The role of SMEs on economic development

The role of SMEs on economic development SMEs has an important role in the development of an economic of a country (both developing and developed countries). They bring lots of benefits like employment generation, exports, foreign currency, investment, income and wealth distribution. These benefits lead to an economics growth of a country and many countries has been encouraging the setting up of small and medium business. Organization like World Bank Group approved more than $ 1.5 billion to SME support program in 2002 as it is believed that SME play and contribute to future expansion of an economy. SMEs is one of the most important economic pillars in Mauritius. The main role of SMEs in Mauritius is to create jobs so as to reduce unemployment rate. Not to forget that in early 1980s, when there was economics recession in Mauritius result in big unemployment rate, it was specified that SMEs could create 10% of jobs. As this was proof of the importance of SMEs The Government of Mauritius have come and provide new facilities and help to these companies by making availability of finance at low interest rate and taxes lowered on export , machinery and parts also. A special organization has been found by the Government called SMEDA to assist the small and medium firm to grow and establish them self. Most of the SMEs generate fund internally or by taking loans. SMEs use a combination of long term sources of finance which is called capital structure. Financial instrument SMEs usually use; Micro Credit Government loans and grants Leasing Loans from financial firms Personal savings There are some internal and external factor that affect small, micro and medium firm , namely: Competition from bigger firm. Financial resource constraint. Access to research and development tool. Assistance for new ideas and creativity. Liability issues. Fluctuation in the economy. Difficult to obtain significant market share. Government law and policy. Narain, 2004: SMEs are born out of individual initiatives and skills, offer low cost product, production flexibility and can adopt new technology and innovate and export, have high employment orientation, utilize locally available human and material resources and reduce regional imbalances. SME distinction: Autonomous firm(either a proprietor, partnership or linked enterprise ) Partner firm( which does not cause problem in ownership and decision making) Linked firm ( has a small share in the firm and few authority) Micro firm Definition: Micro firms form part of small firm and are often unregistered. They usually single owner and have no employees and are generally young. Micro firm produce and distribute goods in unregulated but competitive markets. These firms are usually independent, largely family owned, employ low level of skills and use low and affordable technology and are highly labor intensive. Micro firm provide income and employment to a reasonable proportion of people in a country by producing goods and services for the population Small firm Definition: Small firm are usually a business that is privately owned (corporations, partnership or sole proprietor) and have a low volume of sales. One of the most used definition of small firms: one with a relatively small share of market, one that is managed by its owners in a personalized and independent way, i.e. free from outside control in decision making. [ Stanworth (1991)]. These small firms are not usually dominant in the market and are not a big threat to large and quoted firms Medium firm Definition: Medium firm are normally engaged in industrial and more complex activities that small and micro firms and are registered companies. They usually import and export goods. Small, Micro and Medium firm can begin or commerce activities on a low budget and can be managed easily on a full time or part time basis. Decisions are take freely and there is no interference in the work done. Demarcate between Micro, Small and Medium firm. According to OECD, Small and Medium firm are usually defines according to the number of employee, capital, asset, sales volume and production ability to produce adequate goods. The differentiation criterion varies from country to country like the employment criterion which is usually used to demarcate hem, for example a country may limit medium employee to 300 when others may limit it to 200 employees. As per SMEDA Act, it definition include all Enterprise in the economic sector and they use turnover criterion to demarcate them. Medium firm are define separately from small firm as they have different needs and objective. They usually are more sophisticate firms and well technology averse while small firm are usually in a developmental state. Normally there are three criteria to differentiate Micro, Small and Medium firms from each other: Staff headcount Annual turnover Annual Balance Sheet Comparing these 3 criteria allow you to determined the type of the firm, i.e. Micro, Small or Medium. Staff headcount. The number of employee is an important factor to determine in which category SME the firm falls. It include full time, part time and seasonal employee. The employees head count is expressed in annual work unit. Full time staff is count as 1unit whereas part time and seasonal worker are count as a fraction of 1 full time worker. Annual turnover and Balance sheet. The annual turnover is determined by calculating the income of the firm during its financial year after all debt has been paid. Turnover should not include VAT or any indirect taxes and the Balance sheet should refer to the value of the form main assets You are autonomous when no other people have participation in ur firm or you in other firm. Classification of SME: Mauritius Micro firm Small Firm Medium Turnover N.A Balance Sheet N.A Employees N.A 0-10 0-250 Europe Micro firm Small firm Medium Turnover Balance Sheet Employees 0-10 10-50 50-250 To qualify as an SME, both staff and ownership criteria must be satisfied, and either the turnover or the balance sheet criteria, i.e any of these two criteria must be meet in order to qualify.

