Atishwar Pandaram

Are Fiji'S Government Commercial Companies in Competent Hands?

Following the launch of Fiji’s public enterprise reform in 1993 that involved commercialisation and corporatisation to create solutions in the ailing government commercial companies (GCCs), not much improvement has been seen in recent times. Many questions were raised in an attempt to determine the cause of the problem. In return, a lot of explanations and answers were presented and the key competencies of senior managers in charge of GCCs were acknowledged amongst the myriad of issues raised. This study seeks to bring to the fore key competencies central to sound performance of GCCs according to senior managers of GCCs following the reform. This is based on several interviews and questionnaires conducted on senior managers of GCCs. The findings of this research are important for many reasons. In particular, it helps government officials identify and address the training needs of senior managers of GCCs.

Exploring the nexus between urbanisation, inflation and tourism output:empirical evidences from the Fiji Islands

ABSTRACT The main aim of this study is to investigate the relationship between urbanisation, inflation and tourism output of Fiji. This study used the Autoregressive Distributed Lag bounds test to examine the relationship between urbanisation, inflation and tourism output by using annual time series data for the period 1985–2015. This study has found that urbanisation, inflation and tourism output share a long-run relationship when urbanisation and inflation are used as the dependent variables. The results of this study confirm that in the long run, tourism output has a significant and positive impact on urbanisation. This implies that a 1% increase in tourism output will increase urbanisation by 0.000165%. In the short run, urbanisation and inflation do not affect the tourism output of Fiji. The findings from this study have implications for the policy-makers and practitioners. Policy-makers should play an essential role in expanding tourism activities in the rural areas. In Fiji, there is development disparity between the urban and rural areas. The government has to invest more financial resources in the development of tourism activities in the rural areas.