Impact of Institutional Quality on Trade Performance of Small and Medium Enterprises in Pakistan

The trade economy is dependent upon the institutional quality of the country. It affects the ease of doing business in the economy. It is plausible to think that, how institutional quality can affect the trading performance of Pakistan. Small & medium enterprises (SMEs) are playing the role of the backbone of the trade sector in Pakistan. Contribution SMEs can be significantly improved, by improving the supporting macroeconomic indicators. This paper studies the short-run and the long-run association between SME trade growth and cost of production, relative prices, and Institutional quality in Pakistan. It also examines the Environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis, between SME trade growth and institutional quality in Pakistan. This study utilizes secondary data, which is taken from multiple secondary sources, including the SMEDA, Pakistan Economic Survey, and world development indicators. The biannual data is assembled up for 38 observations from (2000 to 2019). This study uses Auto Regressive Distributive Lag (ARDL) bound testing method to examine the short run and long run connections between SMEs’ trade growth and macro-economic variables, like; relative prices, Cost of production. Gross Domestic Product, exchange rate, and institutional quality. These variables are selected from the available literature. The study finds that the short-run response of SMEs trade is not significant, but it significantly responds to macro-economic indicators in long run. The institutional quality has a non-linear relationship with SMEs trade growth. This indicates that the pollution heaven hypothesis holds valid even for the case of institutional quality and SMEs trading performance. The study focuses on the optimality of institutional quality for the optimal performance level of SMEs in Pakistan.

Secondary School Teachers Perceptions of Management Leadership Style and its Impact on Job Satisfaction

This research has investigated the teachers’ job satisfaction and the role of secondary principals in the context of Pakistan, which has an ultimate impact on student achievement in a positive way. In fact, the goal is to improve the quality of education and improve the student performance in schools as the teachers’ satisfaction can improve the student performance, the research also indicates that creating a school culture that fosters open communication, provides a trusting atmosphere and a positive environment where teachers are satisfied with their jobs is an excellent place for the students to learn. This research has followed the studies done by Pettis (2017) on the relationship of employee’s perception of Administrator’s Leadership Style and their perceived empowerment in USA and found that, in higher education institutions, administrators that use transformational leadership style increased the faculty and staff’s perceived psychological empowerment. The study also followed Tobias (2017) that researched upon the relationship between Teachers’ Preferred Leadership Behaviors, and Teacher Job Satisfaction in the context of USA and hence found no statistically significant relationship between principal leadership behaviors and teachers’ job satisfaction. Hence, this study has taken some of the elements of the above studies and researched upon them in the context of Pakistan. The research was based upon the postpositivism philosophy and has used the quantitative paradigm with probabilistic sampling design, and it was cross-sectional in nature. The research has used the stratified random sampling and the teachers have been chosen based on the data provided by Sindh Education Statistics Report (2015-16). This study has targeted on the secondary school population as the main area of research is about the secondary schools. Karachi is divided into 6 districts and total teaching staff hired is 11,731. Hence, the sample size was chosen to be 5% (586) of the total teaching staff hired in public schools in Karachi as mentioned in the population size. It has been revaled by applying two statistical techniques Pearson and Spearman on the study hypotheses that, first hypothesis has been proved as all elemements of independent variables are co-related with the overall job satisfaction of Secondary school teachers as p value is less than 0.05. Although, Principals’ empowerment, accountability, courage are moderatly corelated with teachers job satisfction having the relationship stregnth almost or more than 50% in both tests results. Although, in the case of second hypothesis, it has been observed that, the components of job satifaction namely job supervison, colleagues, remuneration, responsibility, advancmeent, recognition are statistically significant with more than one independent variable elements: principals’ empowerment, accountability and courage and standing back. However, However, the strength of relationship between principals’ empowerment, accountability and courage and job supervision has found to be moderate in nature while weak in all other cases. Moreover, the thid hypothesis is also accepted as job supervision, remuneration, advancement and responsibility are statistically significant with the Transactional leadership style as their correlation value of both Pearson and Spearman is less than 0.05. However, colleagues and recognition are not found to be co-related with the transactional leadership. Although, job supervision, remuneration, and responsibility strength of relationship is weak in nature with the Transactional leadership style. However, advancement characteristics is found to be having moderate strength of relationship with the Transactional leadership style. However, the fourth and second last hypothesis is also accepted as job supervision, remuneration, advancement and responsibility are found to be statistically significant with the Transformational leadership style. Neverthesless, recognition is found to be negatively co-related with the Transformational leadership. However, colleagues’ characteristics is found to be statistically co-related with the Transformational leadership style only in Pearson correlation test. But, recognition is found to be statistically negatively co-related in both tests. Last but not the least, the fifth Hypothesis has also been proved as more than one of the variables is statistically significant with the moderate variable. It is to observed that job supervision and responsibility are statistically significant with the Laissez-faire leadership style as their correlation value of both Pearson and Spearman is less than 0.05. However, the colleagues and remuneration are also found to be statistically co-related with the Laissez-faire leadership style in Pearson correlation test. Although, job supervision, colleagues, remuneration and responsibility are negatively corelated in both statistical tests but, their strength of relationship is found to be weaker in nature with the Laissez-faire leadership style. However, advancement and recognition both are found not to be statistically co-related with the Laissez-faire leadership style. At the end, the research suggests that principal attitude have a significant impact on the job performance of teachers as a whole and the academic performance of their students in Pakistan. Hence, it can be concluded at the end of this study that, principals and teachers need to work together to provide an atmosphere that is conducive to the education process of Pakistan.