Compare and contrast the purpose, process, and agencies involved in the production of cost-benefit analysis and profit-loss analysis.

There are many potential goals of a corporation, such as: minimize costs, maximize sales, maximize employment, maximize earnings, maximize shareholder wealth, maximize dividend payments, etc. Which one is the best for the long-term health of the company and society?

Why might economists be quite concerned if the annual interest payments on the U.S. public debt sharply increased as a percentage of GDP?

I would appreciate it if it was typed and if the answer is lengthy. Thank you!(4-5 paragraphs)

In the fast-paced personal computer industry, it would be very tempting for a computer company to rush a new product to market without taking the time to solicit customer input and feedback during the product development cycle. To avoid this temptation and to highlight its commitment to customer satisfaction, Apple Computer has developed a program called Customer Quality Feedback (CQF). CQF is a hands-on program that enables Apple engineers to communicate with potential end users during the entire development cycle of an Apple product. The program integrates many of the features of a focus group, but is sustained on an ongoing basis. It is also a very substantive and useful tool for Apple because it keeps the company attuned to the needs, preferences, and desires of its end users. For people interested in participating in the program, Apple has posted an application form on its Web site. The application form is fairly comprehensive and outlines the terms and conditions of participation. Although the program is open to anyone, it is clear that Apple wants well-informed participants who will stick with the program. Participants are selected based on their interest, ability to provide timely information, commitment to working with Apple personnel, and the suitability of their computing environment as it relates to Apple’s current needs. Once selected, the participants become an integral part of the development process
for the products they are evaluating. They are provided early prototypes of Apple products and are asked to provide feedback pertaining to the product’s features, interaction with employees, ease of use, performance, compatibility with third-party software, and other topics. The participants are also asked to provide suggestions as the product development cycle matures. The information provided by the participants is fed directly to the Apple engineers who are developing and testing the products. The overriding objective of the program is to incorporate customer input into the development of Apple products before they are shipped, rather than waiting for customers to react to the company’s products after they are made available for sale. Prior to a product launch, the CQF participants involved with the product are asked to write testimonials about their input into the product’s final design. These testimonials are used by Apple to demonstrate to other potential end users how Apple incorporates user feedback into the design and development of its products. Apple’s CQF program is a good example of a proactive approach to satisfying customer needs. It is also evidence of the company’s willingness to “listen to the voice of the customer” in its product development and design. These are important steps in the development of a customer-driven approach to quality.

Question1：Explain how Apple’s Customer Quality Feedback program helps the firm hear the voice of the customer.

Question2：If you were an Apple user, would you enjoy participating in the Customer Quality Feedback program? Why or why not?

Suppose residents of Islandia use rubies as money. Every ruby is used, on an average, 7 times per year to carry out transactions. The total supply of rubies is fifty million. (a) What is the level of aggregate nominal spending in Islandia according to the quantity theory of money? (b) Suppose now that the residents of Islandia use less money to conduct the same number of transactions. What is the effect on the velocity of money? (c) Suppose a new financial product named “bonds” introduced into the economy. How the introduction of this new financial product will affect the willingness to hold rubies and consequently the velocity of rubies? (d) Plot the following table on the graph showing average money growth rates on the horizontal axis and average inflation rates on the vertical axis.

(e)Do the data reported in the above table support the quantity theory of money? Explain your answer with the help of the graph you draw in part (d).

Do you think that taking the (Harvard) MBA Oath positively affects the ability of employees to discharge their ethical duties? Is it useful? If so, in what ways? What would you add to the Oath? Is there anything that concerns you, and why?

Does strong Canadian dollar indicate a strong Canadian economy? Explain in words how even if economy is weak in Canada, the Canadian value may appreciate and the opposite?

1. Assume that in a country the total holdings of banks were as follows:

1. Show that the balance sheet balances if these are the only assets and liabilities.

2. Assuming that people hold no currency, what happens to each of these values if the central bank changes the reserve requirement ratio to 2%, banks still want to hold the same percentage of excess reserves, and banks do not change their holdings of Treasury bonds?

3. How much does the money supply change by?

What led Dickerson to his thesis that the presidency is broken?

This question is based on the general equilibrium analysis.

Suppose the world consists of two large countries - the U.S. and Mexico - which trade with one another. Both countries produce and consume two goods: cars (C) and textiles (T). The U.S. has a comparative advantage in the production of cars. Initially, the U.S. has no tariffs, but Mexico has a 10% tariff on its imports. In 1995, NAFTA (a free trade agreement) is implemented, and Mexico removes its tariff. What are the implications of NAFTA for the U.S.? First explain what happens to production and consumption of cars and textiles in the U.S. Support your answer with a PPF graph that shows the U.S. equilibrium both before and after the implementation of NAFTA (plot C on the x-axis). Second, could the U.S. economy be hurt by NAFTA? Explain.

Define the Elasticity of Demand for Labor. List the five benchmarks analysts use in its discussion and detail whether increased wages for each results in an increase in the total of wages received by workers in that labor market or not.

Jim spends $100 on leisure when he is not exercising. He doesn’t participate in any leisure when he does 25 hours of exercise. He proudly claims that he maximizes his satisfaction by choosing to perform 10 hours of exercise and $60 on leisure.

a) Draw the budget line and illustrate where her indifference curve intersects the budget line. Call this indifference curve U_a.

b) Under a new pricing arrangement, her budget line changes. His income remains the same but the slope is different: she now spends $70 on leisure when he is not exercising and does 70 hours of exercise when she doesn’t participate in any leisure. Although he could still choose to perform 10 hours of exercise and $60 on leisure, he claims that he is better off with 25 hours of exercise and $45 worth of leisure. Draw the updated budget line and illustrate where her indifference curve now intersects the updated budget line. Call this indifference curve U_b.

c) Is Jim's claim that he is better off correct? Use your understanding of revealed preferences and indifference curves to support his claim.

