India’s Urban Challenges and Smart Cities: A Contemporary Study

After coming to power in 2014 Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government announced the ambitious programme of building 100 smart cities in India. The idea behind is to rejuvenate the ailing urban system, improve urban infrastructure, quality of life and achieve sustainable and inclusive development besides other things. Tremendous demographic pressure, inadequate infrastructure and resources to cater to the population which runs in billions, unplanned growth of the peri-urban sprawls characterize India’s urban environment. Socio-economic imperatives are the key factors behind the rapid urbanization in India. Livelihood, security and prosperity are some prime movers. Ironically, cities, which on the one hand are considered the growth engines of economy, also attract poverty (socio-economically marginalized population) in large proportion. Consequently posh urban sprawls in Indian cities exist amidst impoverished habitats called slums where the poor inhabitants are condemned to live in sub-human condition. Reconciling growing affluence and abject poverty in cities is a difficult task too. In the backdrop of India’s urban challenges this paper seeks to examine some critical issues associated with the development of smart cities to understand: Will smart cities serve India’s aspiration or fulfill its urban needs? Can it address the contemporary and future needs of India’s urbanization? How will it ensure the participation of the urban stakeholders? How will it ensure social inclusion and finally, whether India needs smart cities or smart urban solutions for sustainable development?

Full text of the paper is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.19085/journal.sijbpg030301

This paper has been published in Scholedge International Journal of Business Policy & Governance.

Goodwill and accounting discretion

According to EU Regulation 1606/2002, since January 2005 all listed EU firms are required to prepare their consolidated financial statements (and, in the Italian context, also their separate financial statements) in accordance with IFRS; therefore, they are required to use the IAS 36, IAS 38 and IFRS 3 to recognise the goodwill as well as to evaluate whether it has to be impaired. In fact, according to the above-mentioned accounting standards, goodwill is not amortised but is subject to an annual impairment test; more specifically, IAS 36 prescribes that goodwill must be written down if its carrying value exceeds the recoverable amount (expressed by the higher of fair value less costs to sell and the value in use).

Even though IASB decided to prohibit amortization in order to express the “true” value of goodwill in the balance sheet, contrasting earnings management behaviour, scholars argue that both the first recognition of goodwill value as well as its impairments provide managers with a substantial accounting discretion (Bloom 2009). In fact, this discretion can relate firstly to the identification of goodwill within the whole price of an acquisition (thus goodwill is considered as a residual value) and, secondly, to the determination of its recoverable amount as well as its allocation within cash generating units (Wong & Wong 2001). More specifically, the decision of writing down goodwill, the time of this decision and the magnitude of the impairment loss provide managers with a good opportunity to manipulate earnings. The magnitude of this discretion is expected to be larger in periods of financial crisis, where a more frequent impairment of goodwill should occur. 

Furthermore, a recent study (ASBJ et al. 2014) highlights that impairment losses often come too late and this effect has been made evident in recent years in which many entities recognised impairment losses of goodwill several years after the financial crisis; as a consequence, it concludes that reintroduction of goodwill amortisation would be appropriate, because it reasonably reflects the consumption of the economic resources acquired in a business combination over time.

The aim of the paper is to investigate this timely topic by analysing the association between discretionary accruals and yearly changes of goodwill (due to its first recognition because of new acquisitions and to its impairments), referring to a sample of Italian listed firms. By this way, this study will try to add new knowledge to this intriguing accounting issue by considering not only accounting discretion provided by impairment test procedure but also that yielded by the initial recognition of goodwill, as a residual value emerging after allocating the price of acquisition within a business combination.

From a methodological point of view, we adopted the modified Jones’ regression model, which is largely used in many studies investigating earnings quality. Findings provided by this model support the idea that goodwill accounting offers several possibilities to manipulate earnings.

