FIN207International Business Finance and Economics of GlobalisationAssessment 2: Written...

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FIN207International Business Finance and Economics of GlobalisationAssessment 2: Written AssignmentSemester 1, 2021                                         Dr. D ChakrabartyMaximum Marks: 35 (worth 35% of the overall assessment)Due date: Sunday, 9th May 2021, 23:59 hours, Darwin time Instructions:1. Assignment must be typed and submitted in Microsoft Word format. 2. Format the assignment with 1.5 line spacing and size 12 point Arial font.3. Submit the completed assignment (as a Word document) electronically via “Assessment 2: Written Assignment Submission Point” in the Assessment 2 folder.4. You must clearly label the answer to each question.6. Word count: XXXXXXXXXXwords (total)The suggested word limit for each question is provided in the assignment. 7. You should be familiar with materials covered until week 7 to answer this assignment. You may also use liary resources and other online articles to support your answers.    8. You must clearly acknowledge all sources using Harvard referencing system including the textbook.  9. Keep a copy of your submitted assignment, in case there are problems with the electronic submission.Important Notice:As this is an individual assessment, students should submit their own assignment. All assignments submitted will go through a matching process. If found to have cheated/plagiarised, all submissions will receive a mark of zero for this assessment item. It is up to you to keep your assessment confidential.This Assignment consists of 3 questions. Attempt all of them.Question 1 (10 marks, 600 words)(a) Are there any links between lower labour and environmental standards in developing countries and their increased shares in world trade and investment?  Discuss with evidence. (4 marks, 200 words) (b) Do you support the idea of imposing restrictions on the imports of goods that have been manufactured using child labor and in countries with lower environmental standards?  Why? Why not?  Discuss. (3 marks, 200 words) (c) What are the best ways to address lower labor and environmental standards in developing countries? Discuss. (3 marks, 200 words)Question 2 (10 marks, 600 words)Suppose you work for an US Software company. You have been asked to write a report on possible countries that might be suitable for outsourcing software development. To help you write your report, your team has collected data on labour productivity and average salary of software developers for ten candidate countries.[footnoteRef:1] The data is summarized in the table below. [1:  All numbers provided in this question are hypothetical. Data for U.S.A. is provided for comparison. ]         Country Name    Average Annual Salary(in US dollars)    Labour Productivity    1    Brazil    6,100    61    2    Canada    48,000    85    3    China    28,000    65    4    Egypt    6,000    30    5    India    11,500    62    6    Philippines    10,000    67    7    Poland    23,000    81    8    Romania    12,600    80    9    Taiwan    23,400    84    10    Ukraine    12,800    75    11    U.S.A.    90,000    97The average salary of software developers in all countries have been converted into US dollars. Labour productivity is measured on a scale of 0-100 with 0 being the worst and 100 being the highest.   (a) Assuming labour costs and labour productivity are equally important in the profitability of a software development company, write a ief report highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of the ten candidate countries for outsourcing. Your report should include your top three and bottom three picks as a destination for outsourcing software development of your company.  (10 marks, 600 words)Question 3 (15 marks, 800 words)Recently, there have been instances of large open economies imposing significant tariffs on imports from their trading partners. Details of the two such cases are provided below.1. Starting from a most favoured nation (MFN) average tariff rate of 3.1% in 2017, the US increased its tariff on Chinese exports to 21% by January 2020. This was caied out by a series of tariff hikes under Section 301 from the beginning of 2018. 2. In May 2020, the Commerce Ministry of China ruled that Australia had indulged in dumping and subsidisation of barley exports to China and imposed a combined 80.5% tariff on Australianarley (73.6% anti-dumping duty and 6.9% countervailing duty). (a) Based on the theories we have studied, discuss the possible explicit and implicit reasons that may explain the decisions by the US and Chinese governments to implement such a sharp increase in their tariff rates. (8 marks, 400 words)(b) What are the likely impacts of the higher tariffs on the different sections of the economy in the importing and the exporting country? Provide a ief explanation for each case.(7 marks, 400 words) END OF WRITTEN ASSIGNMENTFIN207, S1 20214FIN207, S1 2021

Arunavo · Accepted Answer

FIN207
INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS FINANCE AND ECONOMICS OF GLOBALISATION
ASSESSMENT 2
Table of Contents 
Answer 1	3
A)	3
B)	3
C)	4
Answer 2	4
Answer 3	6
a)	6
b)	7
References	9
Answer 1
A)
The environmental laws of a country can be described as the scarcity of the environmental resources because they affect the factor grant of that country and hence, its position in the international partition of the labour.  As discussed by Ahmed and Najmi (2018) that there is certain stringent measures imposed over the market access restrictions, which results into the limitation in the competitiveness. This is very much persistent in the developing countries because of the inadequate infrastructure and the monitoring facilities, limited choice of technology, and also towards the limited access towards the environment friendly raw materials for production, non availability of complete information and many more. Similarly, the developing countries will end up in raising the standards of the workers, which leads to losing the comparative advantage, leading to the decline in the export performance, and also leading to the decreased per capita income. Hence, the labour standards provided in the trade agreements level the standard of the labour practice and also helps in meeting up the acceptable level of the labour condition in order to eliminate the unfair economic advantage. Since, there is a relationship between the trade agreements and the standard of the labours in developing countries, it is closely linked according to the changes taking place in the global marketplace, and also in the labour market, which help in their increased shared in the labour demand of developed countries.     
B)
In most of the developing and under developed countries with lower environmental standards for work, there are many issues related to child labour. As discussed by Mehta et al. (2020) child labours are vulnerable to abuse because of the cycle of poverty they are trapped into. In the most extreme cases the children are even forced to work under the threat of violence of death. The child labour is majorly seen in the countries with lower level of environment for work, where they are hugely discriminated. Because of the lower cost of labour, the child labour is used majorly in manufacturing units, agricultural sector, and many more other sectors. Hence, the restrictions imposed on the import of the goods in the form of trade barriers will help in lowering the cost of moving goods from one country to other country. This will lead to increase in incomes and wealth for all in the country, and it will also increase the per capita income. However, there is still discrepancy lies that this benefit will reach to the child or not, and also, there is another factor that the trade barriers will sometime bring negative effects on the workers, economies and the environment, especially in the poor countries.  
C)
Multinational companies always look forward to the less developed countries for the requirements of the manufacturing needs. As discussed by Ferronato and Torretta (2019) that the corporate social responsibility programs are designed to address the poor working condition of the developing countries. In the developing there is a huge problem of unemployment, poor working conditions, gaps in wages, discrimination and other concerns related to the poor environment condition. Therefore, in order to address the issues of lower labour and environmental issues, it is important to establish the collaboration with the local competition. Supply chain management can be competitive advantage is the local collaboration is made with the local company. The next step is to build the local capacity, which will help in improving the working condition of the people who are associated with the manufacturing company. The third step is to measure the work environment performance by identifying the root cause of the problem. The consideration should be done on the lost time injuries, and psychological, such as stress, aspects of the working conditions must be considered. The fourth step is to gather more feedback from workers, which will help in improving the wage condition and the working condition of the employees.  Hence, these steps will help in improving the lower labour and environmental standards in the developing countries. 
Answer 2
For any company the two major factors that matters the most is labour cost and the productivity of the company. As discussed by Alaghbari et al. (2019) that the productivity and cost are the set of economic data that measures the future inflationary trends with two indicators.

FIN207 International Business Finance and Economics of Globalisation Assessment 2: Written Assignment Semester 1, 2021 Dr. D Chakrabarty Maximum Marks: 35 (worth 35% of the overall assessment) Due...

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