The idea of supply chain management (SCM) is covering its perspective in the form of flow of material and information from the business to customers. Its application in the field of tourism is also very much significant. The objective of present study is to analyze the empirical association between the supply chain management and tourism industry from the context of hotel industry in Indonesia. For this purpose, a questionnaire-based approach is followed while taking the demographic factors regarding age, gender and qualification. A sample of 272 respondents is finally accepted for the empirical examination between supply chain and its implication in tourism industry. Both descriptive and regression analysis are conducted. To analyze the factor of supply chain, sixteen items are considered from the existing literature while considering the strategic supplier partnership, information sharing, and information quality as the key indicators. The factor of tourism is meas-ured through four different proxies. The practical implications of the study are taken both the tourists and key policymakers while dealing with the SCM and its integration with those hotels dealing with the tourism and related services. This study contributes towards the future trends in the form of integration for SCM and tourism industry.

The issues of audit quality and audit committee have received huge consideration from the auditing profession, the general public population and the government controllers particularly after the prominent corporate outrages in firms like Enron, Global Crossing, Tyco, and WorldCom. These concerns discourage investors to invest in foreign and local businesses. The primary objective of the current study is to explore the impact of internal and external governance mechanisms such as board size, audit committee independence, audit committee expertise, and audit committee meetings on the quality of audit in selected firms. The study is carried out on a sample of Iraqi non-financial firms. The dependent variable is the audit quality measured as a dummy variable and it receives 1 if a firm receives audit services of big five auditing firms and zero, otherwise. To achieve the research objectives the study uses logit regression technique. The results indicate that there was a positive relationship between audit quality and the percentage of non-executive directors in the audit committee. The findings of the current study will be helpful for policymakers, researchers, accountants, financial experts, and audit practitioners in understanding the importance of the concept of audit quality and the key factors which affect the audit quality of any non-financial firms in Iraq.

Project management tools and techniques provide the efficiency and effectiveness in managing and handling the projects. Many tools and techniques have been discovered and applied widely for a long period of time among project managers around the world with great contributions to the success of projects. Vietnam is a developing country and has become an attractive hub for national and international business opportunities. Consequently, there has been an increasing development and expansion of business projects in Vietnam. The purpose of this study is to analyze the use of project management tools and techniques in Vietnam. More specifically, this study aims at investigating: 1) the awareness of business people related to projects, 2) the application of project management tools and techniques within the organization and 3) the challenging obstacles that have prevented organizations in using the tools and techniques. The mixed-method methodology is employed to collect and analyze the data. This study uses interview and questionnaire techniques to collect the data for the study. Several companies in different industries in Vietnam participated in collection of the data. The findings of the study indicate lack of indepth understanding and recognition of project and project management tools and techniques in Vietnamese businesses. The term “project” has not yet become popular in Vietnam. Hence, companies in Vietnam have been facing many obstacles with the application of project management tools and techniques affected on the performance of the projects. The study suggests that the definition and recognition of Project Man-agement should go beyond the current assumption of the Vietnamese business people. Better exercises and practices of the concept of Project Management can benefit the local and international companies. Achieving higher awareness of projects and project management tools can significantly improve economic success of Vietnam.

This study evaluates the technical efficiency, productivity change of financial companies listed in the Malaysian stock exchange (Bursa Malaysia) and examines the effects of productivity change on efficiency over the period 2007–2016. Moreover, this study also concentrates on the ranking of financial companies according to their efficiency scores. Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is uti-lized on a Malmquist Productivity Index in order to calculate the financial companies’ efficiency scores. The results of this study show that some firms were fully efficient. The results implied that these companies were in optimal control of their inputs or resources to generate the maximum outputs. Also, the results indicate a tremendous productivity gain was mostly because of a positive shift in frontier technology and positive shift in technical efficiency. This study is significant because it helps to identify the efficient companies from the financial sector in Malaysia based on multiple inputs and outputs by using the DEA model. Common misspecification problems observed that instability of efficiency scores over productivity.

This study is conducted to study the implementation of the audit techniques and procedures executed by auditors using risk-based approach. The study also determines factors affecting audit quality of financial statements in Vietnamese insurance enterprises. Quantitative method is used in the study where questionnaires are sent to 250 independent auditors and 186 valid questionnaires are encrypted, declared and entered into SPSS software version 22.0. The results show that in audit techniques, except for document testing and verification technique, there were significant differences in application level of material testing, observation, interview, calculation and analysis techniques between big 4 firms and non-big 4 firms. The analysis also confirms that the most significant difference was between the two audit groups. In audit procedures, while control testing is not performed singly, detailed testing can be performed alone at all three assurance levels and the analysis is performed alone in the assurance level of 1. It is possible to combine them in these proce-dures with the assurance level of 2 and 3. On the other hand, the combination of these three proce-dures is only guaranteed at level 3. The results of the factor analysis and regression model test demonstrate that there were six factors influencing the audit quality of financial statements in insur-ance enterprises; namely audit method, auditors’ quality, awareness of auditors and director board, characteristics of insurance enterprises, legal environment and position of the audit firm. In particular, audit method and auditors’ quality are the strongest factors.

