The arrival of foreign invests to the industrial sector is an important tool to increase the supply of production resources that an increase the export capacity of the host country. The increase of production and export capacity attracts revenues, creates new job opportunities, increases technology transfer, and promotes the efficiency of production factors and finally the economic growth in the host country. The present study was conducted with the aim of investigating a significant relationship between foreign investment and the factors affecting the attraction of foreign investor. Policy, optimal management, laws, facilities and selecting a proper place in industrial towns are among the factors studied in this study. For this purpose, a sample of 200 members is selected by random stratified sampling method. Firstly, the significant relationship between the factors is studied by using structural equation modeling (SEM) and secondly the degree of this relationship is measured. Then, the above-mentioned factors are ranked according to the importance of their effectiveness by using analytic hierarchy process (AHP). Thus, among the factors mentioned in this study, the policies adopted by the government have the maximum effect with factor load of 3.695 in the attraction of foreign investors. 

The Foreign investment is considered one of the paramount of contemporary world for its different advantages in all aspects of life. Therefore, many developing countries tried to make radical improvements in economic administration and introduce legislations, which encourage and attract foreign investment. Tourism has a distinguish position in investment strategies, especially in developing as an activity which has cultural, social and economic effects. Therefore, many countries considered developing this activity by facility the process of foreign investment. Due to the fact, Iraqi Kurdistan Region is enjoying considerable security stability since the nineties of the last century. Add to this the decisions enacted by the local governments among which law, enactment and removing the difficulties that hinder their work in order to attract the foreign capitals, the private sector in particular. This is enhanced by the availability of the tourist, natural historical and religious capacities of attracting and increasing the investments. 

Purpose: The current research was based on investigating and analyzing the effect of workforce diversity on employee’s job performance in education sector, Jalalabad, Afghanistan. The term workforce diversity is considered to be a crucial factor for achieving organizational goals. Design/Methodology: Questionnaire was distributed among selected higher institutions (260) employers and students participated. SPSS and Microsoft Excel used as a major tools for interpreting the collected data in which linear regression, correlation and reliability tests was used. Findings/Conclusion: The result found that workforce diversity has significant effect in employee’s job performance. Moreover, the Gender based diversity and Ethnic Based diversity was constant variables. 

Urbanization programme in Ethiopia is neither participatory nor supportive to farmers in periphery, and thus has negative impact on people livelihood and highly affects the livelihood of poor people by diminishing the natural resource available to them. The municipality has provided cash compensation for affected rural people. However, monetary compensation is not an appropriate mechanism to rehabilitate an affected people and minimal and seems inadequate. The aim of the study was to assess policy and practice of land expropriation process and rehabilitation mechanism of evicted peri-urban farmers as the result of urban expansion to peripheral areas in Ethiopia. Primary data were collected from 200 peri-urban evicted farmers through questionnaires and 30 conducted interview with municipality officials. As the findings of the study shows that the reason for eviction of peri-urban farmers in Ethiopia are industries, urban dwellers residential house, public projects, private investments, NGO projects, Recreational sites and industrial parks. Peri-urban land are potential areas of interest, most stakeholders are tied to together confidentially for malpractices. Peri-urban farmers have the complaints on property valuation, amount of compensation, survival strategies and on implementation of policies, however, poor response. The rehabilitation practice which most municipalities now applying are mostly monetary compensation but rare practice of income capitalization. The practical implications that should be applied are use combination of rehabilitation mechanism, apply standardized land expropriation process, apply proper grievance handling mechanism and create enabling environment for peri-urban farmers.

The purpose of this study was to extend the SERVQUAL model with subjective norms and to investigate the customer satisfaction and customer loyalty in Islamic Banks. This study has used survey method where data was collected from 500 respondents through a questionnaire survey. Structural equation model (SEM) was applied to check the hypothesis relationship between proposed constructs. Finding revealed that the extended model has significant impact on customer satisfaction and customer loyalty in Islamic banks of Palestine. Furthermore, this study unearths certain areas that were not previously discussed in Arab cultural context such as subjective norms. The findings of this study will be helpful for managers and policy makers to improve the service quality in Islamic Banks of Palestine. Extension of this study in other developing countries is recommended as this study was contextualized in Palestinian cultural context.

The study was carried out at Damot Gale district of Wolaita zone in Southern nation nationalities regional state with the main objectives to describe factors of child labor in the study area. In order to attain this objective the study made use of cross-sectional household survey data collected from 94 sample households. The data collected were analyzed and discussed by using both descriptive statistics and binary logit regression model. To this end, identifying children’s who were in child labor and those who were not in child labor; descriptive result shows that from different age category 73% of the children’s were engaged in different activity and the remaining 27% responded as they were not working. Most children’s started working below the age of 8 and major sectors of work were unpaid family work such as agriculture 58% Male and 7.24% Female and Home service 7.3% Female and 22% male. The result of the logistic regression model revealed that out of 8 variables included in the model, 4 explanatory variables were found to be significant at 1%, 5% and 10% level. Accordingly, family size and loss of parents have positive association with child labor and statistically significant up to less than 1% and 10% respectively. Meanwhile occupation status of the parents and education level of were found out to have strong negative association with child labor and statistically significant up to less than 1% level of significance.

An important industry, producing non-food consumer goods, is textile industry. From the development of this industry depends the social level of living, therefore it is necessary to increase the role of light industry in the development of domestic market by competitive domestic products of high quality. Light industry includes several sub-sectors: textiles (including cotton, wool, silk, linen, knittеd fabrics, felting), garment, haberdashery, leather, fur and footwear industries. However, under the pressure of imports the light industry of Kazakhstan has practically ceased to exist, providing only 8-10% of the internal demand. The paper evaluated the effectiveness of investment projects in the textile industry on the basis of economic and mathematical risk prediction method, marked types of risks in investment attractiveness, which are inherent in any sector of the economy. The article details the method for calculating the prediction of risk of the investment strategy in the textile industry.

This research targets to test the connotation between the helpfulness of public relation and export performance in Sudanese export companies; the mediating effect of commitment and trust, the data have been collected from 150 high-ranking administrators of export company in Sudanese exporting firms. Questionnaire was used to collect the data; overall response rate was 84%. Many statistic tools have been utilized, reliability test, exploratory factor analysis, correlation analysis and hierarchical regression to the goodness of measures and interrelationships. The results showed that public relation meaningfully influenced the export performance, also commitment and trust significantly influenced the export performance, beside the significantly association between the public relation and commitment and trust.

Supply chain integration has been widely identified as a key research topic by both practitioners and academicians. In such environment, it is essential to vividly illustrate the publications contribution during the period of time and recognize research area and interests as well as the direction of research trend for future studies. With the availability of bibliometric data and variety of analytical tools for evaluation purposes, disregarding bibliometric analysis would be a missed opportunity for this area. Therefore, the current research attempts to deliver a comprehensive comparison thorough using rigorous bibliometric tools that provides a better understanding not previously fully grasped or evaluated by prior studies in the area of supply chain integration. The objective of this research is to recognize the global scientific production; the most productive authors, journals, articles and countries as well as to extract the most influential articles. The analysis begins by identifying over 500 published studies during the period of 1980 to 24th February 2016, which are then purified to works of proven influence and those authored by influential investigators. Web of Science Core Collection (formerly known as ISI), category of management was utilized to identify the relevant articles. Gaps are also discussed in knowledge about literature and bibliometrics analysis. The findings provide wisdom and a vigorous roadmap for further investigation in this field.