International Business Law Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

International Business Law - Assignment Example The overall importance of WTO is critical regarding establishing a link between trade and environment because it is the single most important document which governs the international trade. The growing debate therefore is focused upon the potential role of WTO in clearly establishing a link between global trade and environment. Prescription of different standards as well as the framework therefore is one of the key tasks which WTO has to perform in order to comprehensively establish the link between the two. This paper will discuss the linkages between trade and environment and how it has remained on of the important challenges for international business law. This paper will also discuss as to what steps by WTO during last decade to properly address this issue within the perspective of international trade. Environment and international trade Trade is considered as beneficial for the society and the economy and its liberalization can actually help any society to achieve greater econom ic resources. It is critical to understand however that with increased trade and production processes, the overall pace of economic degeneration can expedite and the results can be both negative as well as positive. Environment can be protected if cleaner technologies are implemented which involve less energy consumption besides relying more on labor intensive techniques. The environment can also be damaged because growth in production process requires more energy and raw materials and hence more environmental de-gradation can take place. There is therefore a nexus between environment and international trade and how expansion of international trade can actually result into both the protection as well as degradation of environment. (Charnovitz, 2007.) Serious efforts to actually integrate concerns for environment and international trade started during 1970s and as a result of this growing debate, an international conference in Stockholm took place to debate on the future course of de fining how international trade agreements can actually affect the businesses with significant potential to damage environment. Prior to this conference, GATT undertook a study on its own behalf to determine and explore the impact of environmental protection policies on international trade. In same year, Environmental Measures and International Trade Group was established however, it remained inactive for more than two decades and it was only in during 1992 that this group was convened by members. (Charnovitz, 2007.) Subsequent legislative efforts include Tokyo round and Uruguay round went on to establish different standards and kick started the process of integrating international trade with that of the environment protection. There was also growing concerns among developing countries regarding the export of those products which were considered as environmentally damaging with serious safety and health related issues. The overall debate was therefore based upon the argument that fre e trade has an impact on the environment and that higher levels of free trade can further result into damage to the environment. (Charnovitz, 2007.) The recent efforts however by WTO clearly outline the way the nexus between free trade and environment. Though WTO

Pampers Health Spa (PHS) Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2250 words

Pampers Health Spa (PHS) - Assignment Example 2325540 =? 2325540 1 – (Variable Cost / Sales)] 1 - 0.499 0.501 Break-even point= ? 4641796.41 (Atrill & McLaney, 2011) Margin of safety % = Current sales level – Break- Even Point Current sales level Margin of safety % = ? 2965000 -? 4641796.41 = (56.55) % (Atrill & McLaney, 2011) ? 2965000 Task 3 Payback period method Proposal 1 The project requires an investment of ?900,000 and it generates cash as follows: ?270000 in Year 1; ?295000 in Year 2; ?345000 in Year 3; ?325000 in Year 4. The payback period is 3 years ?270000+ ?295000= ?565000 in the first two years + ?335000 of the ?345000 occurring in Year 3). Payback period method= ?270000+ ?295000+?335000= ?900,000 ?335000/ ?345000 =0.971 Payback period= 2+0.971=3 years Proposal 2 The project requires an investment of ? 750000 and it generates cash as follows: ?160000 in Year 1; ?189000 in Year 2; ?225000 in Year 3: ?254000 in Year 4. The payback period is 3.7 years ?160000 + ?189000 +?225000 = ?565000 in the first thre e years + ?78000 of the ?254000 occurring in Year 4). ?160000 + ?189000 +?225000 +?78000= ?750 000 ?176000/ ?254000=0.693 Payback period= 3+0.693=3.7 years Accounting Rate of Return Accounting Rate of Return =Average net income / Average investment (Davies & Pain, 2011) Proposal 1: Average net income =90000 + 98000 +75000 + 65000 = 328000/ ?900,000* 100= 36.44% Proposal 2: Average net income = 60000 + 70000 + 95000 + 125000 = 350000/ ?750 000 * 100 = 46.67% Net Present Value methods NPV= -Co + C1/1+r + C2/ (1+r) 2 +†¦+ C n / (1+r) n (Davies & Pain, 2011) -Co= Initial Investment, C = Cash Flow, r = Discount rate, n = Time Proposal1 NPV= ? (900,000) + ?270000 / (1+0.893) + ?295000/ (1+0.797) 2 + +?345000 / (1+0.712) 3+ ?325000 / (1+0.636) 4 NPV= ? (900000) + ? 247865.60176 + ? 91353.8957 + ? 68755.2314+ ? 45368.2506 = ? (446,657.0206) Proposal 2 NPV= ? (750000) + ?160000 / (1+0.893) + ?189000 / (1+0.797) 2 + +?225000 / (1+0.712) 3+ ?254000/ (1+0.636) 4 NPV= ? (750000) + ? 84521.9 229 + ? 58528.4281 + ? 44840.3683 +? 35457.0328 = ? (526652.2479) Total Expenses Fixed cost (70%) Variable cost (30%) ? ? ? Motor Expenses 8900 6230 2670 Insurance 28700 20090 8610 Rates 20400 14280 6120 Premises 1680000 1176000 504000 Wages and Salaries 1445000 1011500 433500 Repairs & renewals 54700 38290 16410 Professional charges 17500 12250 5250 Advertising 67000 46900 20100 Cost of Sales 483700 Total 2325540 1480360 Contribution ratio = Sales/ total variable cost = ?1480360 / ?2965000 =0.499 Task 4: In order to ascertain the financial position of Pampers Health Spa’ (PHS) it is necessary to carry out a financial analysis as it measures the financial performance of the enterprise in terms of profitability, leverage, and liquidity in its operations. As the management of Pampers Health

