Ülkemizde yapılan İsrail (hatta belki de Ortadoğu) özelindeki çalışmaların henüz ergenlik dönemini yaşadığı gerçeği, bu kitabın ortaya çıkmasındaki temel motivasyonu oluşturmaktadır. Halbuki Ortadoğu’daki gelişmelerin kahir ekseriyeti ve bizatihi Türkiye’nin ulusal güvenliğini de oldukça yakından ilgilendiren konu başlıkları, genel olarak İsrail merkezli üretilen politikaların bir sonucu olarak idrak edilir. Fakat buna rağmen İsrail politikaları analiz nesnesi olarak görülmez. Görülse dahi istikrarlı bir çalışma sahası tesis edilmez. Edilse dahi bu analiz nesnesini çalışacak ‘cesur’ bireyler yetişmez. Bu liste böylece uzayıp gidebilir. Nihayetinde bu realiteyle yüzleşmek dahi tek başına önemli bir ilerlemedir.

The determinants of local government performance have long been of interest, and have been empirically investigated in a number of recent studies. A general question in this area is: why have some local governments across the countries achieved high rates of performance whilst the others remained at lower levels? Evidence from the relevant literature indicates that some local governments or municipalities, particularly in developed countries, achieve very good performance. Others, in particular those from underdeveloped or developing, have very little or almost no performance.

This research empirically investigates the budgeting conditions in North Cyprus and evaluate how budgeting conditions vary from one municipality to the other in the five major municipalities; Lefkosa, Magusa, Girne, Guzelyurt and Iskele over the period 2004Q1 to 2012Q4. Two types of methodologies are conducted. First; it empirically investigates the determinants of local government deficit by using cointegration techniques. The Johansen co-integration and The Vector Error Correction model (VECM) are applied to test the effect of each element such as own-source revenue, grants, expenditures and debt services on the budget deficit. Second, the study test the convergence hypothesis if similar regions within the country converge to the same long-run steady state by considering five major Cypriot municipalities in the North Cyprus economy.

The results from the empirical analysis on budget deficit findings show that there is evidence of a long-run relationship between general deficit and its determinants. The evidence of causality is found from expenditure and debt to general deficit for Lefkosa municipality. There is unidirectional causality from grant and revenue through deficit for Magusa municipality. Third empirical analysis on convergence introduced that the municipalities with the lowest number of people per staff, commonly diverge from the group mean.

Globalization and related technological developments have increased competition and put organizations in a struggle to survive in an extremely difficult market condition. Organizations adopt their technologies and infrastructures to today’s conditions to gain a sustainable competitive advantage and maintain their existence. However, all these efforts of organizations are easily imitated by rival companies and may cause the loss of competitive advantage.

The resource-based view provides additional information that strategic human resource is the scarce, valuable, inimitable and non-substitutable resources of organizations, thus enabling them to gain a competitive advantage. According to this view, the competitive advantage of the organization is achieved by combining valuable internal resources. Nowadays, sustainable competitive advantage is provided not by environmental factors or physical capital but by human capital (employees) efficiency. In this context, the attitudes and behaviors of employees who make up human resources are important for their organizational success. Many studies emphasize that positive attitudes and behaviors (e.g. innovative work behavior, work engagement, job satisfaction) in employees have important contributions to the success of the organization, while similarly negative attitudes and behaviors (e.g. organizational silence, turnover intention) are one of the main reasons for the failure of the organization.

In our book, literature has been created on the definition, antecedents, and organizational results of new and current concepts that are newly conceptualized in the literature and are still in their infancy. It is considered that this cumulative literature within the book will be a source for future studies on these subjects and will provide important insights for practitioners.