Evaluating productive efficiency:comparative study of commercial banks in Gulf countries

Financial institutes are an integral part of any modern economy. In the 1970s and 1980s, Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries made significant progress in financial deepening and in building a modern financial infrastructure. This study aims to evaluate the performance (efficiency) of financial institutes (banking sector) in GCC countries. Since, the selected variables include negative data for some banks and positive for others, and the available evaluation methods are not helpful in this case, so we developed a Semi Oriented Radial Model to perform this evaluation. Furthermore, since the SORM evaluation result provides a limited information for any decision maker (bankers, investors, etc...), we proposed a second stage analysis using classification and regression (C&R) method to get further results combining SORM results with other environmental data (Financial, economical and political) to set rules for the efficient banks, hence, the results will be useful for bankers in order to improve their bank performance and to the investors, maximize their returns. Mainly there are two approaches to evaluate the performance of Decision Making Units (DMUs), under each of them there are different methods with different assumptions. Parametric approach is based on the econometric regression theory and nonparametric approach is based on a mathematical linear programming theory. Under the nonparametric approaches, there are two methods: Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and Free Disposal Hull (FDH). While there are three methods under the parametric approach: Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA); Thick Frontier Analysis (TFA) and Distribution-Free Analysis (DFA). The result shows that DEA and SFA are the most applicable methods in banking sector, but DEA is seem to be most popular between researchers. However DEA as SFA still facing many challenges, one of these challenges is how to deal with negative data, since it requires the assumption that all the input and output values are non-negative, while in many applications negative outputs could appear e.g. losses in contrast with profit. Although there are few developed Models under DEA to deal with negative data but we believe that each of them has it is own limitations, therefore we developed a Semi-Oriented-Radial-Model (SORM) that could handle the negativity issue in DEA. The application result using SORM shows that the overall performance of GCC banking is relatively high (85.6%). Although, the efficiency score is fluctuated over the study period (1998-2007) due to the second Gulf War and to the international financial crisis, but still higher than the efficiency score of their counterpart in other countries. Banks operating in Saudi Arabia seem to be the highest efficient banks followed by UAE, Omani and Bahraini banks, while banks operating in Qatar and Kuwait seem to be the lowest efficient banks; this is because these two countries are the most affected country in the second Gulf War. Also, the result shows that there is no statistical relationship between the operating style (Islamic or Conventional) and bank efficiency. Even though there is no statistical differences due to the operational style, but Islamic bank seem to be more efficient than the Conventional bank, since on average their efficiency score is 86.33% compare to 85.38% for Conventional banks. Furthermore, the Islamic banks seem to be more affected by the political crisis (second Gulf War), whereas Conventional banks seem to be more affected by the financial crisis.

Political representation in France: a crisis of democracy?

The past two decades have witnessed growing political disaffection and a widening mass/elite disjuncture in France, reflected in opinion polls, rising abstentionism, electoral volatility and fragmentation, with sustained voting against incumbent governments. Though the electoral system has preserved the duopoly of the mainstream coalitions, they have suffered loss of public confidence and swings in electoral support. Stable parliamentary majorities conceal a political landscape of assorted anti-system parties and growing support for far right and far left. The picture is paradoxical: the French express alienation from political parties yet relate positively to their political institutions; they berate national politicians but retain strong bonds with those elected locally; they appear increasingly disengaged from politics yet forms of ‘direct democracy’ are finding new vigour. While the electoral, attitudinal and systemic factors reviewed here may not signal a crisis of democracy, they point to serious problems of political representation in contemporary France.

László Csaba, Crisis in economics? Studies in European political economy. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó , 2009, 224pp., e35.10 h/b.

Book review

Political leadership and the politics of performance:France, Syria and the chemical weapons crisis of 2013

This article draws upon developments in UK research on political rhetoric and political performance in order to examine the incident in 2013 when French President François Hollande committed French forces to a US-led punitive strike against Syria, after the use of chemical weapons in a Damascus suburb on 21 August. The US-led retaliation did not take place. This article analyses Hollande's declaration on 27 July and his TV appearance on 15 September. His rhetoric and style are best understood as generic to the nature of the presidential office of the Fifth Republic. The article concludes by appraising how analysis of the French case contributes to the developing literature on rhetoric, celebrity and performance.

Protocol, image, and discourse in political leadership competition:the case of Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, 1997-2002

This article examines the relationship between Prime Minister Jospin and President Chirac in the period 1997 to 2002. It is concerned in particular with symbolism, discourse and protocol, and how these have mediated the political competition between Chirac and Jospin. We develop a framework of analysis with several main strands. We consider the effects of the institutions of the Fifth Republic upon the political conduct of Prime Minister and President. We observe the perceived character traits of the individuals concerned, as well as the character traits expected of the offices of President and Prime Minister. We investigate the influence of the past upon the behaviour of Chirac and Jospin in the present, both in terms of notions of regime crisis which configured the institutions in the first place, and in relation to the image of previous holders of the offices (especially Charles de Gaulle and Franois Mitterrand).

