proposal for a methodology to monitor sustainability in the production of soft drinks in ref pet this study proposes a methodology to view and monitor the economic social and environmental impacts of operational and strategic decisions in reverse logistics rl industries factor analysis was conducted to form indexes in these three dimensions of an integrated rl process unlike other research the proposed methodology is oriented towards managers decisions on all aspects of the triple bottom line simultaneously and is adaptable to various industries the methodology was tested in a retail company in brazil that markets the world s largest carbonated soft drink brand in ref pet the results provide a holistic view of the impact of decisions on the use of economic social and environmental resources enabling direct operational decisions and strategies in the search for a better balance of the triple bottom line thus managers can seek improvements in the inputs of the rl process avoiding undesirable outputs this study contributes to the implementation of the concept and the adoption of sustainability practices in the corporate strategy improving the communication flow between operational activities and economic performance regarding the consumption of scarce resources and reducing the negative social and environmental impacts for the benefit of the company the business community society and nature

sustainability in electrical and electronic equipment closed loop supply chains a system dynamics approach abstract in this paper we examine the impact of ecological motivation and technological innovations on the long term behavior of a closed loop supply chain with recycling activities ecological motivation manifests through legislation and green image factor whereas technological innovations manifest through design for environment we adopt system dynamics methodology applied to many environmental systems seeking long term gains the developed model is implemented to a real world supply chain of electrical equipment in greece numerical analysis illustrates the factors concerned like the delay of the legislation enforcement to achieve a sustainable future through non renewable resources and landfill preservation

sustainable design of renewable energy supply chains integrated with district heating systems a fuzzy optimization approach abstract this study aims to develop a comprehensive decision model for sustainable design of biomass based renewable energy supply chains and district heating systems dhs with thermal energy storages the model integrates the strategic decisions such as location and capacity selection for energy plants dhs thermal storages and biomass storages with tactical decisions related to biomass production supply and transportation planning inventory management and energy production the main purpose is to find the optimum configuration of the supply chain and dhs to meet the heat demand of a particular locality the model combines cost and service level objectives and accounts for biomass supply material flow capacity demand and technical constraints the problem is formulated as a fuzzy mixed integer linear programming milp model that comprises multiple biomass types and system uncertainties to explore the viability of the proposed model computational experiments are performed on a real world case sensitivity analyses are conducted to examine the impacts of cost and capacity limit of thermal energy storage as well as heat demand on the objective functions and thermal storage capacity the results reveal that the proposed model can effectively be used in practice to assist the decision makers in planning energy production systems in a sustainable and effective manner

new evidence on the monetary approach of exchange rate determination in mexico 1994 2007 a cointegrated svar model abstract we provide empirical evidence supporting the validity of both short and long run versions of the monetary approach of exchange rate determination for the mexican peso u s dollar exchange rate from 1994 to 2007 using a cointegrated svar model we estimate not only the long run relationship between the variables of the monetary model for the exchange rate but also the very short run effects which have been often ignored in previous empirical work we show that there are robust short and long run relationships between the mexican monetary aggregates and the exchange rate which ultimately responds to what bilson s variant of maer predicts

confronting the environmental kuznets curve t he environmental kuznets curve posits an inverted u relationship between pollution and economic development kuznets s name was apparently attached to the curve by grossman and krueger 1993 who noted its resemblance to kuznets s inverted u relationship between income inequality and development in the first stage of industrialization pollution in the environmental kuznets curve world grows rapidly because people are more interested in jobs and income than clean air and water communities are too poor to pay for abatement and environmental regulation is correspondingly weak the balance shifts as income rises leading industrial sectors become cleaner people value the environment more highly and regulatory institutions become more effective along the curve pollution levels off in the middle income range and then falls toward pre industrial levels in wealthy societies the environmental kuznets curve model has elicited conflicting reactions from researchers and policymakers applied econometricians have generally accepted the basic tenets of the model and focused on measuring its parameters their regressions typically fitted to cross sectional observations across countries or regions suggest that air and water pollution increase with development until per capita income reaches a range of 5000 to 8000 when income rises beyond that level pollution starts to decline as shown in the conventional ekc line in figure 1 in developing countries some policymakers have interpreted such results as conveying a message about priorities grow first then clean up numerous critics have challenged the conventional environmental kuznets curve both as a representation of what actually happens in the development process and as a policy prescription some pessimistic critics argue that crosssectional evidence for the environmental kuznets curve is nothing more than a

