Time for Calendar Reform? Jan 2nd, 2014 Jeff Garthoff Business Management class-pack/content/time-for-calendar-reform/ The Gregorian Calendar has been in place for most countries for about 400 years. There are some significant business related issues that could be resolved by changing to a calendar that is more consistent. The consistency would be related to key issues like holidays and the length of months. If holidays fell on weekends rather than mid-week, it would significantly impact the productivity of all nations. The financial books of companies is regularly impacted by the Gregorian Calendar. It is difficult to compare months, quarters and years when the length of these can be different. The day of week that a holiday falls greatly impacts the results of a business as well. Not to mention the fact that interest calculations are bases on a 360 day year which causes problems. Below is a possible solution listed in a Stratfor post. You can read the full article here. In 2012, Richard Conn Henry, a former NASA astrophysicist, teamed up with his colleague, an applied economist named Steve H. Hanke, to introduce perhaps the most workable attempt at calendrical reform to date. The Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar (itself an adaptation of a calendar introduced in 1996 by Bob McClenon) is, as the pair wrote for the Cato Institute in 2012, “religiously unobjectionable, business-friendly and identical year-to-year.” The Hanke-Henry calendar would provide a fixed 364-day year with business quarters of equal length, eliminating many of the financial problems posed by its Gregorian counterpart. Calculations of interest, for example, often rely on estimates that use a 30-day month (or a 360-day year) for the sake of convenience, rather than the actual number of days, resulting in inaccuracies that — if fixed by the Hanke-Henry calendar, its creators say – would save up to an estimated $130 billion per year worldwide. (Similar problems would still arise for the years given an extra week in the Hanke-Henry system.) Meanwhile, it would preserve the seven-day week cycle and in turn, the religious tradition of observing the Sabbath — the obstacle blocking many previous proposals’ path to success. As many as eight federal holidays would also consistently fall on weekends; while this probably would not be popular with employees, the calendar’s authors argue that it could save the United States as much as $150 billion per year (though it is difficult to anticipate how companies and workers would respond to the elimination of so many holidays, casting doubt upon such figures).
Posted on: Thu, 30 Jan 2014 11:10:11 +0000
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