Bringing hope to crisis: critical thinking, ethical action and social change

This paper departs from this point to consider whether and how crisis thinking contributes to practices of affirmative critique and transformative social action in late-capitalist societies. I argue that different deployments of crisis thinking have different ‘affect-effects’ and consequences for ethical and political practice. Some work to mobilize political action through articulating a politics of fear, assuming that people take most responsibility for the future when they fear the alternatives. Other forms of crisis thinking work to heighten critical awareness by disrupting existential certainty, asserting an ‘ethics of ambiguity’ which assumes that the continuous production of uncertain futures is a fundamental part of the human condition (de Beauvoir, 2000). In this paper, I hope to illustrate that the first deployment of crisis thinking can easily justify the closing down of political debate, discouraging radical experimentation and critique for the sake of resolving problems in a timely and decisive way. The second approach to crisis thinking, on the other hand, has greater potential to enable intellectual and political alterity in everyday life—but one that poses considerable challenges for our understandings of and responses to climate change...

Metaphor in (Arabic-into-English) translation with specific reference to metaphorical concepts and expressions in political discourse

Cognitive linguistics scholars argue that metaphor is fundamentally a conceptual process of mapping one domain of experience onto another domain. The study of metaphor in the context of Translation Studies has not, unfortunately, kept pace with the discoveries about the nature and role of metaphor in the cognitive sciences. This study aims primarily to fill part of this gap of knowledge. Specifically, the thesis is an attempt to explore some implications of the conceptual theory of metaphor for translation. Because the study of metaphor in translation is also based on views about the nature of translation, the thesis first presents a general overview of the discipline of Translation Studies, describing the major models of translation. The study (in Chapter Two) then discusses the major traditional theories of metaphor (comparison, substitution and interaction theories) and shows how the ideas of those theories were adopted in specific translation studies of metaphor. After that, the study presents a detailed account of the conceptual theory of metaphor and some hypothetical implications for the study of metaphor in translation from the perspective of cognitive linguistics. The data and methodology are presented in Chapter Four. A novel classification of conceptual metaphor is presented which distinguishes between different source domains of conceptual metaphors: physical, human-life and intertextual. It is suggested that each source domain places different demands on translators. The major sources of the data for this study are (1) the translations done by the Foreign Broadcasting Information Service (FBIS), which is a translation service of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the United Sates of America, of a number of speeches by the Iraqi president Saddam Hussein during the Gulf Crisis (1990-1991) and (2) official (governmental) Omani translations of National Day speeches of Sultan Qaboos bin Said of Oman.

From therapeutic to political education: the centrality of affective sensibility in critical pedagogy

While the need for humanising education is pressing in neoliberal societies, the conditions for its possibility in formal institutions have become particularly cramped. A constellation of factors – the strength of neoliberal ideologies, the corporatisation of universities, the conflation of human freedom with consumer satisfaction, and a wider crisis of hope in the possibility or desirability of social change – make it difficult to apply classical theories of subject-transformation to new work in critical pedagogy. In particular, the growth of interest in pedagogies of comfort (as illustrated in certain forms of ‘therapeutic’ education and concerns about student ‘satisfaction’) and resistance to critical pedagogies suggest that subjectivty has become a primary site of political struggle in education. However, it can no longer be assumed that educators can (or should) liberate students’ repressed desires for ‘humanisation’ by politicising curricula, pedagogy or institutions. Rather, we must work to understand the new meanings and affective conditions of critical subjectivity itself. Bringing critical theories of subject transformation together with new work on ‘pedagogies of discomfort’, I suggest we can create new ways of opening up possibilities for critical education that respond to neoliberal subjectivities without corresponding to or affirming them.

Germany as the EU's reluctant hegemon? Of economic strength and political constraints

This article explores the growing perception, prompted by the eurozone crisis, of Germany as a hegemonic power in the European Union. The article explores the realignments in the power balance within the European Union (EU) by making an original application of the insights from the literature on hegemony. It reviews the evidence for Germany playing a hegemonic role, but then emphasizes three sets of constraints. First, German pre-eminence is largely confined to the economic sphere. Even in this area Germany has not acted fully in line with the role ascribed by hegemonic stability theory. Second, its pre-eminence in the EU encounters problems of international legitimacy. Third, growing constraints arising from German domestic politics further hamper playing the role of hegemon. In consequence, Germany is intrinsically a reluctant hegemon: one whose economic leadership is recognized but politically contested. The conclusion considers the significance of these findings on the EU's most important member state. © 2013 Taylor & Francis.

