Foreign direct investment and carbon emissions in developing economies: The moderator of renewable energy consumption

A rigorous and extensive application of the value chain management (VCM) has become the vogue in modern day business practices and processes. However, due to the complex and multidimensional nature of value chains, achieving efficient and effective value chain management in real value chains remains a major conundrum for practitioners. Many unknown barriers continue to impede effective and efficient value chain management in developing countries’ industrial value chains. The purpose of this study was to find out the common barriers to effective value chain management in a developing country’s industrial value chains using evidence from the cotton industry in Zimbabwe. The analysis was based on survey data sets obtained from 157 purposively sampled experts from the cotton industry value chain in Zimbabwe. Exploratory factor analysis was used to find the barriers to effective value chain management. The results revealed both architectural and governance barriers to effective value chain management. The findings also presented major policy implications for industrial value chains in the developing countries and also indicated areas for further robust research founded on a broader data set from other developing countries’ industrial chains as a way of validating the findings of this study.

The advent of globalization has spurred the level of foreign direct investment (FDI), which has increased the employment level and economic growth in countries around the world. This scenario has also been debated in the extant literature. It is on this backdrop that this study was inspired to examine the relationship between FDI and the level of employment in Nigeria. The article uses the Fully Modified Ordinary Least Squares (FMOLS) and the Johansen co-integration econometric approach on the data, which were sourced from the World Development Indicators (WDI) of the World Bank and the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) statistical bulletin. The investigation period covered thirty-two years (1985–2017). Also, the authors adopted the theory of absorptive capacity as the baseline for the model. Results obtained from the study showed that foreign direct investment is statistically significant and positively related to the employment level in Nigeria. These findings imply that a 1 unit increase in the inflow of foreign direct investment to the Nigerian economy is capable of increasing the level of employment by about 0.97 units. Therefore, based on findings, the study is concluded by recommendations that the Nigerian economy should become viable through effective trade policies and programs, which are capable of attracting foreign direct investment into the Nigerian economy for employment creation.

Acknowledgment(s)
The publication support received from Covenant University Centre for Research, Innovation and Discovery (CUCRID) is appreciated

Given the negative utilitarianism and difficulty in maintaining long-term loyalty, hospitals resort to a variety of images that define and redefine their relationship strategies in order to stay patient-centric. As in any other sector, in healthcare, patients play an important role in service design and delivery. The basic services of medical appointment scheduling, online payment and health information search are recognized as one of the most important elements that increase patient footfall, service planning, patient satisfaction and their continued usage, in particular in developing economies such as India. This study seeks to understanding the basic e-Health services continuance usage intention among patients by integrating the Expectation Confirmation Model (ECM) and the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and extending them by including certain external variables. With a well-structured questionnaire, a survey of 453 respondents – out-patients and care-givers, who should have used e-Health services at least once, in particular, visited multispecialty hospitals, revealed that along with the ECM and TAM constructs such as satisfaction, confirmation, perceived ease-of-use, and perceived usefulness, the external variables such as trust, social influence, perceived service quality, and perceived privacy and security had a significant influence (p < 0.05) on e-Health services continuance usage. The main findings of the study contribute to developing and empirically testing a model that explains the basic process of motivating the e-Health service users for continuance usage intention.