Research Papers - Dept of Information of Management
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Publication Open Access ESTIMATING WILLINNESS TO PAY FOR WETLAND CONSERVATION: A CONTINGENT VALUATION STUDY OF MUDUN ELA AND KALU OYA WATERSHEDS, WESTERN PROVINCE SRI LANKA(International Conference on "Water, Environment and Climate Change: Knowledge Sharing and Partnership, 2018-04-10) Jayathilaka, R; Serasinghe, PWetland ecosystems are often neglected or undervalued. Few people realize the range of products derived from wetlands and their freshwater habitats. There are a number of social and economic benefits of wetlands and the wetlands are in a serious risk today. Specially, in relation to human activities and in inconvenient utilization, wetlands around the globe are being modified, reclaimed and over-exploited due to high levels ofresource consumption, land conversion and also upstream developments that alter the quality and flow of water that feeds into them. Decision makers often have a little understanding of the environmental value of wetlands because wetlands are often perceived as having little or no value compared with uses that yield more visible and immediate economic benefits. In this circumstances, revelation and recognition of value of wetlands and thereafter the valuation their importance has been an essential matter which helps to protect such habitats and also it is useful to utilize the benefits of wetlands in a proper management. The objective of this study is to estimate the willingness to pay (WTP) for conservation of MudunEla and KaluOya watersheds, Western province Sri Lanka using Contingent Valuation Method (CVM). Respondents were randomly selected for data collection through face-to-face interview. The Tobit model was used to estimate the entrance fee to for conservation. The marginal effects on probabilities in the tobit model suggest that postgraduate degree holders, households who are using wetland as education, research and agricultural purposes play significant roles in residents' WTP for protect wetland. Thus, higher educated households was found to have a positive response on willingness to pay for protect wetlands in the country. On the other hand, households who were used wetland for agricultural purposes have a negative response on willingness to pay for wetland protect practices.Publication Open Access Trade Liberalisation and Poverty in South Asia(Taylor & Francis Books, 2011) JAYATHILAKA, R; DE MEL, DThe relationship between trade and poverty has long been debated in academic and policy circles. The purpose of this chapter is to contribute to this debate through an in-depth study of the experience of Sri Lanka, the first country in South Asia to break away from the protectionist past by embarking on a decisive process of economic opening in 1977. During the first decade after independence in 1948, Sri Lanka continued with a liberal trade regime, until growing balance of payments problems induced a policy shift towards protectionist import substitution policies from the early 1960s. By the mid-1970s the Sri Lankan economy had become one of the most inwardoriented and regulated outside the group of centrally planned economies. In 1977, Sri Lanka responded to the dismal economic outcome of the closedeconomy era by embarking on an extensive economic liberalisation process, becoming the first country in the South Asian region to do so. Despite major macroeconomic problems and political turmoil, market-oriented reforms have been sustained over the ensuing years. Sri Lanka is now classified as one of the few developing countries outside East Asia that have achieved a clear policy shift from the entrenched import-substitution era. This policy transition has brought about notable structural changes in the economy (Athukorala and Rajapatirana 2000; World Bank 2005b; Kelegama 2006). However, the impact of liberalisation reforms on the incidence of poverty and poverty reduction has not yet been systematically studied. Therefore, the main objective of this chapter is to systematically examine the link between trade liberalisation and poverty reduction through employment channels. The chapter is arranged as follows: Section 2 provides an overview of trade policy shifts and the role of trade in the economy. Section 3 surveys the incidence and patterns of poverty. Section 4 examines key channels through which trade policy impacts on poverty. Section 5 examines some cross-cutting issues. Section 6 reports the results of an econometric analysis undertaken to examine the determinant of poverty at the household level with emphasis on the impact of trade policy. The chapter ends with a summary of key findings and policy inferences.Publication Open Access The Effects of Natural Disasters: A Study to Sustain Paddy and other Seasonal Crop Farmers in Sri Lanka(DEPARTMENT OF ECONOMICS AND STATISTICS