Performance reviews seem to be a lightning rod for disappointment, dread, or even wrath on the part of employees who have to be “reviewed†and managers who feel they have to do the “reviewing.†It’s hard to find people who express satisfaction with their review processes, and it’s not an understatement to say that, by and large, almost everyone hates them—whether getting them or giving them ... and for very good reasons.
Somehow or other, we’ve managed to forget what performance reviews are for, and even in situations where someone does remember, the process is so poorly implemented that it ends up having no value to anyone. Worse, poorly conducted performance reviews create more problems than they solve and end up costing real time and money that should be used more productively.
It’s almost as if human resource departments, managers, supervisors, and employees conspire to make sure performance reviews end up as wasted effort. You couldn’t mess them up more if you tried.
The US Government is a major purchaser f products from suppliers throughout the country. Selling to the Federal government is an important outlet for many manufacturers and distributors, from large corporations to small businesses. Companies with energy efficient products and services have special opportunities in the Federal sector. This document highlights the major avenues to becoming a supplier and gives sources of information for private companies to use.
Federal agencies buy energy-efficient products for several reasons, ranging from Federal policies and regulations to economic and environmental benefits. Federal policy and the Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR) require agencies to buy ENERGY STAR® qualified and FEMP-designated products. In most cases, purchasing energy-efficient products will save the government a significant amount of total ownership cost over the product’s useful life. Although actual savings vary according to energy costs at each site, hours of operation, and the price premium for a more efficient product, the Department of Energy’s Federal Energy Management Program (DOE/FEMP) estimates that Federal agencies can save well over $200 million annually by choosing more efficient products.
Different countries and currency areas are typically characterized by different financial structures, as a result of history, legal frameworks, collective preferences, politics. Financial structures are in turn among the key determinants of bank and asset risks. Micro data for industrialized country show differences in banking systems in terms of return on assets, loan loss provisions, availability of external finance and efficiency indicators. At the same time, remarkable asymmetries in economic fluctuations have been documented across industrialized countries mostly during the last decade. For instance some countries like the UK and the US have highly correlated business cycle fluctuations, while other regions like the US, the Euro area and Asian countries are characterized by low or negative correlations over the cycle.
Financial markets may play a role in shaping the patterns of international transmission of shocks across countries. However, asymmetries in the financial systems and corporate risk have not been incorporated in the analysis of the international transmission of shock and of macro policy interdependence. The open economy literature has studied international business cycle properties under different settings, but very little work has focused on the role of financial fragility and even less on the effect of asymmetries in such fragility. This paper explores this concept and argues that financial diversity can account for heterogenous business cycle fluctuations and help to explain some of the features of the international transmission mechanism across countries.