Cordell Hull: The hero of peace behind the scene Essay

Cordell Hull, a Tennessee native, October 2, 1871; son of William and Elizabeth (Riley) Hull; was considered one of America’s greatest Secretary of States. Prior to becoming Secretary of State in President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s cabinet, where he served during the very critical years of the Great Depression and World War II, 1933 to 1944, he was a U.S. Senator and congressman for 24 years. As a young army captain he fought in the Spanish-American War of 1898. Cordell Hull’s most remarkable achievements were in the area of international economics where his special knowledge in that field left a lasting impact on the United States’ relations with other countries for many years after he died. He had dealt with the threats of war with the axis powers, the merit of the U.S. assuming the role of an isolationist nation by avoiding foreign entanglements, and the conciliation of aggressive nations in Europe and Asia. Hull advocated the revival of world trade as a key means for lifting the country out of the depression and as a way to attain global peace. His influence upon Congress to do away with high protective tariffs were enormous and he lobbied for the passage of Reciprocal Trade Agreements in 1934. Tariffs were reduced on certain goods up to 50% through special treaties, granting â€Å"most-favored-nation† terms with friendly nation anxious to do business with the U.S. Hull also created the Export-Import Bank, a government agency that allowed nations to borrow money in order to buy American products. In the interest of peace he helped start the United Nations. Franklin D. Roosevelt called him the â€Å"Father of the United Nations.† (Resnick 70) The man of peace Cordell Hull has devoted his entire life to the stabilization of international relations, best known to the public as his untiring efforts in the field of commercial policy, efforts inspired by his desire to counteract autarchic tendencies both in the U.S.A. and abroad. Of these efforts, which considerably influenced national policies during the period between the wars and especially at the end of the twenties, he says: â€Å"there can be no real progress toward confidence or peace or permanent trade recovery while retaliations and bitter trade controversies rage.† Confidence and peace between nations have constituted his goal in all spheres of his activity. This is the driving spirit behind this fight against isolationism at home, his efforts to create a peace bloc of States on the American continents, and his work for the United Nation Organization.   Hull reopened the question of taxation, after the victory of the democrats in 1912, managed to secure the introduction of income tax. He certainly saw it as a means of increasing federal income, but his first concern was with the effects of this tax as against those of the tariffs. He was convinced that protectionism created monopoly and enriched the few at the expense of the many, and that such system could not be reconciled with the free competition in which he believed. By the end of the war, his view on economic policy could be expressed as follows: High tariffs are barriers obstructing the development of trade and friendship between nations, thereby becoming barriers also to lasting international peace. As early as 1917, he put forward the idea of an international agreement to govern the methods employed in commercial competition. The task of reducing trade restrictions was taken up in the League of Nations and the basis for the work of the following years established at the great world conference in 1927 at Geneva. The culmination of these efforts was the World Economic Conference in London in 1933 which Hull himself attended, this time as secretary of state which ended as failure. It may think it was a mistake to lay so much stress on the question of stabilization of currency form the very beginning; it was then that led to Roosevelt’s famous telegram in which he rejected the plan for currency stabilization on the grounds that, a nation’s prosperity depends more upon a healthy internal economic structure than it does upon the price of its currency in relation to the price of currencies of other nations. This attitude, which prevailed in the United States, brought Hull’s work in this direction to a halt. Yet Hull did not give up, even though the London conference was a setback for his ideas. Despite this failure, in November of that year he headed the American Delegation to the Seventh Pan-American Conference, held in Montevideo, and won the trust of the Latin American diplomats, laying the foundation for the â€Å"Good Neighbor† Policy, followed up in the Inter-American Conference for the Maintenance of Peace held in Buenos Aires (1936) , the eighth Pan- American Conference in Lima (1938), the second consecutive Meeting of Ministers of Foreign Affairs of the American Republics in Havana (1940) (Haberman 289). Father of income tax Cordell Hull was the principal architect of the Income Tax of 1913. In structuring this tax, he used as his prototype the Income Tax of 1894. He believed that a tax on consumption unjustly burdened