spatially distributed production data for supply chain models forecasting with hazardous waste abstract this paper introduces a novel approach to forecasting future commodity production in hundreds of nodes which represents a key input for many applications of supply chain models a mathematical model was proposed to handle the problem of forecasting with spatially distributed and uncertain data it is derived from the principle of regression analysis and extended by a data reconciliation technique additional areal constraints guarantee mass conservation in a tree like structure which reflects the organisational arrangement of an investigated region the proposed model was tested through a case study where future production of hazardous waste suitable for thermal treatment was forecasted in 206 base nodes 14 superior nodes and one apex based on an extensive investigation of historical data it was revealed that extrapolations carried out at different levels of the hierarchical organisational structure lead to inconsistent forecasts the differences between forecasts reached up to 50 in addition to this mass conservation was violated significant corrections were performed by computations utilizing the formulated model the corrections ranged from between 0 and 12 for 90 of nodes there were 17 nodes where massive adjustments of up to 30 were inevitable

purchasing power parity for developing and developed countries what can we learn from non stationary panel data models the aim of this paper is to apply recently developed panel cointegration techniques proposed by pedroni 1999 2004 and generalized by banerjee and carrion i silvestre 2006 to examine the robustness of the ppp concept for a sample of 80 developed and developing countries we find that strong ppp is verified for oecd countries and weak ppp for mena countries however in african asian latin american and central and eastern european countries ppp does not seem relevant to characterize the long run behavior of the real exchange rate further investigations indicate that the nature of the exchange rate regime doesn t condition the validity of ppp which is more easily accepted in countries with high than low inflation

social capital barriers to production and capital shares implications for the importance of parameter heterogeneity from a nonstationary panel approach recent advances in the growth literature have proposed that difficult to quantify concepts such as social capital may play an important role in explaining the degree of persistent income disparity that is observed among countries other recently explored possibilities include institutional mechanisms which generate barriers to aggregate production an important limitation for empirical work in this area stems from the fact that it is difficult to distinguish sources of heterogeneity when direct observations are not available in this study we show how developments in the analysis of nonstationary panels can aid in this endeavor in contrast to traditional dynamic panel data analysis this approach focuses explicitly on low frequency behavior under relatively mild assumptions the approach can be used to infer properties of aggregate production which are robust to the presence of large classes of unobserved features in this framework we are able to estimate and test the distribution of production function parameters that would be required in order to generate conditional forecast convergence of per capita incomes even when some of the key factors required to explain growth are unobserved the results indicate that in order to fully explain the observed persistence in the disparity of per capita incomes the manner in which unobserved mechanisms influence production must go beyond merely accounting for differences in the trending behavior of aggregate productivity specifically if such mechanisms are to be successful empirically they must also be able to account for cross country heterogeneity in steady state capital shares this adds to a growing literature that provides support for models with multiple production regimes copyright 2007 john wiley sons ltd

embodied pollution in trade estimating the environmental load displacement of industrialised countries abstract the present paper sets out to aid in the development of environmental load displacement indicators developing the notion of the environmental memory of physical flows we estimated embodied pollution in trade of 18 industrialized countries with a the rest of the world and b developing countries from 1976 to 1994 we found that in the last years of analysis total imports of japan usa and western europe have entailed in general larger air pollutant emissions than local exports the balance of embodied emissions in trade beet seems to follow an inverted u shape across time in japan and western europe and an n shape in the us in the period of analysis japanese and european environmental terms of trade with developing countries improved from the japanese and european point of view whereas american environmental terms of trade with developing countries deteriorated over time although there is no statistical trend between income and embodied emissions in imports in a cross section analysis there does seem to be a positive relationship between both variables at a national level the results suggest that despite many shortcomings this type of assessment may shed useful insights on the international aspects of sustainable development