FACULTY OF ARTS, UNIVERSITY OF PERADENIYA, 2019-10) Deshapriya, R. D. N. L; Lakpriya, K. A. D. L; Pathiraja, P. M. D. G. T; Wijesiri, P. G. N. A. H; Jayathilaka, RThe United Nations (UN) Development Programme set out seventeen sustainable development goals (SDGs) to be achieved by the UN member countries in 2030. One such goal, SDG 8 is about decent work and economic growth, where the agriculture sector can play a wider role for economic growth by reducing unemployment in the country. Worldwide, various factors can adversely affect many occupations, especially with unfavorable effects on those engaged therein. Previous researchers have shown that natural disasters cause impacts in terms of income volatility, particularly negative income shocks regardless of the cause whereas risks force households in developing countries to lower their expenditure on health and education. Mottaleb et al. (2013) identified natural disasters impacting on household income and expenditure volatilities in Bangladesh as well. Ministry of Disaster Management (DM) in Sri Lanka identifies flood and drought as the major types of natural disasters affecting Sri Lanka (Karunarathna and Athukorala, 2018). Nevertheless, Tsunami has also been a major issue in the recent past. Its likelihood of occurrence is rather small, but it causes high damage. Ancient Sri Lanka was a country with selfsufficiency. Currently, an open market economy, Sri Lanka’s dependency is higher on imports, partly due to insufficient local production. In addition, over the years cultivation has declined due to various reasons. The International Trade Administration (2018) states that in Sri Lanka, over 25% are employed in the agricultural sector, which contributes 6.9 % to Gross Domestic Production (GDP). This indicates the magnitude of any adverse impacts to the agricultural sector. In Malaysia, Hein (2019) discussed the response to extreme disasters and climate change when the government intervenes to mitigate same and spread awareness of climate changes. However, in Sri Lanka no long term plan is in place to mitigate or at least minimize the effects of natural disasters, which can lead to inequalities in the population. The findings/results of this study can assist Sri Lanka to initiate policies to reduce inequality among farmers, and thereby improve and sustain the agricultural practices in Sri Lanka; and thus to achieve SDG 8 as set out by the UN.Publication Open Access The Impact of the Proportion of Female Directors on Firm Performance: An Approach to Achieve Gender Equality(Postgraduate Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences (PGIHS) University of Peradeniya, 2019-10) Zainab, A. C. H. F; Senavirathna, H. D. N. N; Priyashantha, W. M. S; Yasarathna, T. A. D. K; Jayathilaka, RSri Lanka is well known as a country that ended a 30-year civil war of which the scars have not yet healed. The end of this brutal civil war was also a beginning of a new era of peace and development. Sri Lanka can only achieve sustainable development via long-term investments in economic, human and environmental capital. The inclusion of a focus on gender equality as the 5th goal within the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) illustrates the importance of women’s contribution to the economic growth. Both empowering women and ending gender based disparities are essential for sustainable development. More vigorous efforts will be required in order to achieve gender equality in terms of women’s empowerment even though it is evident that there are changes in the stereotypes that prevailed in the past. If a country makes better utilization of its female population, it would pave the way to increase economic growth, reduce poverty levels and enhance the wellbeing and living standards of its citizens. In order to close the gender related gaps, the governments have the responsibility to take into account the gender dimensions while implementing policies so that it can ensure that it doesn’t fail to make complete utilization of human capital resources (OECD, 2008). The focus and concern for women representation in business management has increased specially after the financial crises and corporate scandals such as Lehman Brothers and Enron. Many countries in Europe have adopted regulations in the form of legislative gender quotas for corporate boards. The main aim of implementing such gender quotas is to break the glass ceiling and provide an equal chance for both males and females in reaching top positions of companies. However, the underpresentation of women in senior positions in Sri Lankan firms indicates that they do not play a dominant role in the labour force as do females in developed economies. This is mainly due to women in developing economies such as Sri Lanka being typically confined to family and domestic roles and therefore tending to have invisible barriers in