Questions 3 and 4 Coursework Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Questions 3 and 4 - Coursework Example One partner suggests that the business should be moved to a vacant office in downtown Boston. She argues that the additional business gained will exceed the charges for rent and moving the office. The other partner at Progressive Business Solutions does not want to buy that idea. He argues that cost of office stationery and business cards is covered and that moving will prove to be costly. In the case of the partnership business, a lot of factors can be considered. The factors can originate from the evaluation of the costs and benefits. Every business entity will always want to make the most possible benefits .Reduction of costs is another target of the business. In this case, a partner’s decision is considered as optimal if it leads to the best outcome at a particular time. The outcome will make the participants in the business to gauge whether it is optimum or not. The partner needs to estimate how altering the business can affect both the benefits and the costs that the business incurs from carrying out that particular activity. If altering the activity makes the benefits to increase more than the costs, or the costs reduce more than the benefits, the partnership will grow. A security analyst specializing in the stocks of the motion picture industry wants to determine the relationship between the number of Movie Theater tickets sold in December and the annual level of earnings in the motion picture industry. Time-series data for the last 15 years are used to estimate the regression model. E = a + bN where E is total earnings of the motion picture industry measured in dollars per year and N is the number of tickets sold in December. The regression output is as follows: How well do movie ticket sales in December explain the level of earnings for the entire year? Present statistical evidence to support your answer. Also, sales of movie tickets in December are expected to be approximately 950,000. According to

Analysis of hard working summer student Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Analysis of hard working summer student - Essay Example The student’s response would most likely reveal his potential weak areas. The mentor should offer him sincere guidance and coaching in those areas so that he may amend the analysis and hence, the whole paper before forwarding it for getting published. The mentor should not send the paper without raising the student’s work to the level suitable for writing publishable papers. Should  the  mentor  simply  edit  the  student’s  paper  and  send  it  for  publication? No, the mentor should neither make an attempt to edit the student’s paper nor send it for publication on his behalf. Although if the mentor does so, this would provide the student with an instant relief and he would feel rewarded for his effort so far, yet the instant relief would ultimately prove harmful for the student. If the student is made to have a hard time now, he is likely to put in more effort in an attempt to make the paper publishable as per the required standa rds. In the course of trying that, the student would indeed learn all what would benefit him for the rest of his life as a researcher. Should  the  mentor  write  a  short  paper  of  her  own,  based  on  the  student’s  data,  and  send  it for  publication? Writing a paper based on the data collected and complied by the student is out of question for the mentor because it is fundamentally the data, that he sees problems with.

Cb5 Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Cb5 - Assignment Example Therefore the behavior of the consumer is determined by the motivation he or she gets. need for self-actualization. The most basic and fundamental four levels of the pyramid comprise of deficiency needs as termed by Maslow, they include security, friendship and love, esteem, and physiological needs. If these needs are not met with the exemption of the essential physiological need, there might be no physical sign, but the person will feel tense and anxious. This theory proposes that the most essential needs should be met before the person strongly desires the higher level or secondary needs (Patrick, 2003). Consumer involvement is the degree of data processing or level of significance that a customer accords to a product. The level of involvement has a very important impact on the behavior of the consumer. High involvement purchasing decisions are always the dream of a marketer as in this level consumers as the buying decisions are informed and planned. This is because the buyer purchases the product since it is important to them, therefore he or she concentrates on the features and warranties, and the price is not an issue. However, low involvement buying decisions are those that are formulated without planning, and they come about if one spots a product and they impress them. To increase customer involvement, marketers should select the correct customers, select pilots that fit into the present culture and should be aware of what consumers look for in their products (Michaelidou & Dibb, 2008). The self-image comprises of three dissimilar dimensions, that is the real self, the ideal self, and the self-esteem. The self-esteem refers to the positivity to an individual’s self-concept. Marketing communications may influence the self-esteem of an individual. Low self-esteem is when a person thinks they cannot do a task while high self-esteem is the opposite and individuals may tend to think more of themselves. The