investigation of rfid investment in a single retailer two supplier supply chain with random demand to decrease inventory inaccuracy abstract inventory information inaccuracy is one of the main causes to the inventory waste in supply chain operations which motivates many companies to adopt modern tracing technologies e g radio frequency identification rfid to decrease inventory errors and strengthen the cooperation between the supply chain stakeholders considering different types of rfid possess unequal technique features in tracing items in more practical environment for the first time this paper explores the different effectiveness of rfid in decreasing the inventory inaccuracies in a supply chain containing one retailer and two suppliers firstly a novel scale factor function is introduced to illustrate the relationships between the variable cost of rfid and the non full abilities of rfid in decreasing inventory inaccuracies then under the stochastic demand and inaccurate inventory analytical models are formulated to investigate the cost effectiveness of different rfids to the optimal order quantities and the expected profits in different scenarios uncoordinated and coordinated supply chains hereby the best coordination strategies are addressed at last numerical results obtained from different scenarios on adopting rfid and a practical case level rfid system for recycling packaging cases indicate that rfid can not only decrease inventory inaccuracies but also strengthen the supply chain coordination

how does foreign direct investment influence energy intensity convergence in china evidence from prefecture level data abstract the huge energy intensity gaps among chinese prefectures make the overall reduction of energy intensity extremely difficult energy intensity convergence eic i e catching up of the high energy intensity prefectures with the low ones is imperative for narrowing these gaps as one of the most important channels for international technology diffusion foreign direct investment fdi has great impact on energy intensity and may be beneficial for the convergence based on pollution haven hypothesis however fdi may result in energy intensity divergence to provide an in depth understanding of the mechanisms of fdi induced convergence divergence this paper employs markov chain approach to examine the impact of fdi on eic for 256 chinese prefectures in the period from 2005 to 2014 moreover we particularly emphasis on the influences of local specific characteristics such as human capital resource endowment and environmental regulation on fdi induced convergence divergence our study on 256 chinese prefectures finds that fdi helps prefectures with higher energy intensity to catch up with lower ones which strengthens eic the impact of fdi on eic varies depending on different local characteristics among all characteristics mentioned above human capital and environmental regulation benefit the convergence driving effect of fdi while this effect is hindered by resource endowment more comprehensive and detailed policies are recommended to address energy intensity gaps in china

global reverse supply chain redesign for household plastic waste under the emission trading scheme with increasing global resource scarcity waste becomes a resource that can be managed globally a reverse supply chain network for waste recycling needs to process all the waste with minimum costs and environmental impact as re processing of waste is one of the major sources of pollution in the recycling processes a mechanism is needed to control and reduce the emission impact in the re processing as a key to facilitate the globalized reverse supply chain and avoid spreading pollutants overseas emission trading schemes ets can function as policy instruments for controlling emissions the ets introduces a trade off between the economic efficiency and the environmental impacts ets has been implemented in europe and is developing rapidly in china too the aim of the research is to re design a reverse supply chain from a global angle based on a case study conducted on household plastic waste distributed from europe to china emission trading restrictions are set on the processing plants in both europe and china we modeled a network optimization problem using integer programing approach allowing the re allocation of intermediate processing plants under emission trading restrictions optimization results show that global relocation of re processors leads to both a reduction of total costs and total transportation emission ets applied to re processors further helps to reduce emissions from both re processing and transportation sectors carbon cap should be carefully set in order to be effective with a given carbon cap the model also shows the effective carbon price range these results give an insight into the feasibility of building a global reverse supply chain for household plastic waste recycling and demonstrate the impact of ets on the network design

