Certification and integration of management systems: the experience of Portuguese small and medium enterprises

The purpose of this study was to characterize the situation of Portuguese Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) concerning the certification of their Quality Management Systems (QMS), Environmental Management Systems (EMS) and Occupational Health and Safety Management Systems (OHSMS), in their individually form, to identify benefits, drawbacks and difficulties associated with the certification process and to characterize the level of integration that has been achieved. This research was based on a survey carried out by the research team; it was administered to 46 Portuguese SMEs. Our sample comprised 20 firms (43%) from the Trade/Services activity sector, 17 (37%) from the Industrial sector, 5 (11%) from the Electricity/Telecommunications sector and 4 (9%) from the Construction area. All SMEs surveyed were certified according to the ISO 9001 (100%), a quarter of firms were certified according to the ISO 14001 (26.1%) and a few certified by OHSAS 18001 (15.2%). We undertook a multivariate cluster analysis, which enabled grouping variables into homogeneous groups or one or more common characteristics of the SMEs participating in the study. Results show that the main benefits that Portuguese SMEs have gained from the referred certifications have been, among others, an improvement of both their internal organization and external image. We also present the main difficulties in achieving certification. Overall, 7 of the Portuguese SMEs examined indicated that the main benefits of the IMS implementation management included costs reduction, increased employee training and easier compliance of legislation. The respective drawbacks and difficulties are also presented. Finally, we presented the main integrated items in the certified Portuguese SMEs we examined.

Criminal Liability of Organizations, Corporations, Legal Persons, and Similar Entities on Law of Portuguese Cybercrime: A Brief Discussion on the Issue of Crimes of “False Information,” the “Damage on Other Programs or Computer Data,” the “Computer-Software Sabotage,” the “Illegitimate Access,” the “Unlawful Interception,” and “Illegitimate Reproduction of the Protected Program”

Abstract: in Portugal, and in much of the legal systems of Europe, «legal persons» are likely to be criminally responsibilities also for cybercrimes. Like for example the following crimes: «false information»; «damage on other programs or computer data»; «computer-software sabotage»; «illegitimate access»; «unlawful interception» and «illegitimate reproduction of protected program». However, in Portugal, have many exceptions. Exceptions to the «question of criminal liability» of «legal persons». Some «legal persons» can not be blamed for cybercrime. The legislature did not leave! These «legal persons» are v.g. the following («public entities»): legal persons under public law, which include the public business entities; entities utilities, regardless of ownership; or other legal persons exercising public powers. In other words, and again as an example, a Portuguese public university or a private concessionaire of a public service in Portugal, can not commit (in Portugal) any one of cybercrime pointed. Fair? Unfair. All laws should provide that all legal persons can commit cybercrimes. PS: resumo do artigo em inglês.

Finantial risk analysis of portuguese textile and tourism companies

Textile and tourism sectors are two important industries in the Portuguese economy. However, its high exposure to both internal and international economic volatility make the companies operating in these economic sectors particularly vulnerable to economic crises, such as the ones which have been impacting Portugal and the European Union. The objective of this paper is to evaluate and understand the impact of size and age on the financial health of textile and tourism companies, measured by economic indices. An empirical based model is proposed. Its implications are derived and tested on a sample of 4061 Portuguese companies from textile and tourism sectors, during the period 2005-2009. The findings suggest that age has a major impact on the risk of failure, rather than size. Whereas the effect of age is generally positive regarding the financial health of the company, the effect of size is less clear and ultimately depends on the age of the company.

Residents’ perspectives on tourism impacts of portuguese world heritage historic centers: Angra do Heroísmo and Évora

The aim of this study is twofold. First, the study analyzes local community perspectives of the importance of the World Heritage Site (WHS) classification of the historic centers of Angra do Heroísmo and Évora. Second, the study analyzes local residents’ perceived tourism impacts on the municipalities of Angra do Heroísmo and Évora. The methodology comprises quantitative research based on a self-administered survey applied to convenience samples of local residents of the two Portuguese municipalities in 2014. The main results reveal that local residents have a strongly positive perception of the WHS designation in both municipalities. With regard to the perceived tourism impacts, residents from Angra do Heroísmo have a stronger agreement about the impacts of tourism on their city than the residents of Évora, except for the negative social and cultural impacts. The comparison of the mean scores of these impacts across residents that live near and far from the historic centers reveals that the most valued and least valued impacts in the three categories of impacts (economic, social and cultural, and environmental) are common to all groups of residents. Nevertheless, residents living in or near the historic center of Angra do Heroísmo have higher means in the majority of tourism impacts (in all categories), with only one negative impact to concern the majority of respondents. Among the residents from Évora, residents living in or near the historic center have higher means in the majority of economic impacts but lower means in almost social and cultural impacts. With regard to the environmental impacts, residents living in or near the historic center have higher means scores in the positive impacts and lower means scores in the negative environmental impacts.