Virtualization for Healthcare Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 5000 words

Virtualization for Healthcare - Research Paper Example 1.0 What is Virtual Healthcare? Virtual healthcare is, in a nutshell, any kind of health care that is accomplished through a means that is not face-to-face interaction. Harrop (2001) defines virtual healthcare as â€Å"asynchronicity, outsourcing and anonymity† (Harrop, 2001, p. 244). Demiris (2005) describes a number of different, broad, categories under which health care virtualization would fall. One is that of health care delivery systems, which is where a team of professionals and caregivers are assembled, for the benefit of the patient, and participate in therapy or health care by videophone. This enables a patient, such as one who is homebound, to participate in meetings regarding the patient’s care virtually, without having to leave his home. Another of the broad groups is that of virtual research teams. Virtual research teams concern health care researchers, and this is where the health care researchers communicate and exchange information with one another thro ugh the Internet or other advanced technology. Virtual disease management is another category cited by Demiris. This is where a patient, who has a chronic illness, interacts with health care professionals in an effort for the health care professionals to intervene and communicate with their health care professional. ... Virtual disease management also has, as one its top goals, education of the patient in self-care (Demiris, 2006, pp. 180-181). Virtual healthcare differs from traditional health care in that the patient does not necessarily meet with his or her health-care provider face to face. As indicated below, this has a number of advantages with regards to costs, yet also has a number of disadvantages when compared against traditional face-to-face healthcare. 2.0 Examples of Virtual Healthcare There are many different examples that may be used to illustrate some of the benefits and uses of virtual health care. One such is the concept of telehome care. This is where a patient accesses, from his or her home, audio and video data between the patient and the health care provider, such as a nurse. This visit is facilitated by such hands-on devices, such as stethoscopes, blood pressure readings, wounds dressing, and auscultation (Shea et al., 2008, p. 136). These different readings are performed by t he patient or the care-giver with the supervision of the nurse, who appears through the patient’s audio or video set, and is also on hand to answer any questions that the patient might have about his or her care (Shea et al., 2008, p. 136). The University of Cyprus, in the Eurasian country of Cyprus, has innovated a virtual health-care system called DITIS, which is a Network for Medical Collaboration (Pitsillides et al., 2008, p. 1). DITIS was originally developed so that the difficulties in communication and continuity of care between a home health multidisciplinary team, and the team and an oncologist, could be addressed (Jossif, 2005, pp. 6-7). DITIS is a team that consists of a variety of different providers and family members, such as a social worker,