This paper investigates the impact of lagged-exchange rate along with market risk and financial sector indicators on country risk in Kuwait. For this purpose, time series analyses both in aggregated and disaggregated approach are conducted along with the correlation and descriptive outcomes. Overall study sample is divided into fourth groups; namely the whole-time period, 1980 to 1990, 1991 to 2000, 1991-2005 and finally 1995-2005. To achieve this objective, regression equations are developed, indicating the set of lagged predictors along with market and financial sector indicators of exchange rate volatility. For the whole sample of the study, it is found that exchange rate lagged values are significant predictors of country risk from 1980 to 2005. Under the first subsample, lagged 1 and market risk through real interest rate are blamed for creating exchange rate (ER) volatility. For the 2nd disaggregated analysis, the factors like lagged 1 of ER along with deposit interest (DIR) and price level of the Government (PLG) are significant predictors of exchange rate. Additionally, during the period 1995-2005, none of the regression models appears to create the exchange rate volatility. However, for the last disaggregated time series analysis, it is found that ERL1, and PLG significantly determine the country risk in the region of Kuwait. Findings of the study are contributing in the present literature while confirm the fact that lagged values of exchange rate are very much significant to be observed to understand the current trend in ER. Besides, the re-sults can also support the argument that exchange rate risk and interest rate are interlinked with each other.

This paper attempts to find out various facets of work-life balance (WLB) contribution and relationships with the employees’ working in dairy company in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The study considers 131 employees selected randomly from the Nadec dairy company. Work-life balance Scale developed and standardized by Pareek et al. (2011) [Pareek, U., Purohit, S., & Joshi, A. (2011). Training instruments in HRD and OD. New Del-hi: Tata McGraw- Hills Publishing Company Limited. 287-289.] was used to gather the information from the respondents. Both de-scriptive and inferential statistics are been used to analyze the data. The most prominent findings of the result are: (i) all the facets of work-life balance have positive relationships with each other ex-cept teamwork; (ii) married are scored high in terms of mean on time management and teamwork which statistically indicates an existence of significant difference in contrast to their counterparts and (iii) social needs a component of work-life balance appears as one of the most powerful pre-dictors of personal needs within the employees’ working in the dairy company. The current investigation is an eye-opener for HR professional in the Kingdom to design and implement the certain mechanism to improve the work-life balance of the employees to achieve the Saudi Vision 2030.

This study investigates the effect of dividend payout on firms’ future earnings growth (FEG) in Malaysia. We use panel data analysis methodology to determine the effect of dividend payout and other control variables on FEG in 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 years. Our results show that firm size and payout ratio had significant positive relationship on four out of five dynamic models tested. The remaining factors except of debt ratio are significant at least four out of the five years used in dynamic models in this study. We find evidence that Malaysian firms show mean reversion pattern in their earnings; smaller firms would enjoy greater future earnings growth; increased monitoring from creditors leads to better earnings performance; firms with better investment prospect have greater future growth in earnings; and higher investment in assets leads to higher future earnings growth. The findings show that in Malaysia, managers use dividend as a tool to signal their positive private information about the firms’ future prospect.

The six GCC states share similar economic, geographic and socio-cultural characteristics and also face with similar challenges in terms of energy perspective. This study plans to focus on the eco-nomic and energy efficiency of the six GCC states. In the process, the study ranks the GCC states in terms of their efficiency scores. These efficiencies are computed through Data Envelopment Analysis. The economic efficiency is calculated for all six GCC states. Capital and labor are the inputs and GDP is the output. In this survey, Saudi Arabia maintains the highest efficiency score of 0.94, closely followed by Qatar (0.92), Kuwait (0.89), Bahrain (0.83), Oman (0.81) and UAE (0.67). There is a huge gap between the economic efficiency scores of Saudi Arabia and UAE. The environmental efficiency scores are calculated using CO2 emissions as output and electric power consumption and energy as input. Again, the highest efficiency score is for Saudi Arabia (0.91) followed by Oman (0.87), Kuwait and Bahrain have a tie for the 3rd position with a score of 0.74. Finally, the laggards are UAE (0.65) and Qatar (0.62). Again, there is a huge gap between the best and the worst performers. The case of two countries is worth mentioning. Qatar is ranked second in terms of economic efficiency while it was ranked sixth in terms of economic efficiency. Oman was ranked fifth in terms of economic efficiency while it was ranked second in terms of environmental efficiency. Finally, an average of economic and environmental efficiency are taken to compute the composite index. Saudi Arabia has the first place followed by Oman, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar and UAE.

A constant concern of academic institutions has been to improve the customer satisfaction in university libraries. The service quality within academic library context is pivotal for satisfying customers by meeting the customers’ needs to create loyalty amongst customers. This research uses LibQual to analyze the gap between customer’s perception and expectation, concerned with the services at the University Sultan Zainal Abidin (UniSZA) Library. There are six dimensions in service quality; namely general services, search for materials, library collection, staff, environment and environment, considered for this empirical research. The purpose of this paper is to 1) know service quality dimensions that satisfy the customers and 2) to observe the impact of service quality on customer satisfaction. The research methodology is carried out using a questionnaire survey distributed among 170 samples through simple random sampling. The data obtained was analyzed by using covariance-based structural equation modeling and importance-performance analysis. The results suggest that quality of service had a significant impact on customer satisfaction. Among the service quality dimensions, library environment and general service were viewed as high importance and strong performance index. Implication for research and practice resulting from these findings were also discussed.