Financial Risk Analysis of Portuguese Textile and Tourism Companies

Textile and tourism sectors are two important industries in the Portuguese economy. However, its high exposure to both internal and international economic volatility make the companies operating in these economic sectors particularly vulnerable to economic crises, such as the ones which have been impacting Portugal and the European Union. The objective of this paper is to evaluate and understand the impact of size and age on the financial health of textile and tourism companies, measured by economic indices. An empirical based model is proposed. Its implications are derived and tested on a sample of 4061 Portuguese companies from textile and tourism sectors, during the period 2005-2009. The findings suggest that age has a major impact on the risk of failure, rather than size. Whereas the effect of age is generally positive regarding the financial health of the company, the effect of size is less clear and ultimately depends on the age of the company.

IDENTIFYING ETHICAL DILEMMAS OF PORTUGUESE CHARTERED ACCOUNTANTS

The way professionals deal with ethical dilemmas and the decisions they make may be guided by a personal and individual ideology, but it is also strongly influenced by their professional group and society. This paper focuses in real situations as they are experienced by individuals in their day-to-day professional life. The data were collected using opened-end interviews. Respondents were asked to identify the ethical dilemmas they had been faced with during their professional life. Qualitative analysis shows that main dilemmas are about how to deal with “informal economy”, “false invoices” and “tax evasion”. This study aims to contribute to the discussion of ethical issues faced by Portuguese Chartered Account (TOC), thus promoting a large debate about the way the TOC can help to create a better society and consequently legitimating their existence as a professional organization of public interest. More than ever, understanding professionals’ behavior in their real context is essential for to build a culture conducive to the ethical development of society, and to ensure, at the same time, the desirable business sustainability. This study gives a broaden description of ethics dilemmas faced by chartered accounts and shows some inefficiency in the ethical control system made by professional bodies.

Financial Risk Analysis of Portuguese Textile and Tourism Companies

Textile and tourism sectors are two important industries in the Portuguese economy. However, its high exposure to both internal and international economic volatility make the companies operating in these economic sectors particularly vulnerable to economic crises, such as the ones which have been impacting Portugal and the European Union. The objective of this paper is to evaluate and understand the impact of size and age on the financial health of textile and tourism companies, measured by economic indices. An empirical based model is proposed. Its implications are derived and tested on a sample of 4061 Portuguese companies from textile and tourism sectors, during the period 2005-2009. The findings suggest that age has a major impact on the risk of failure, rather than size. Whereas the effect of age is generally positive regarding the financial health of the company, the effect of size is less clear and ultimately depends on the age of the company.

Determinants of environmental disclosure in the annual reports of large companies operating in Portugal

Similarly to what has happened in other countries, since the early 1990s Portuguese companies have developed corporate environmental reporting practices in response to internal and external factors. This paper is based on empirical research directed to both the study of environmental reporting practices developed by Portuguese companies and the identification of the factors that explain the extent to which these companies disclose environmental information. This study focuses on the environmental disclosures made in the annual reports by a sample of 109 large firms operating in Portugal during the period 2002-04. Using the content analysis technique we have developed an index in order to assess the presence of the environmental disclosures in companies’ annual reports and their breadth. Based on the extant literature, several characteristics relating to firms’ attributes were selected and their influence on the level of environmental disclosure was tested empirically. The selected explanatory variables were firm size, industry membership, profitability, foreign ownership, quotation on the stock market and environmental certification. The results reveal that, in spite of the fact that the level of environmental information disclosed during the period 2002-04 is low, the extent of environmental disclosure has increased as well as the number of Portuguese companies that disclose environmental information. Moreover, the firm size and the fact that a company is listed on the stock market are positively related to the extent of environmental disclosure. This study adds to the international research on environmental disclosure by providing empirical data from a country, Portugal, where empirical evidence is still relatively unknown, extending the scope of the current understanding of the environmental reporting practices.

Conditioning information in mutual fund performance evaluation: Portuguese evidence

We estimate and compare the performance of Portuguese-based mutual funds that invest in the domestic market and in the European market using unconditional and conditional models of performance evaluation. Besides applying both partial and full conditional models, we use European information variables, instead of the most common local ones, and consider stochastically detrended conditional variables in order to avoid spurious regressions. The results suggest that mutual fund managers are not able to outperform the market, presenting negative or neutral performance. The incorporation of conditioning information in performance evaluation models is supported by our findings, as it improves the explanatory power of the models and there is evidence of both time-varying betas and alphas related to the public information variables. It is also shown that the number of lags to be used in the stochastic detrending procedure is a critical choice, as it will impact the significance of the conditioning information. In addition, we observe a distance effect, since managers who invest locally seem to outperform those who invest in the European market. However, after controlling for public information, this effect is slightly reduced. Furthermore, the results suggest that survivorship bias has a small impact on performance estimates.

Measuring fund performance using multi-factor models: evidence for the Portuguese market

This paper examines the performance of Portuguese equity funds investing in the domestic and in the European Union market, using several unconditional and conditional multi-factor models. In terms of overall performance, we find that National funds are neutral performers, while European Union funds under-perform the market significantly. These results do not seem to be a consequence of management fees. Overall, our findings are supportive of the robustness of conditional multi-factor models. In fact, Portuguese equity funds seem to be relatively more exposed to smallcaps and more value-oriented. Also, they present strong evidence of time-varying betas and, in the case of the European Union funds, of time-varying alphas too. Finally, in terms of market timing, our tests suggest that mutual fund managers in our sample do not exhibit any market timing abilities. Nevertheless, we find some evidence of timevarying conditional market timing abilities but only at the individual fund level.

