This paper provides a brief but comprehensive overview of microfinance academic literature with emphasis on recent innovations, trends and efficiency. In particular, we focus on controversial issues of microfinance, such as commercialization, regulation, interest rate policy and the balance...

This paper examines the impact of natural gas consumption, real gross fixed capital formation and trade on the real GDP in case of Tunisia over the period of 1980-2010. We used Auto-Regressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) bounds testing approach to test the existence of long run relationship between...

In this paper we tried to investigate the positive influence of capitalization of players acquisition costs as intangible assets on efficiency of professional football clubs. Econometric approach was used to establish econometric models for three indicators of efficiency – total income, total...

Economic growth is one of the most important issues discussed worldwide. Its dynamics over time seem to be crucial from the perspective of the ability of poor countries to catch up with highly developed economies. As can be easily noticed in world statistics, both GDP per capita and GDP growth...

In this paper, we investigate the influence of the education of entrepreneurs, which we hypothesise to be a signal of talent, on the adoption of variable pay (VP) schemes in the Italian economy. We estimate to what extent differences in the diffusion of VP between Italian firms reflect...

For several decades public enterprises have been criticised for their poor economic performance. Many economists take it as “conventional wisdom” that publicly owned enterprises are inefficient by their very nature. This seemed to be proved by what is probably the most cited survey...

The issue of foreign aid dependency in African countries remains controversial among policy makers. So far, there is no consensus on aid effectiveness and the resulting policy prescriptions have been conflicting. The Euro zone which provides the bulk of foreign aid to developing countries, is...

This article examines whether financial sector development has ‘caused’ economic growth and investment in Ghana between 1970 and 2007. As a proxy for financial sector development we use credit to private sector as per cent of GDP, bank liquid reserve – asset ratio and liquid liability as a...

Problems of difficult settlement or solution in the world cannot be solved by segmented academic formats, market-place interests or mass-media headlines; instead of dealing with taken for granted issues (the apparent “bubbles” in the surface), public policies, research and teaching...

Data drain and data uncertainties for rival units affect the reliability and effectiveness of strategic plans for individual operational units. This study introduces a stochastic, multi-stage, optimization technique for short-term forecasting that intends to assist policy makers in developing...