The remainder of the paper is structured as follows. The second section focuses on goodwill accounting treatment over time, while the third one reviews the literature on the topic introducing the hypotheses of the study. The fourth section presents and discusses the results while the fifth one concludes, also summarizing further developments of the research.

This paper is published in the Scholedge International Journal of Management & Development and the full paper is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.19085/journal.sijmd021002

Sustainable Urban Canvas- Experiments with truth

The phenomenon of urbanisation, especially suburbanisation, is observed monolithically worldwide, but in a rippling wave like vogue. It trickles down vertically and diffuses out horizontally from the developed to the developing areasand from central to the peripheral regions, respectively. No economically progressing country has ever been able to avert its occurrence, which is inevitable and challenging. The daunting task of intelligently designing and confirming sanity and sustainability for an urban canvas is a multidimensional and multi / cross disciplinary endeavour. This demands retrospective understanding of the place and its people; anticipatory sense to forecast and strategize; and awareness about the practices worldwide and indigenous. Civilizations have always been civilized because of their informed and active citizens, who have come forth to the rescue of theirlands of origin and fellow natives. Representation of this kind can be cited in the Garden City and City Beautiful movements of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, followed by many similar smaller and bigger experiments to the formal school of thought of urbanism, called “New Urbanism”.Many experiments happened under the wide umbrella of New Urbanism and garden city movement across the globe. From Great Britain, to the USA, Abu Dhabi and India, all have witnessed and / or are undergoing the sweeping dynamism in thought and action, for the pursuit of urban revamp and sustainability. This piece of research is an attempt towards compiling and evaluating such utopian models, taking cases from different countries, from different time periods, that have aimed at urban amelioration. The paper considers four cases of Masdar City (Abu Dhabi), Letchworth City (U.K), Disney Celebration Community (U.S.A.) and Magarpatta City (India) to showcase people’s experiments with truth for urban sustainability.

This paper is published in the Scholedge International Journal of Multidisciplinary & Allied Studies and the full paper is available at: http://thescholedge.org/index.php/sijmas/article/view/208

The Instability of Economic Systems and speculative market: The case of China

The paper aims to investigate instability of an economy on the threshold of a financial crisis. We will try to peek on the main variables that seem to "warn" the outbreak of a financial crisis. In fact, the bubble distorts the values of the GDP, which therefore rise. In contrast, the trend in nominal prices remains neutral, because only sensitive to the real economy. This dissonance between the values of growth and inflation can be a useful clue to decipher the formation of a bubble. Therefore, we consider comparing the performance of both GDP and inflation in the years preceding the crisis. After will attempt to determine whether these features are sufficient, at least in part, to provide meaningful messages in a state of emergency being prepared.

In the final part of the essay, we try to apply the search procedure to today's China, which has accumulated profound abnormalities in twenty years of growth boiling. In the experience more or less recent, the formation of a massive speculative bubble is constantly accompanied by a remarkable tendency to deflation of the price system. China is perhaps repeating the experience of Japan and travels to a financial crisis of unexpected violence? We suppose that the shocks of the global economy are transferred to the Chinese giant, which reacts with a slowdown in its endless growth.

This paper is published in Scholedge International Journal of Management & Development and the full paper is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.19085/sijmd.020905

Remedial theology: An exploration into the factors-Religious conviction, mysticism and wellbeing

Spirituality and religion have been seen as beneficial, harmful, and irrelevant to health. An effort was made to examine the recent research on this topic. The focus was on: defining spirituality and religion both conceptually and operationally. The rapidly accumulating evidence on spirituality further confirmed that personal spirituality has important influences on healthcare outcomes however it is difficult to integrate into daily medical practice. However medical spirituality was studied as a distinct interdisciplinary with its own well-developed body of clinical evidence, clinical skill and with well-defined clinical boundaries. An effort was made to integrate the new knowledge, and help anticipate developing "turf issues."

This paper is published in Scholedge International Journal of Multidisciplinary & Allied Studies and the full paper is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.19085/sijmas.020903