climbing up the corporate ladder and representing themselves on boards. Therefore, the Labour Force Participation Rate (LFPR) is low in Sri Lanka mainly due to the low contribution of women to the LFPR (CBSL, 2014). The issue of underrepresentation of women in corporate boards has gained substantial attention in today’s corporate world. There is a significant amount of evidence supporting this research issue in the developed countries. “In an attempt to address this question, many scholars in the recent years have studied the effect of women directors on firm performance. However, the empirical evidence of the extant literature inconclusive and most studies focus on firms in the U.S. and a few other developed economies” (Liu, Wei and Xie, 2014, p.170). Thus, investigating this research gap in a Sri Lankan context will be important to identify the extent to which women directors in the listed firms of Sri Lanka have the power to make strategic decisions and enhance firm financial performance. The role of public listed companies is important since they have the ability to boost the performance of an economy by contributing to the growth of financial institutions, creating employment opportunities and developing infrastructure facilities. If board gender diversity can trigger profitability and performance of the listed firms, then it will also be a determinant for economic growth.Publication Embargo Road Navigation System Using Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) And Natural Language Processing (NLP)(IEEE, 2019-01-31) Withanage, P; Liyanage, T; Deeyakaduwe, N; Dias, E; Thelijjagoda, SIn a highly evolving technical era, Voice-based Navigation Systems play a major role to bridge the gap between human and machine. To overcome the difficulty in taking and understanding user's voice commands, simulating the natural language, process the route with user's turn by turn directions while mentioning key entities like street names, landmarks, point of interests, junctions and map the route in an interactive interface, we propose a user-centric roadmap navigation mobile application called “Direct Me”. The approach of generating the user preferred route, system will first convert the audio streams into text through Automatic Speech Recognizer (ASR) using Pocket Sphinx Library, followed by Natural Language Processing (NLP) by utilizing Stanford CoreNLP Framework to retrieve the navigation-associated information and process the route in the Map using Google Map API upon the user request. This system is used to provide an efficient approach to translate natural language directions to a machine-understandable format and will benefit the development of voice-based navigation-oriented humanmachine interface.Publication Open Access Factors Influencing the Private Cost of Higher Education; the Case of Sri Lanka(researchgate.net, 2019-03) Gobinath, S; Tharshan, K; Dheerasekara, W. R. H; Gunawardena, M.M.D de S; Jayakody, S. G; Lokeshwara, A. AThe research aims to identify and analyze the cost elements that impact the private cost of university education in Sri Lanka. It focused on determining the private cost of the Bachelor’s degree programs and also the cost elements affecting the total private cost and their significance. Twenty one cost categories were identified through a pilot study and analyzed in order to assess their impact on the private cost and their variability based on field of study, gender, programme duration, and the socio-economic group of undergraduates. The population comprised of students enrolled in private higher education institutes offering Bachelor’s degree programs in Sri Lanka. The study was conducted during the 2016/2017 academic year and the sample contained 419 respondents drawn utilizing the purposive and stratified random sampling procedures. The data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, while the hypotheses were tested using the Chi-square test for independent sample statistics at 0.05 level of significance. It was found that majority of cost categories (15) had significantly varied between fields of study undertaken while minority of cost categories (10) varied significantly between students’ gender. The study revealed that the identified factors influenced the private cost of university education in the Sri Lankan context.Publication Open Access Impact of lean implementation on employees’ job satisfaction in the ABC Apparel manufacturing firm(Canadian Center of Science and Education, 2019-10-21) Karunarathne, N; Samarasinghe, H. M. U. S. RFor almost all organizations, employees are the vital resource and they are representing an important asset within the business. The main concern of Human resource management is to improve the potential of employees so that they can get maximum job satisfaction from their work and give their best efforts to the organization. Job satisfaction