Money and Morality Essay Example for Free

Money and Morality Essay MONEY AND MORALITY: Gifts of eternal truth in moments of the mundane By Cheryl Leis, PhD, Management Consultant/Practical Philosopher As inhabitants of this 21st century Western world, we all have to deal with money. We participate in the world of commerce as a means to obtain those things considered necessities of life. Money plays the role of the most commonly accepted means in this giving and getting from others. And the more money one has, the greater one’s power to regulate the particulars of survival – one’s own and that of others. We use money to participate in the exchange of products or services, individually and corporately – whether employed by or leading an organization. In some cases these organizations are publicly funded non-profits, and in other cases they are private, for-profit ventures. Money and morality is a topic that has surfaced on many occasions in my line of work. One such instance was during a contract with CBC TV to work on the development of a six-part national series titled: â€Å"Beautiful, Filthy Money and the Search for Soul. † The title itself speaks to the ambivalent nature of our responses to money and its presence in our lives. As part of the contract, I appeared as a guest on the panel, where I was asked to complete the following sentence: â€Å"Money is†¦Ã¢â‚¬  Yes, what is money? My response was: Money is a tool for finding out who we really are. What you do with money, and how you live with money’s presence in your life, tells a lot about your values. Or, as Ralph Waldo Emerson puts it: â€Å"A dollar is not value, but representative of value, and, at last, of moral values. † This is apparently pretty close to what Buddhists believe about money. There are times when many of us are faced with an imbalance between money and morality and find ourselves asking in some form or another: How we can put â€Å"Money† and â€Å"Morality† in the same sentence and not end up with an ethical contradiction? The incompatibility of these Mwords is an inherent, yet complex part of being human. And it is only when we face the truth of their incompatibility that we can come to understand the utter necessity of their coexistence. The challenge stems from the fact that there is both a spiritual side and a material side to our situation. When we don’t bring the spiritual side into dialogue with the material side, problems result. This is true for individuals as well as organizations. Think about Enron – what do you think their way of dealing with money says about the moral values that guided senior management there? Each of us could turn the question on our own lives. Money, in and of itself, is neutral. It has no intrinsic value, but is a mere yardstick of value, a means of measuring or comparing in the exchange of one thing for another. Money â€Å"belongs to the class of great mental inventions, known as 1 measures†¦Ã¢â‚¬  Measures of distance – the meter or mile – span the gulf between two things or places yet are not themselves things or places. Similarly, money brings things of different value together without becoming one or the other. † Because money is merely a way of measuring, it is in itself, therefore, not real. Thus, money is both neutral and unreal. Nevertheless, we often seem oblivious to this unreal nature of money and equate it with things that are very real, like our own values. But if, as Aristotle says, â€Å"[a]ll things that are exchanged 2 must be somehow comparable,† what are we saying about our perception of reality when we measure our sense of self-worth by our net-worth? While money is a measure of value, that value can change depending on what the market is willing to bear. It’s rather similar to the story of the emperor’s new clothes. As soon as we agree something no longer has value, our whole perception of it changes. This change in the perception of the value of something affects humans psychologically and emotionally. So when the value of stocks falls through the floor, people react in fear or paranoia. Conversely, when stocks rise like crazy, there is frenzy fuelled by hope and even greed. What then, motivates our relationship with money? With what intention do we strive to accumulate wealth? Do we recognize what our relationship with money says about our values? Money Obsessing For some the question of ethics and money leads down another path. In â€Å"Is Lucre Really 3 that Filthy? † Craig Cox, executive editor of Utne magazine, reflects on his own journey from disdain for the almighty dollar as a child of the 60s to becoming – of all things – â€Å"bourgeios,† earning money and learning to manage it. There was the example by a leading voice of the counter-culture of the day, Allen Ginsberg, who wrote in Howl! of burning all his money in a wastebasket. Times have changed – even for Ginsberg, 1. David Appelbaum, â€Å"Money and the City,† Parabola, Volume XVI, No. 1 (Spring 1991), 40. 2. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1133a 18. 3. Craig Cox, â€Å"Is Lucre Really That Filthy,† Utne Reader (July-August, 2003), 63. who â€Å"†¦of course, sold his papers to Stanford University for 4 nearly a million bucks. † The irony, points out Cox, is that social justice activists who want to eschew wealth in order to bring about social justice and help the poor are in fact helping people to attain the very thing they, the activists, abhor: a comfortable life. He sets up an interesting dilemma when he insists that â€Å"If you insist on embracing poverty in your own life, how do you become a credible advocate for folks who would do almost anything to 5 escape it? † True enough, there are those who become enslaved to money in their attachment to mere accumulation of more and more capital. However, there are also those who are enslaved to money in their ascetic avoidance of it. Both are obsessive behaviours: obsessed with having money or obsessed with avoiding it – like the alcoholic’s family that is obsessed with avoiding alcohol. In neither case is money at the service of the individual as a means of providing for the necessities of life; rather, the individual is at the service of money. Our emotional responses to this neutral thing called money often lead to an automatic attachment of value-statements. We grab on to labels such as â€Å"evil,† â€Å"bewitching,† â€Å"aweinspiring,† or â€Å"filthy lucre. † Respect for money is replaced with either worship or condemnation of it. Emotional and value-laden responses are also evident when conversation turns towards money and self-righteous posturing rises very quickly to the surface with comments like: â€Å"Well, I don’t soil my hands with money. † Or: â€Å"I certainly don’t 4. Ibid 5. Ibid work for money. † A lot of judging of others happens: â€Å"He’s just in it for the money. † Or: â€Å"She’d do anything for money. † This judgmental