testing the monetary model of exchange rate determination a closer look at panels abstract in this paper we undertake an extensive evaluation of panel tests of the long run monetary model of exchange rate determination we first show how poorly the monetary model performs on a country by country basis for us dollar exchange rates over the post bretton woods period for a large number of industrialized countries in sharp contrast we find considerable support for the monetary model using panel procedures as in groen 2000 and mark and sul 2001 given the disparity in the country by country and panel approaches we carefully analyze the homogeneity restrictions inherent in the panel procedures the evidence on the appropriateness of the homogeneity restrictions is mixed in the end whether the monetary model conforms to post bretton woods data largely depends on one s prior beliefs

vertical and horizontal intra industry trade a cross industry analysis for the united kingdom a large theoretical literature has emerged directed at explaining the presence of intra industry trade iit one of the distinctions which comes out of these models is that between horizontal iit where goods are differentiated by attributes and vertical iit where goods are differentiated by quality in this paper horizontal and vertical iit in u k trade are disentangled using a unit value dispersion criterion and a range of industry characteristics the paper not only points up the relative importance of vertical and horizontal iit in the united kingdom it also demonstrates how a failure to separate them out can impact on the interpretation of empirical results copyright 1995 by royal economic society

incentive and production decisions for remanufacturing operations we consider a manufacturer producing original products using virgin materials and remanufactured products using returns from the market where the amount of returns depend on the incentive offered by the manufacturer we determine the optimal value of this incentive and the optimal production quantities in a stochastic demand setting with partial substitution we analyze 3 different models in centralized and decentralized settings where the collection process of the returns is managed by a collection agency in the decentralized setting we also analyze contracts to coordinate the decentralized systems and determine the optimal contract parameters finally we present our computational study to observe the effect of different parameters on the system performance

a novel closed loop supply chain based on the quality of returned products abstract closing an existing real world supply chain and modelling the resultant network are challenging practices this paper investigates the possibility of closing the chain in a textile company and the effects of such a decision on the profits of the chain the paper addresses one of the common problems in modelling the return rates of backward chain since inaccuracy in estimation of such rates leads to incorrect results the present model forgoes the need for commonly used predetermined rates by proposing a conditional quality based segmentation policy addition of a secondary chain as a recovery option quality dependent incentive rates and flexibility of the model in defining quality are also among novel points of this paper first a bi objective model is proposed to formulate the chain which includes the manufacturers distributors and customers in the forward chain and remanufacturing repairing and recycling centers in the backward chain this model is applicable to industries with zero waste strategy and similar recovery facilities second an extensive sensitivity analysis is carried out on a case study from textile industry the results reveal that increase in rate of returns with low medium qualities leads to higher profits since they create more suitable environmental economical business opportunities moreover closing the supply chain of the company increases the impact of distributors collectors performance on the final profits hence managers of the company need to adopt a pricing policy in favor of the distributors collectors which equals to lower repairing remanufacturing and purchase costs from manufacturers and higher sales prices to customers manufacturers and recycling center

the impact of carbon policies on supply chain design and logistics of a major retailer abstract the energy used to move freight comprised about 17 of all the energy consumed in the united states in 2010 this percentage was an increase from 8 7 in 1970 even though fuel efficiency gradually improved over the period one major reason of this phenomenon is that the longer supply chains of many industries caused by globalization increase freight movement various carbon policies have been discussed and even implemented for some industry sectors in the european union to reduce carbon emissions however the emissions of surface transportation have not been well studied this paper investigates three of the most common carbon policies carbon emission tax inflexible cap and cap and trade the impact on a company may include the redesign of its supply chains and different choices of transportation modes truck rail or waterway this paper proposes optimization models for major retailers who make a huge contribution to freight movement to design their supply chains under various carbon policies the results from the models can help policy makers to predict the impact of policies on overall emissions in the freight transportation sector the model may also be incorporated into the integrated assessment models for climate change analyses furthermore a sensitivity analysis is conducted to study the impact of the policy parameters on carbon emissions and logistics cost this research uses the supply chain of a major u s retailer i e wal mart to demonstrate how to use the models and conduct the sensitivity analysis in order to realize significant emission reduction a redesign of supply chains of major retailers is necessary and will be triggered only by a high carbon tax rate a high carbon price or a very strict carbon cap which all may involve high social and or economic complexity numerical experiments show that different policies have different impacts on the costs and the effectiveness of emission reduction how to choose policy parameters is critical to the effectiveness of a carbon policy the different sensitivity also implies different challenges during the implementation of the policies such as the high cost preventing retailers from accepting any carbon taxes and the difficulty of reaching an agreement on the carbon caps between retailers and policy makers

