Search results

Earned Value Management (EVM) is a project monitoring and control technique that enables the forecasting of a project's duration. Many EVM metrics and project duration forecasting methods have been proposed. However, very few studies have compared their accuracy and stability.

This paper presents an exhaustive stability and accuracy analysis of 27 deterministic EVM project duration forecasting methods. Stability is measured via Pearson's, Spearman's and Kendall's correlation coefficients while accuracy is measured by Mean Squared and Mean Absolute Percentage Errors. These parameters are determined at ten percentile intervals to track a given project's progress across 4,100 artificial project networks with varied topologies.

Findings support that stability and accuracy are inversely correlated for most forecasting methods, and also suggest that both significantly worsen as project networks become increasingly parallel. However, the AT + PD-ESmin forecasting method stands out as being the most accurate and reliable.

Implications of this study will allow construction project managers to resort to the simplest, most accurate and most stable EVM metrics when forecasting project duration. They will also be able to anticipate how the project topology (i.e., the network of activity predecessors) and the stage of project progress can condition their accuracy and stability.

Unlike previous research comparing EVM forecasting methods, this one includes all deterministic methods (classical and recent alike) and measures their performance in accordance with several parameters. Activity durations and costs are also modelled akin to those of construction projects.

Within earned value management, the cost performance index (CPI) and the critical ratio (CR) are used to generate the estimates at completion (EACs). According to the research in the 1990s, estimating the final contract’s cost at completion (CAC) using EAC_CR is a quicker predictor of the actual final cost versus using EAC_CPI. This paper aims to investigate whether this trend stills holds for modern department of defense contracts.

Accessing the Cost Assessment Data Enterprise (CADE) database, 451 contracts consisting of 863 contract line item numbers (CLINs) were initially retrieved and analyzed in three stages. The first replicated the work conducted in 1990s. The second stage entailed calculating 95 per cent confidence intervals and hypothesis tests regarding percentage accuracy of EACs for a contract’s final CAC. Lastly, regression analysis was conducted to characterize major, moderate and minor influencers on EAC reliability.

For modern contracts, EAC_CR aligns more with EAC_CPI and no longer demonstrates early accuracy of a contract’s final CAC. Contract percentage completion strongly reduced the per cent error of estimating CAC, while cost-plus-fixed-fee contracts and those with no work breakdown structure greater than Level 2 negatively affected accuracy.

To militate against optimism of early assessment of a contract's true cost.

This paper provides empirical evidence that EAC_CR behaves more like EAC_CPI with respect to modern contracts, suggesting that today’s contracts have relatively high SPI. Therefore, caution is warranted for program managers when estimating the CAC from contract initiation up to and slightly beyond the mid-point of completion.

This study aims to analyze the impact of global climate change on food security in the East African Community (EAC) region, using panel data analysis for five countries, over 2000-2014.

The determinants of food security are expressed as a function of rainfall, temperature, land area under cereal production, and population size. The paper used pooled fixed effects to estimate the relationship among these variables.

Findings show that food security in EAC is adversely affected by temperature. However, precipitation and increasing areas cultivated with cereal crops will be beneficial to ensure everyone's food security.

Actions for mitigating global warming are important for EAC to consolidate the region’s economic, political and social development/stability.

This case can be used in management of international business courses to illustrate the analysis of market attractiveness, the importance of fit between firm capabilities and market requirements, and the effects of multimarket competition. It describes the international expansion challenges facing EAC Nutrition, the infant formula division of a Danish conglomerate, in early 2002. Growth in EAC's core markets of Thailand and Malaysia has stagnated and EAC is contemplating three expansion options: entry into India, geographic expansion within China, and product line expansion in existing markets.

Former Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama continues to actively promote his party's East Asian Community (EAC), which he had as a centrepiece of his coalition government. This chapter supplements an earlier one where I compare the EAC with that of the late South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun's Northeast Asian Community (NEAC) and examine the impediments that have been the cause of friction in the region, the removal of which is fundamental to the creation of these communities, and show that that they will be around for a very long time. This chapter concentrates on what the EAC can learn from the European Union experience since both Hatoyama and Roh have stated that it is the EU that has been the source of their inspiration. It argues that the basic requirements for a ‘customs union’, let alone a ‘common market’ or ‘economic community’, will not be realised by the EAC in the foreseeable future. This suggests that the best that can be hoped for is a ‘preferential trade and investment arrangement’, between China, together with Hong Kong and Taiwan, Japan, both the Koreas and the United States, otherwise one must wonder why the EAC or NEAC is needed, rather than the ASEAN+3 and ASEAN+6 that are presently in the making. The problem is that both Hatoyama and Roh have ruled out the United States as a full member while at the same time they want it to continue to provide security for the region when full membership would enhance that. Nevertheless, the vision is admirable and should be desired by the whole world, not just the parties directly involved, so should receive our full support.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate inflation convergence within the East African Community (EAC) as it aspires to become a currency union.

An unobserved dynamic factor model was used to decompose the variation in inflation into a component that is common across the countries in the EAC region and a component that is country specific. Convergence was measured by the percentage of variation in inflation that is common across countries.

The estimated results from the dynamic factor model for the pre‐EAC Treaty (1981:3 to 2000:2) period and post‐EAC Treaty (2000:3 to 2009:1) period suggest that the percentage variation in inflation in the EAC that is explained by the common regional component increased significantly during the post‐Treaty period.

One of the limitations of this paper is that it does not address the mechanism through which the convergence in a currency union is achieved. Future research should try to examine the link between convergence and different macroeconomic policies.

This paper suggests that the push towards forming a currency union in East Africa has led to a greater degree of inflation synchronization across different countries in the region.

The main contribution of this paper is to use an unobserved component model to estimate the degree of inflation synchronization in East African countries.

The study aims to explore the validity of the modern renewable energy-environmental Kuznets curve (REKC) while considering the relevance of financial development in the consumption of modern renewable energy in East Africa Community (EAC). Modern renewable energy in this study includes all other forms of renewable energy except traditional use of biomass. The authors controlled for the effects of urbanization, governance, foreign direct investment (FDI) and trade openness.

Panel data of the five EAC countries of Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda for the period 1996–2019 were used. The analysis relied on the use of the autoregressive distributed lag–pooled mean group (ARDL-PMG) model, and the data were sourced from the World Development Indicators (WDI), World Governance Indicators (WGI) and International Energy Agency (IEA).

The REKC hypothesis is supported for modern renewable energy consumption in the EAC region. Financial development positively and significantly affects modern renewable energy consumption, whereas urbanization, FDI and trade openness reduce modern renewable energy consumption. Governance is insignificant.

The concept of the REKC, although explored in other contexts such as aggregate renewable energy and in other regions, has not been used to explain the consumption of modern renewable energy in the EAC.

This study aims to examine the effect of governance on the consumption of modern renewable energy in the East African Community (EAC), controlling for economic growth, trade openness and foreign direct investment (FDI).

The study relied on secondary data sourced from the World Development Indicators, World Governance Indicators and the International Energy Agency (IEA) for the EAC from 1996 to 2019. A panel Cross-Sectional Augmented Distributed Lag (CS-ARDL) model and second-generation panel data models were employed in the analysis.

The findings indicate that poor governance and inadequate FDI are significantly responsible for the low level of modern renewable energy consumption (MREC) in the EAC. On the other hand, trade openness significantly enhances MREC, while GDP per capita has no significant effect on MREC.

The consumption of modern renewable energy sources (excluding the traditional use of biomass) and its determinants, as most studies focus on renewable energy consumption as a whole. The study also employed the panel CS-ARDL model and second-generation panel data models.