Is the Coca Cola Company a multinational enterprise? Which activity has the Coca Cola company conducted to support its transactions across national borders? Did it follow a step-wise internalization process in the past years?

Answer with reference to the article “Automation, Productivity, and Growth” (Spence, 26 August 2015)

To facilitate your answers, you are strongly advised to adopt direct quotes from the article as much as possible.

a. What results on productivity and unemployment do we normally expect from automation? Do we see this trend in the US?

b. The author claims that we do not see these trends as expected in (a). Why not? Explain with reference to the role of tradable vs. non-tradable sectors.

c. How would the advancement of global supply chains affect the productivity figures in the age of digital technology? Why is this so?

Automation, Productivity, and Growth

It seems obvious that if a business invests in automation, its workforce – though possibly reduced – will be more productive. So why do the statistics tell a different story?

In advanced economies, where plenty of sectors have both the money and the will to invest in automation, growth in productivity (measured by value added per employee or hours worked) has been low for at least 15 years. And, in the years since the 2008 global financial crisis, these countries’ overall economic growth has been meager, too – just 4% or less on average.

One explanation is that the advanced economies had taken on too much debt and needed to deleverage, contributing to a pattern of public-sector underinvestment and depressing consumption and private investment as well. But deleveraging is a temporary process, not one that limits growth indefinitely. In the long term, overall economic growth depends on growth in the labor force and its productivity.

Hence the question on the minds of politicians and economists alike: Is the productivity slowdown a permanent condition and constraint on growth, or is it a transitional phenomenon?

There is no easy answer – not least because of the wide range of factors contributing to the trend. Beyond public-sector underinvestment, there is monetary policy, which, whatever its benefits and costs, has shifted corporate use of cash toward stock buybacks, while real investment has remained subdued.

Meanwhile, information technology and digital networks have automated a range of white- and blue-collar jobs. One might have expected this transition, which reached its pivotal year in the United States in 2000, to cause unemployment (at least until the economy adjusted), accompanied by a rise in productivity. But, in the years leading up to the 2008 crisis, US data show that productivity trended downward; and, until the crisis, unemployment did not rise significantly.

One explanation is that employment in the years before the crisis was being propped up by credit-fueled demand. Only when the credit bubble burst – triggering an abrupt adjustment, rather than the gradual adaptation of skills and human capital that would have occurred in more normal times – did millions of workers suddenly find themselves unemployed. The implication is that the economic logic equating automation with increased productivity has not been invalidated; its proof has merely been delayed.

But there is more to the productivity conundrum than the 2008 crisis. In the two decades that preceded the crisis, the sector of the US economy that produces internationally tradable goods and services – one-third of overall output – failed to generate any increase in jobs, even though it was growing faster than the non-tradable sector in terms of value added.

Most of the job losses in the tradable sector were in manufacturing industries, especially after the year 2000. Although some of the losses may have resulted from productivity gains from information technology and digitization, many occurred when companies shifted segments of their supply chains to other parts of the global economy, particularly China.

By contrast, the US non-tradable sector – two-thirds of the economy – recorded large increases in employment in the years before 2008. However, these jobs – often in domestic services – usually generated lower value added than the manufacturing jobs that had disappeared. This is partly because the tradable sector was shifting toward employees with high levels of skill and education. In that sense, productivity rose in the tradable sector, although structural shifts in the global economy were surely as important as employees becoming more efficient at doing the same things.

Unfortunately for advanced economies, the gains in per capita value added in the tradable sector were not large enough to overcome the effect of moving labor from manufacturing jobs to non-tradable service jobs (many of which existed only because of credit-fueled domestic demand in the halcyon days before 2008). Hence the muted overall productivity gains.

Meanwhile, as developing economies become richer, they, too, will invest in technology in order to cope with rising labor costs (a trend already evident in China). As a result, the high-water mark for global productivity and GDP growth may have been reached.

The organizing principle of global supply chains for most of the post-war period has been to move production toward low-cost pools of labor, because labor was and is the least mobile of economic factors (labor, capital, and knowledge). That will remain true for high-value-added services that defy automation. But for capital-intensive digital technologies, the organizing principle will change: production will move toward final markets, which will increasingly be found not just in advanced countries, but also in emerging economies as their middle classes expand.

Martin Baily and James Manyika recently pointed out that we have seen this move before. In the 1980’s, Robert Solow and Stephen Roach separately argued that IT investment was showing no impact on productivity. Then the Internet became generally available, businesses reorganized themselves and their global supply chains, and productivity accelerated.

The dot-com bubble of the late 1990s was a misestimate of the timing, not the magnitude, of the digital revolution. Likewise, Manyika and Baily argue that the much-discussed “Internet of Things” is probably some years away from showing up in aggregate productivity data.

Organizations, businesses, and people all have to adapt to the technologically driven shifts in our economies’ structure. These transitions will be lengthy, rewarding some and forcing difficult adjustments on others, and their productivity effects will not appear in aggregate data for some time. But those who move first are likely to benefit the most.

what should Fitbit do to Improve its social media presence and what are the possible pro and cons to do so?