represents one of the foremost areas facing current managers when it comes to managing their employees. In the current context of Sri Lankan apparel industry, it can be seen that the high labor turnover rate in relation to the labor recruitments. The lean implementation of the apparel industry has been drastically changing the industrial environment and the way a worker perform his job role. As a solution to the labor turnover it is necessary to identify the impact of lean implementation on the employee satisfaction. ABC apparel manufacturing firm is a one of the apparel manufacturing firms which has implemented lean concepts such as Empowerment, Standardization, Quality Management, Problem Solving Demand, Effort-Reward Fairness, Team Working Culture and Job Rotation. Based on the literature review and preliminary investigation, hypothesis were developed in order to identify the relationship between the lean implementation and job satisfaction. Therefore the primary data for this research were collected through the survey conducted in the ABC Company. The survey was conducted over 60 sample units and the sample was selected using the simple random sampling technique. The collected data were analyzed using the statistical tool namely descriptive statistics, frequencies, correlation and linear regression. Based on the data analysis, it can be concluded that there is a moderate positive relationship between the lean practices and the job satisfaction in the ABC apparel manufacturing firmPublication Open Access A study of the implications of logistics 4.0 in future warehousing: a Sri Lankan perspective(researchgate.net, 2019-03) Karunarathna, N; Wickramarachchi, R; Vidanagamachchi, KAn effective combination of highly innovative logistics infrastructure plays a vital role in every business activity as a strategy of achieving competitive advantage. Currently, warehousing has been identified as one of the foremost value adding activities in supply chains. In the warehousing industry, automated intralogistics systems would be an ideal solution to eliminate the inefficiencies in conventional practices as well as to overcome the labour shortage issue. With the emergent trend of technology adaptation in industries, it is evident that Sri Lanka has the capability to apply these technologies up to a certain extent. Therefore, discovering the opportunities of logistics 4.0 implementation in Sri Lankan warehousing industry is highly demanding. This scrutiny has been conducted using a comprehensive and systematic review of literature published in relation to the areas of smart warehousing, smart logistics, intralogistics and Sri Lankan Third Party Logistics (3PL) industry. Through the effective categorization and integrative analysis, this paper intends to identify the ways of warehousing process improvements using the logistics 4.0 technologies while achieving the operational excellence. Further, it is expected to suggest the critical success factors affecting the logistics 4.0 implementation from the perspective of Sri Lankan 3PL warehousing Industry.Publication Open Access Effectiveness of Financial Accounting and Reporting Practices introduced to Eastern Provincial Council, Sri Lanka(2014-01-31) Nagendrakumar, NSri Lanka in recent years has been introduced changes in public sector financial management. The introduction of accrual basis of accounting to public sector especially in Provincial Councils has created new trends in public financial management. This research is concerned with the effectiveness of public sector accounting and financial reporting in the research domain of Eastern provincial council (EPC). The aim of this research is to understand the financial accounting and reporting practices and to analyze whether they are effective. Descriptive method was used to evaluate the variables. The research concludes that the accounting and financial reporting practices adopted at EPC are not effective.Publication Open Access Applicability of Sri Lanka public sector accounting standards: Trincomalee urban council, Sri Lanka(Faculty of Management and Commerce, South Eastern University of Sri Lanka., 2015-10) Nagendrakumar, NThough the Sri Lankan Local Governments were introduced with the accrual based Public Sector Accounting Standards from 2009 they have not been implemented yet. As a result, the present study focuses why it has been a failure and sees the applicability of the standards to the Local Governmental set up in Sri Lanka. The Urban Council of Trincomalee city was selected as the case for study and semi structured interviews were conducted. The study concludes that since the accounting system (Wickramanayake’s accounting system) already in place was based on accrual principles, the application of accrual based accounting standards are possible provided that the staffs’ professional expertise is improved to the level expected