the working people. He aspired to create an institutional structure that would shift the burden from those citizens with the least ability to pay with the ones with the most. Given authority through the Trade Agreements Act of 1934, he negotiated reciprocal trade agreements with numerous countries, lowering tariffs and stimulating trade. He secured the passage of a bill empowering the president to lower tariffs by fifty percent and to reduce import restrictions for countries prepared to grant similar concessions to the United States. He was eventually able to conclude no fewer than twenty-seven trade agreements on the basis of this bill (Joseph 187). This law, which was subject to a time limitation, was last renewed in 1945 and authorized the president to reduce tariffs by forty-five percent. This was, of course, materialized after Hull had retired, but it represented nevertheless a victory for his policy. All of this marked a radical change in the economic policy of the United States; it is an affirmation of England’s policy during the free trade period, taking as a model the Cobden Treaty of 1860 of which the most favored nation clause formed an integral part. Although the change is partly due to the acceptance of the United States as a creditor nation, it signifies something more profound for Hull: it is his immutable belief that it will clear the way for improved international relations and remove one of the causes of war . Hull attacked not only the tariff bill but the whole theory of protection. In particular, he attempted to point out what he considered to be the fallacy of protection for the American farmer. He told the House that 334,000,000 acres of land in the United States were planted, in 1928, to crops valued at $7,000,000,000, which actually got some benefit form tariff protection. The conclusion he drew from these statistics was that, under any system of tariffs designed to protect the farmer against foreign competition, only an infinitesimal percentage of American agriculture could benefit, by the very nature of American production, consisting so largely, in acreage and value, of commodities such as corn, wheat, oats, barley, rye, cotton, tobacco, and fruits, of which large surpluses were exported every year and which had nothing to fear from competitive imports. Hulls claimed that the general tariff rates, which the Republicans were trying to boost, were already higher that those of any country except Spain and that the United States stood twelfth among the nations of the world in per capita exports and only fourteenth in per capita imports .   The principles of Montevideo, including the abrogation of the Platt Amendment, the new treaty with Panama, the withdrawal of the marines from Haiti, and progress on the inter-American highway. The sum total of the accomplishments was among the contribution of the greatest nation in the world to the maintenance and promotion of peace throughout a world which gave every evidence of tottering on the brick of war (Hinton 187). Father of United Nation After World War II broke out in Europe he asked for support to the Allies and recommended the revision of the Neutrality Act, which kept the United States out of being involved in the warfare. After U.S. involvement in war, he worked to develop cooperation among the Allies, through his visits in Moscow in 1943, and started to create a peace plan that supported the establishment of a world organization to maintain peace. Knowing that Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations did not succeed, in part, because of political partisanship in the United States, Hull led successful conventions on the formulation of a new international organization and submitted the â€Å"Charter of the United Nations† in August, 1943. Before the Charter could even be approved in 1944 in San Francisco, Hull had to resign office due to weakening health. Tuberculosis and heart disease were his hindrance for him to continue his work to which Hull was used to. The Roosevelt administration received much of the attention and praise for the establishment of the United Nations, owed and giving much of the credit to Hull. Before Hull resigned in November of 1944, Roosevelt offered Hull the opportunity to run as his vice president, which Hull declined because of his health condition. Roosevelt was so grateful to Hull that he nominated his Secretary of State for the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1945, the Nobel Committee awarded Cordell Hull the Prize for his work in the Western Hemispheres, for his remarkable work on International Trade Agreements, and for his hard work in establishing the United Nations (â€Å"Cordell Hull: 1945†). Works Cited Cordell Hull 1945. 1 December 2007 http://www.cordellhullmuseum.com/about.htm Haberman, Frederick W. Nobel Lectures in Peace. World Scientific, 1999. Hinton, Harold B. Cordell Hull – a Biography. READ BOOKS, 2007. Joseph, Richard J. The Origins of the American Income Tax: The Revenue Act of 1894 and Its Aftermath. Syracuse University Press, 2004. Resnick, Abraham. They Too Influenced a Nation’s History: The Unique Contributions of 105 Lesser-Known Americans. iUniverse, 2003.