analyzing structure of two echelon closed loop supply chain for pricing quality and recycling management abstract this paper analyzes the effects of recycling and product quality level on pricing decision in a two echelon closed loop supply chain clsc where demand is sensitive with price and quality level of the product under stackelberg game setting this paper considers three possible collection activities of used product for recycling viz retailer led collection manufacturer led collection and third party led collection it is found that third party s involvement in used product collection activity is always disadvantageous in this proposed model cost parameters of the reverse channel play an important role in determining best channel structure quality level and price of the product directly vary with recycling a threshold of collection effort determines which party between manufacturer and retailer can provide the best quality product at least price to resolve channel conflict and to distribute surplus profit the concepts of sub game perfect equilibrium and alternative offer bargaining strategy are used the analysis reveals that the subgame perfect equilibrium retail price cuts out channel conflict and depicts particular profit split irrespective of the offering party the proposed model is also justified by illustrating numerical examples

two way product recovery in a closed loop supply chain with variable markup under price and quality dependent demand abstract this article considers a two way product recovery in a two echelon closed loop supply chain which comprises one manufacturer and one retailer for trading a single product the market demand of the product is linearly dependent on selling price and product quality the retailer sets the selling price with a variable markup on the wholesale price of the manufacturer the manufacturer also sets his wholesale price with a fixed markup on the production cost of the product the retailer recovers the used product in two ways he collects from consumers the used products which is a fraction of newly sold products in the forward channel he also collects the used products through an exchange offer and replaces a fraction of the collected used products by new ones we analyze the proposed model under four different decision structures decentralized nash game manufacture led and retailer led stackelberg games and centralized cooperative game structures we then compare these policies to identify the best policy we also examine the feasibility of the cooperative game through a bargaining model to examine the effects of key model parameters on the decisions we perform a sensitivity analysis for a numerical example

a robust fuzzy optimization model for carbon efficient closed loop supply chain network design problem a numerical illustration in electronics industry abstract environmentalism has become an important global issue in the present century during the recent years the closed loop green supply chain management has been increasingly a center of attention as a result of governmental laws and legislations regarding the environmental effects of any activity and the soaring consumers expectations in this study effort has been made to investigate a facility location allocation model for a multi product closed loop green supply chain network consisting of manufacturing remanufacturing and collection inspection centers as well as disposal center and markets to design the network we have proposed a mixed integer linear programming model capable of reducing the network total costs the model has been so developed as to consider such environmental objectives as reducing the rate of carbon dioxide emission in the environment throughout the network in question moreover the model has been developed using a robust fuzzy programming approach to investigate the effects of uncertainties of the variable costs as well as the demand rate on the network design to solve the bi objective programming model use has been made of the e constraint approach and a numerical illustration of copiers industry is used to show the applicability of the proposed optimization model results have revealed that the model is capable of controlling the network uncertainties as a result of which a robustness price will be imposed on the system