The estimation of the return on firms’ investments – as to ISO 9001

The aim of this paper was to estimate the return on investment in QMS (quality management systems) certification undertaken in Portuguese firms, according to the ISO 9000 series. A total of 426 certified Portuguese firms were surveyed. The response rate was 61.03 percent. The different payback periods were validated through statistical analysis and the relationship between expected and perceived payback periods was discussed. This study suggests that a firm’s sector of activity, size and degree of internationalization are related to the length of the investment in QMS certification recovery period. Furthermore, our findings suggest, that the time taken to obtain the certification is not directly related to the economic component of the certification. The majority of Portuguese firms (58.9%) took up to three years to recoup their investment and 35.5% of companies said they had not yet recovered the initial investment made. The recoup of investment was measured by the increase in the number of customers and consequent volume of deliveries, improved profitability and productivity of the company, improvement of competitive position and performance (cost savings), reduction in the number of external complaints and internal defects/scrap, achievement of some important clientele, among others. We compared our work to similar studies undertaken in other countries. This paper provides a contribution to the research related to the return on investment for costs related to the certification QMS according to ISO 9000. This paper provides a valuable contribution to the field and is one of the first studies to undertake this type of analysis in Portugal.

The Influence of Accounting Information in the Re-Election of the Mayors in Portugal

The changes recommended by the New Public Management (NPM) in public accounting have given special attention and importance to the evaluation of mayor’s performance by citizens/voters. Thus, this study aims to assess the impact of accounting information on the re-election of Portuguese mayors. Taking the agency theory as a point of departure, we start from the following research question: Does the accounting information disclosed by the municipalities influence the re-election of Portuguese mayors? The research methodology used in this study is the quantitative type, through which a multivariate analysis of data was performed on 308 Portuguese municipalities, in the period 2005-2008, based on the election results of 2009. The results from the binary logistic regression show that some indicators of accounting nature have impact on the re-election of mayors in Portugal, namely, the components of financial accounting and municipal revenues.

The conditional performance of euro bond funds: evidence from Portugal during the debt crisis

This paper evaluates the performance of a survivorship bias-free data set of Portuguese funds investing in Euro-denominated bonds by using conditional models that consider the public information available to investors when the returns are generated. We find that bond funds underperform the market significantly and by an economically relevant magnitude. This underperformance cannot be explained by the expenses they charge. Our findings support the use of conditional performance evaluation models, since we find strong evidence of both time-varying risk and performance, dependent on the slope of the term structure and the inverse relative wealth variables. We also show that survivorship bias has a significant impact on performance estimates. Furthermore, during the European debt crisis, bond fund managers performed significantly better than in non-crisis periods and were able to achieve neutral performance. This improved performance throughout the crisis seems to be related to changes in funds’ investment styles.

Fatores determinantes da política de distribuição de dividendos: Evidência empírica para as empresas não financeiras da Euronext Lisbon

Dividends and their distribution decisions, being a component of the compensation of investors are a constant financial worry within companies, thus revealing one of the themes highlighted in the context of the financial literature. Study will address the factors determining the dividend policy practiced by companies listed in the Portuguese stock market. The latter will be 47 non-financial companies listed on the Euronext Lisbon during 2009 until 2011. The two samples that have been investigated include the representative of the majority of non-financial companies listed on Euronext Lisbon and the other financial companies members of the PSI 20. The methodology adopted is one of the ordinary least squares regression and the amount of dividends per share distributed was used in determining the dependent variable. In relation to the independent variables, six explanatory factors were chosen. These include profitability, stability of dividend policy, size, growth, risk and investment opportunities. The conclusion suggests that the most important factors to explain the amount of dividends distributed are profitability and stability of dividend policy. There after, growth and risk factors, as well as factors that explain the amount of dividends distributed are also relevant. The remaining variables obtained were insufficient evidence pointing to a significant effect in explaining the dividend policy of Portuguese companies in the sample. The conclusion also states that differences exist in the importance of the explanatory factors to the amount of dividends distributed between the study samples, given the differentiation of dividend policies, followed by companies from each group analyzed.

“Portugal, país de brandos costumes”?

Será? Um pouco da sua história e já no Séc. XX. Vamos, por momentos, esquecer as milhares de guerras que tivemos antes, a tortura pública ou a inquisição ou até alguns massacres e genocídios que fizemos aquando das chamadas descobertas. Em alguns casos, pois os portugueses foram bem mais brandos do que outros “descobridores”, é certo, misturando-se inclusive com os nativos. Os Portugueses, “esse Povo de brandos costumes…”. Abstract: Will be? A little of its history and in the century. XX. Let's for a moment forget the thousands of wars we had before, public torture or inquisition or even some massacres and genocides we did during the calls findings. In some cases, because the Portuguese were far more lenient than others "discoverers", of course, including blending with the natives. The Portuguese, "People of this mild manners ...".