The Political Arena

A boiling hot international issue nowadays is the upcoming elections in the Philippines which will be conducted on May 10, 2010. The election itself is controversial enough because this time, there are ten presidential candidates, but what is really different about this election is that this is the first time that they will be having the automated elections. The Senate Bill No. 2231 states that the automated election system must be used to ensure transparency, accuracy and credibility.As the elections are drawing nearer, more and more intrigues are appearing. One, and perhaps the most worthy of worry, is the failure of the PCOS machines.2 Just five days before the elections, the testing of the machines produced wrong results. In the mock elections, there were five votes for a certain candidate, and five votes for another candidate. These ten votes were all counted for different candidates.Whether the makers of the machine and the administration, headed by the current president who ha s been accused of cheating in the last elections, are conniving for this, it remains a mystery. People are worried that there might be a failure of elections, and when this happens, the current president stays the president. It has been suggested to have a parallel counting, meaning that aside from the automated counting, there will also be manual counting. This proposal was rejected by the Commission on Elections.In the Philippines, there are many different groups and religions. Recently, they have announced their support statements. The Iglesia ni Cristo group announced that they will be supporting Senator â€Å"Noynoy† Aquino, the son of the late President Cory Aquino (their first woman president).3Senator Aquino made a statement saying that the Commission on Elections indeed denied their proposal because it might open more venues for frauds and protests.4The media, being the primary source for most people, definitely plays a big role in this event. They continue to publis h survey results, which almost always show that there are only two presidential candidates who are in a battle for the spot. Again, these surveys only show the majority votes in a certain area, but for some reason, they have the power to manipulate the voters.Some voters will change their votes because their first choice does not show good results in the surveys posted by the media. The media also consistently gives updates on the failure of the PCOS machines. Last April 29, 2010, there was an article saying that the Office of the President also stood behind the decision of the COMELEC, and this made the citizens wonder more if there is indeed a connection between the two groups.5There have been legal actions already, as the mentioned resolutions of the Senate to the COMELEC, but all have been denied. The reason behind this is most probably the connivance of the administration, the COMELEC, and the producers of the PCOS machines. For me, this is an important issue even though it is happening in a different country.This shows us the dirty game of politics, and if it is happening in the Philippines, it can happen to any other country, as long as there are corrupt and power-hungry officials. If their elections push through without failure, we will get to see a new era in the Philippines, but if there is a failure of elections, who knows what can happen to their country?Choosing the next leaders of a country should not be taken lightly, and amidst the issues happening in their country, there are people still hoping for the best results.Works CitedSenate of the Republic of the Philippines, 13th Congress, Senate Bill No. 2231, Automated Election System, filed March 15, 2006.Noynoy Aquino. http://www.noynoy.ph/v3/index.php.Senate of the Philippines Press Release May 4, 2010.COMELEC Rejects Parallel Manual Count, April 29 2010, Manila Bulletin.   

Effectiveness Of Experiential Learning Using The Workshop...

In the workplace, often sexism takes place and arises many issues. This article discusses â€Å"the effectiveness of experiential learning using the Workshop Activity for Gender Equity Simulation – Academic version (WAGES-Academic) to deliver gender inequity information† (Zawadzki, Danube, Shields, 2012, P.605). Researchers formed a quantitative study by comparing the â€Å"WAGES-Academic to an Information Only condition (knowledge without experiential learning) and a Group Activity control condition† (Zawadzki et al., 2012, P.605). For the methods of the research, â€Å"at baseline, 1249 undergraduates from the pool (705 women, 529 men, 15 gender unspecified) completed an online study† (Zawadzki et al., 2012, P.609). Furthermore, â€Å"participants completed the Knowledge of Gender Equity Scale (KGE; Shields et al. 2011; Zappe 2006) as part of an online study that measured a number of individual differences† (Zawadzki et al., 2012, P.609). For the next step in the research, â€Å"participants next completed one of three intervention activities; (1) Participants in the WAGES condition completed the WAGES-Academic intervention described above. (2) Participants in the Group Activity condition played a modified version of Chutes Ladders ® in which they were assigned to Green and White teams before playing the game according to the standard rules† (Zawadzki et al., 2012, P.610). As a result, â€Å"WAGES-Academic is an effective experiential learning tool for increasing knowledge about gender inequity inShow MoreRelatedOverview of Hrm93778 Words   |  376 Pagesin your career. Either you will be working with some organizations or having people working for you, in both cases you will be dealing with people. To be understandable and lively means that we need to communicate you. We start every chapter with learning objectives. 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