Germany at a crossroads:the gathering crisis sharpens

In our book, The Gathering Crisis: The 2005 Federal Election and the Grand Coalition (Miskimmon et al, 2009), we argued that the German political and economic systems faced a number of serious challenges. The resource crunch in public finances has been particularly problematic in a country used to consensus politics- money had previously been used to oil the wheels of German federalism (and European integration). In the light of recent events- the global financial crisis, the Eurozone crisis, the 2009 federal election- we claim that the crisis in the German political economy has sharpened. The task of Angela Merkel and subsequent chancellors will be to navigate the new era, ensuring that Germany remains a leading political and economic power in the European Union and beyond. © 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd.

The fevered novel from Balzac to Bernanos:frenetic Catholicism in crisis, delirium and revolution

Book Review: The Fevered Novel from Balzac to Bernanos: Frenetic Catholicism in Crisis, Delirium and Revolution. By Francesco Manzini. (IGRS Books). London: Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, 2011. 264 pp. Full text: This monograph is an important and compelling account of a novelistic tradition that stretches from Georges Bernanos back to Balzac, by way of Léon Bloy, Joris-Karl Huysmans, and Barbey d'Aurevilly. Depending on a master plot that evokes Maistrean themes of blood, sacrifice, and redemption, working in a feverish female body, this canon combines Romantic freneticism and anti-Enlightenment religion to create a compound that Francesco Manzini calls ‘frenetic Catholicism’. The theme of fever, Manzini tells us, was commented on by Huysmans in writing about Barbey d'Aurevilly. When André Gide read Bernanos's Sous le soleil de Satan, he dismissed it as a rehash of Bloy and Barbey. In this present work Manzini aims to make us aware once more of the gradually intensifying themacity of fever in writings more usually classed in theologo-literary categories. His analysis encompasses (though is not restricted to) Balzac's Ursule Mirouët, Barbey d'Aurevilly's Un prêtre marié, Huysmans's En rade, Bloy's Le Désespéré and La Femme pauvre, and Bernanos's Nouvelle histoire de Mouchette. Thus, as Manzini argues in his conclusion, between the freneticism of the Romantics and that of the surrealists this corpus represents an intermediary wave of freneticism, foregrounding fever, hyperconsciousness, dreamlike episodes, and female automatism. Manzini's knowledge of, and ease amidst, the sources is constantly impressive. Much like Richard Griffiths before him (The Reactionary Revolution: The Catholic Revival in French Literature, 1870–1914 (London: Constable, 1966)), he has read both the bad novels and the good ones. For that we are in his debt. His commentary thrives on the oddities of his subjects. He points quite rightly to the peculiar hubris of writers whose contempt for the secular excesses of scientism leads them down a cul-de-sac of primitive medical quackery. Likewise, he underlines how Zola's attempt to unwrite Barbey — exorcising the former's anti-Romantic animus, as much as scratching his anticlerical itch — leads him to recapitulate Barbey's religious authoritarianism in the secular vernacular of patriarchy. Les espèces qui se rapprochent se mangent, to paraphrase Bernanos (Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune). In spite of all Manzini's tightly organized analysis, however, this reader wonders whether the fevered novel ‘best allowed contemporaries — and now […] literary critics and historians — to imagine the issues at stake in the amorphous scientistic, religious, and political debates’ of the period (p. 17). Below the ideological clashes of nineteenth-century science and religion, the two contending dynamics of anthropocentrism and theocentrism are attested and, it can be argued, even more perfectly dramatized in other Catholic literature (Charles Péguy's poetry, for example). In these terms, what distinguishes the Catholic frenetics from their Romantic or surrealist counterparts is that their fevered subject represents an attempt to build a road out of what Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor calls ‘buffered’ individuality, and back towards the theocentric porous subject who is open to divine influence. By way of minor corrections, nuns do not take holy orders (p. 94) but make religious profession by taking vows. Also, the last Eucharistic host is not extreme unction (p. 119) but viaticum.

Institutions matter: essays on the determinants and consequences of socio-political institutions

ONLY AVAILABLE FOR CONSULTATION AT ASTON UNIVERSITY LIBRARY WITH PRIOR ARRANGEMENT This thesis seeks to contribute to the socio-political literature. It comprises of three individual chapters examining the determinants and consequences of different social-political institutional factors. Specifically, the first study combines game theoretical and empirical techniques to examine how bureaucrats favour other agents within their social group and the effects this will have on the level of corruption in the economy. To this end, I develop a simple model of allocation of time between economic activities and leisure (time spent building social network ties), to illustrate the underlying causal mechanism between social network and corruption. It shows that large social networks and low levels of economic activities provides the condition for high levels of corruption. However, the ability of the government to punish corruption through well-established laws and property rights enforcement acts as a deterrent to corruption. he second work also combines game theoretical and empirical techniques. It aims to clarify the relationship between the degree of competition and political influence of firms, paying particular attention to the level of government regulations that exist in the countries in which the firms operates. The interplay between economic and political institutions is vital to any analysis on understanding the workings of political influence. The third study is purely empirical. It examines the role of two types of business network, namely, political connections and business group affiliations on a firm’s performance. Evidence was provided on Chinese firms’ performance during the 2008 financial crisis.