a model to evaluate acquisition price and quantity of used products for remanufacturing abstract in this paper an analytical model is proposed to evaluate optimal acquisition price and quantity policy based on the quality of returned used products that are subsequently used for remanufacturing the model is developed from the perspective of a consolidation center which facilitates the collection of used products in various collection centers by offering an acquisition price based on the quality of used products receive all of the collected used products and consolidate them with replacement parts before sending the consignment to the remanufacturer it is assumed that the consolidation center receives an order from the remanufacturer for a set quantity and an associated price for used products in a quality level the consolidation center then evaluates optimal acquisition price and quantity policy for used products based on the available information on stochastic return quantity and quality and the cost of predefined set of replacement parts the policy so obtained is offered to the collection centers to initiate the collection of used products in their respective area of operation the impact of the model is studied through a numerical study the authors believe that the model developed here is the first such pricing model in a reverse logistics setting

tactical supply chain planning under a carbon tax policy scheme a case study greenhouse gas emissions are receiving greater scrutiny in many countries due to international forces to reduce anthropogenic global climate change industry and their supply chains represent a major source of these emissions this paper presents a tactical supply chain planning model that integrates economic and carbon emission objectives under a carbon tax policy scheme a modified cross entropy solution method is adopted to solve the proposed nonlinear supply chain planning model numerical experiments are completed utilizing data from an actual organization in australia where a carbon tax is in operation the analyses of the numerical results provide important organizational and policy insights on 1 the financial and emissions reduction impacts of a carbon tax at the tactical planning level 2 the use of cost emission tradeoff analysis for making informed decisions on investments 3 the way to price carbon for maximum environmental returns per dollar increase in supply chain cost

emission policies and their analysis for the design of hybrid and dedicated closed loop supply chains abstract government legislation and consumer awareness on carbon emissions have required industries to seek alternative ways to reorganize their supply chains therefore industries have to consider not only the activities in the forward supply chain but also in the reverse supply chain an integrated supply chain that combines the activities of both the forward and reverse supply chains is referred to as the closed loop supply chain clsc there are two main types of clsc structures hybrid and dedicated in this research we analyze the effect of carbon emissions consideration on the design of both hybrid and dedicated clscs in particular we develop a set of integrated mixed integer linear programming milp models to quantify and compare both of the environmental and economic impacts of carbon emissions policies carbon cap carbon tax and carbon cap and trade and market factors scale effect product return rate and the customer demand on the design of clscs with respect to both clsc structures our analysis shows that when market conditions are considered total cost and total emissions are more sensitive to customer demand than to the scale effect and the product return rate when an industry faces fluctuation on the quantity of the returned products adopting a dedicated clsc would lead to a lower total cost under cap and trade policy dedicated clsc can produce less total emissions we also observe that dedicated clsc is more cost efficient under carbon cap policy and hybrid clsc is more emissions efficient when the carbon tax is introduced

uncovering the link between a flexible exchange rate and fundamentals the case of central and eastern european economies this article examines the link between a nominal exchange rate and macrofundamentals in central and eastern european cee countries we use the model based on the monetary policy rule as a theoret

the monetary model strikes back evidence from the world abstract we revisit the dramatic failure of monetary models in explaining exchange rate movements using the information content from 98 countries we find strong evidence for cointegration between nominal exchange rates and monetary fundamentals we also find fundamentals based models very successful in beating a random walk in out of sample prediction

a carbon market sensitive optimization model for integrated forward reverse logistics globalized supply chains volatile energy and material prices increased carbon regulations and competitive marketing pressure for environmental sustainability are driving supply chain decision makers to reduce carbon emissions enterprises face the necessity and the challenge of implementing strategies to reduce their supply chain environmental impact in order to remain competitive one of the most important strategic issues in this context is the configuration of the logistics network the decision concerning the design of an optimal network of the supply chain plays a vital role in determining the total carbon footprint across the supply chain and also the total cost therefore the logistics network should be designed in a way that it could reduce both the cost and the carbon footprint across the supply chain in this context this research proposes a quantitative optimization model for integrated forward reverse logistics with carbon footprint considerations by integrating the carbon emission into a quantitative operational decision making model with regard to facility layout decisions the proposed research incorporates carbon emission parameters with various decision variables and modifies traditional integrated forward reverse logistics model into decision making quantitative operational model minimizing both the total cost and the carbon footprint the proposed model investigates the extent to which carbon reduction requirements can be addressed under a particular set of parameters such as customer demand rate of return of products etc by selecting proper policy as an alternative to the costly investment in carbon reducing technologies to solve the quantitative model this research implements a modified and efficient forest data structure to derive the optimal network configuration minimizing both the cost and the total carbon footprint of the network a comparative analysis shows the outperformance of the proposed approach over the conventional genetic algorithm ga for large problem sizes