posturing also leads to ideological positioning. Anyone who focuses on making money is immediately dubbed a capitalist and conversely, anyone who speaks of communal sharing is dubbed a socialist. Subtleties are lost and conversation ends right there. No dialogue is possible. We move from love of money to love of ideology, where anyone who thinks differently than I do about money is immediately evil. Spiritual Moments of Mundane Existence To judge from one side or the other is to forget that we inherently have one foot in heaven and one foot in the mud of the earth below. The challenge is to live in both simultaneously. Living as a human being means learning to deal with money – whether one has a lot or a little matters not. It will do us no good to merely pursue a spiritual life unless we are living equally and simultaneously in the material world. Christians are exhorted to remember that even Bishops, or spiritual leaders, are told to balance both. â€Å"For if someone does not know how to manage his own household, how can he take care of God’s church? † (1 Timothy 3:5) A life of wholeness, or one in which the spiritual and the material are in balance, guarantees freedom from distortion. Yet the need for wholeness is also at the heart of the contradiction. The spiritual and the material are of entirely different natures. Not only must they live in the same world, both the spiritual and the human sides of our existence must also have 2 their own identity and remain in full relationship with each other. We have to work at accepting this incompatibility for what it is. These are separate parts of who we are and of our daily existence. These separate parts are in a dynamic relationship one to the other, like notes in a beautiful song: you might have harmony, but you still have separate notes. If they are all the same note, there is not harmony, there is unison. Harmony has tension. It is beautiful because of the tension. Unison is nice, but harmony is richer. Morality And Business Just as it will not help us on an individual level to focus only on the one side of our nature at the expense of the other, likewise it will not help to divide our culture into the spirit-lead and others. It reminds me of a story I recently heard: Two men met for the first time, in of all places, a church on a Sunday morning. The one asked the other: â€Å"So what do you do? † To which the second responded: â€Å"I work as a director of XYZ division of a business. † â€Å"You’re in business? † quipped the first, who was a teacher, â€Å"Oh that’s too bad. † The work of the businessman was seen as inherently less worthy. How far could the conversation go after that? It is a difficult chasm. One finds a classic case of a religious-affiliated venture that refused to acknowledge that it must run itself like a business. After decades of mismanagement, the publishing house cried out to its constituency to get it out of a multi-million debt. One former board member was even quoted in a church publication as saying that this was seen as â€Å"a church venture, not a business venture. † The mistake lay in this eitheror posture. There was no acknowledgment that gifts and talents and skills of different sorts were needed. The disdain goes the other way too. One has only to think of the now infamous corporations like Enron or Livenet, where the situation is merely the reverse: a business enterprise that lacks spiritual sense, and results in moral bankruptcy. If our moral principles give us the framework within which we operate and the ability to continue operating depends upon financial viability, then integrity is automatically lost for any organization when either half of the morality and money equation is lost. Balancing the Equation Only when we pay attention and only when we come to recognize the true place and role we have allowed money in our lives, only then can we possibly hope to reach a deeper understanding of how important a balance between the material and the spiritual is. This deeper understanding may only come in flashes, only fleetingly. Yet the truth that is understood in an instant opens us up to the truth of our everyday actions and existence. In other words, we must become conscious, we must become aware of our human condition – this life lived in a dynamic balance between the spiritual and the material – and be attentive to both. But instead of giving the right amount of attention to those mundane and material aspects of life like taxes and monetary demands put upon us, we often get caught in a bias against money. We would rather point fingers and condemn in broad strokes than engage in dialogue of particular money matters. We would rather alienate than seek to understand. Instead of casting judgment or pretending we, personally, are above being affected by money, we need to face our human situation and recognize we live in two worlds simultaneously. Maybe then we would do a better job of living in both. â€Å"If great truth does not enter into our relation to money, it cannot 6 enter our lives. † And if we do not allow ourselves to face that truth, the negative aspects of our relationship to money will sneak up on us unawares. Bad debts, overdue bills, or an empty fridge will suddenly demand so much of our human attention that we will have no energy left to focus on matters of the spirit. Undeniably, it can be a challenge to live out our moral principles in the marketplace; it is inherent in the challenge of being spiritual and human at the same time. Not giving enough attention to either the spiritual or the material, on an individual or an organizational level, leads to bankruptcy, whether moral or financial. In his book, Business and the Buddha, Dr. Lloyd Field states, â€Å"greed is a choice. † We can choose to allow our insatiable desires to form our intentions or we can choose to recognize where our intentions are ultimately leading us. It is not money or wealth or even the capitalist system that is the problem, he argues. Buddhists regard wealth as neither bad nor negative. Rather, the problem sits plainly with us, human beings, and the intentions which we allow to motivate our thoughts, our emotions and our actions. It cannot be stated any clearer than said in this book: we are exhorted to â€Å"continually make the connection between money and human values. † And then the question that really gets to the heart of the matter: â€Å"What price do we put on our ethics? † We will need to move past our biases and disdain for those whom we consider to be on the other side of the money and morality equation and allow moments of eternal truth and even grace to infiltrate our discussions and our questions. When all gifts and skills are welcome and when integrity is our priority, then there will be the possibility of a true and dynamic relationship between money matters and morality. 6. Needleman, 265.