Prevailing views suggest that short-term, unhedged foreign borrowing and crony capitalism, in combination with a weak financial system and lack of transparency may lie at the heart of the Asian financial crisis of 1997. Although the crisis first began in Thailand, it quickly spread to the rest...

The last two decades of the twentieth century witnessed a series of financial reforms in emerging economics of Asia, Africa and Latin America. The seminal works of R.I. McKinnon and E.S. Shaw, which attribute the slow growth of these economies to financial repression, inspired many of these...

One of the most effective tools for evaluating the success of a quality management programme is the measurement of quality costs (prevention, appraisal and failure costs). The application of the concept of quality costs originated in the manufacturing industry in the early 1950s. As increasing...

Consumers and organizations worldwide are searching for low-carbon alternatives to conventional gasoline and diesel vehicles to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and their impact on the environment. A comprehensive technique used to estimate overall cost and environmental impact of vehicles...

A 'Process Cost Model (PCM)' approach has been proposed previously (Aoieong et al., 2002) for measuring the quality costs of construction projects. The PCM is proposed because the traditional models on PAF (prevention, appraisal and failure) quality costs have been found to be unsuitable for the...