a trade related pollution trap for economies in transition evidence from china abstract this study argues that economic growth does not necessarily reverse the pollution haven behavior even if one economy shifts from the low income group to the high income one i e the economy in transition the economy in transition can become a convergence of trade related pollution then getting stuck in a pollution trap through investigating the case of china during 2003 2009 this study examines the features and causes of trade related pollution trap supported by the world input output database and the product specific statistics from china customs this study applies the input output analysis to trace the distribution of pollution embodied in china s foreign trade then it constructs a sector country year panel and applies the fixed effect model to examine causes of the pollution trap the results show that china s pollution terms of trade ptt with developing economies increases and exceeds one while the ptt with developed economies keeps larger than one it supports the feature of pollution trap the results also demonstrate that pollution trap is determined by the synergy of environmental regulation inter industry trade and intra industry trade 1 environmental regulations keep china from becoming pollution haven of developed economies rather than relocating pollution intensive production to other developing economies 2 the current intra industry trade of low value added products worsens china s environmental performance 3 the diluting advantage on labor and the accumulating advantage on capital keep china specializing in pollution intensive production overall the pollution trap may alert economies that applies the outward oriented growth model to prepare for sustainability transition our findings imply that going green rather than moving away is essential in response to trade environment effects more stringent regulation should improve the environmental performance of production and encourage the utilization of clean technology the increasing role of intra industry trade requires to upgrade the commodity structure towards one with higher added value

taylor rule deviations and out of sample exchange rate predictability abstract the taylor rule has become the dominant model for academic evaluation of out of sample exchange rate predictability two versions of the taylor rule model are the taylor rule fundamentals model where the variables that enter the taylor rule are used to forecast exchange rate changes and the taylor rule differentials model where a taylor rule with postulated coefficients is used in the forecasting regression we use data from 1973 to 2014 to evaluate short run out of sample predictability for eight exchange rates vis a vis the u s dollar and find strong evidence in favor of the taylor rule fundamentals model alternative against the random walk null the evidence of predictability is weaker with the taylor rule differentials model and still weaker with the traditional interest rate differential purchasing power parity and monetary models the evidence of predictability for the fundamentals model is not related to deviations from the original taylor rule for the u s but is related to deviations from a modified taylor rule for the u s with a higher coefficient on the output gap the evidence of predictability is also unrelated to deviations from taylor rules for the foreign countries and adherence to the taylor principle for the u s

temporal change of china s pollution terms of trade and its determinants abstract based on the world input output database wiod this study employed a revised pollution terms of trade ptt indicator to investigate the temporal change of china s environmental cost relative to its economic gains from international trade from 1995 to 2009 the results show that china has ptt larger than 1 indicating that china emits more emissions to obtain each unit of value added from exports than its trade partners over the period china s ptt first decreased from 1995 to 2001 and then increased from 2001 to 2009 the further decompositions show that improving technology is the leading driving force to decrease ptt while the change in global trade pattern is the leading force increasing ptt especially after 2001 we further decomposed the temporal change of china s ptt by income group of the trading partners the results show that the change in the global trade pattern is the crucial driving force behind the different changes of ptt by income group

design and analysis of government subsidized collection systems for incentive dependent returns we present and solve two bilevel programming bp models describing the subsidization agreement between the government and a company engaged in collection and recovery operations these enable the company to capture the remaining value in cores referring to used products of different quality types to pick up the cores the company needs to open collection centers and dispatch vehicles on direct routes to customer sites customers have an inherent willingness to return their core and decide to do so according to the quality dependent financial incentive offered by the company in order to promote collection and recovery the government pays a uniform subsidy to the company for each core collected we introduce a supportive and a legislative bp model to tackle this comprehensive collection system design problem in both models the outer problem of the bp formulation involves the government which is the leader and wants to minimize the unit subsidy the company is the follower in the inner problem and tries to maximize its net profit from the cores subject to the government s subsidy decision in the supportive model the company itself is not bound by the minimum collection rate targeted by the government thus the amount of collected cores may not be sufficient the government tries to resolve this situation with increased subsidization the legislative model assigns the minimum collection rate responsibility to the company but also entitles it to a certain profitability ratio guaranteed by the government the solution methodology proposed for both models consists of brent s method for the outer problem and a tabu search heuristic solving the inner problem its effectiveness is tested in computational experiments the results show that for the same collection rate and profitability ratio the government has to grant a higher subsidy in the supportive model than in the legislative model

the pollution terms of trade and its five components abstract based on two extensions this paper proposes a re appraisal of the concept of the pollution terms of trade ptt introduced by antweiler 1996 first detailed data allows capturing the effect of differences in emission intensities across countries and over time second relying on johnson and noguera 2012 the revised ptt index controls for trade in intermediate goods and is based on value added rather than gross output figures applied to a database for so 2 emission intensities for 62 developed and developing countries over the 1990 2000 period it turns out that the first extension has a larger empirical importance than the second one the global pattern is one in which the major rich economies exhibit a ptt index below one higher pollution intensity in imports than in exports trade imbalances tend to exacerbate this asymmetry allowing rich economies to further offshore their pollution through trade

carbon pricing versus emissions trading a supply chain planning perspective abstract carbon pricing taxes and carbon emissions trading are two globally practiced carbon regulatory policy schemes this paper presents an analytical supply chain planning model that can be used to examine the supply chain performance at the tactical operational planning level under these two policy schemes model implementation and analyses are completed using actual data from a company operating in australia where these environmental regulatory policies are practiced numerical results provide important managerial and practical implications and policy insights in particular the results show that there are inflection points where both carbon pricing and trading schemes could influence costs or emissions reductions an erratic nonlinear emissions reduction trend is observed in a carbon pricing scheme as the carbon price increases steadily whereas emissions reduction in a carbon trading scheme follows a relatively linear trend with a nonlinear cost increase overall a carbon trading mechanism although imperfect appears to result in better supply chain performance in terms of emissions generation cost and service level even though a carbon tax may be more worthwhile from an uncertainty perspective as emissions trading costs depend on numerous uncertain market conditions

intra industry trade in intermediate products pollution and internationally increasing returns this paper examines the relationship between intra industry trade in intermediate products pollution and increasing returns we develop a two country model in which production occurs in two stages final and intermediate good production intermediate goods are produced under monopolistic competition and final good production exhibits increasing returns with respect to the number of varieties of intermediates pollution occurs in the production of the final good when polluting intermediates are used we analyze the effects of international trade in intermediate products on pollution output and welfare under an endogenous tax scenario and with two types of pollution functions the results show that because of increasing returns international trade either leads to lower total pollution in each country or lower pollution per unit of output in at least one country in addition intra industry trade causes countries to import the environmental quality of their trading partners

design and planning of a closed loop supply chain with three way recovery and buy back offer abstract due to strict environmental legislations and competitive economics worldwide closed loop supply chain clsc management has been receiving increasing attention in order to improve the return rate of used products in this paper a recovery framework is proposed by employing buy back offer at retailer level the proposed recovery framework is integrated with an optimization model for a multi period clsc under demand and capacity uncertainty to determine optimal buy back price that needs to be offered to consumers so that the minimum collection limit set by the legislators is fulfilled as well as overall cost of the integrated system is minimized the developed model addresses the possibility of three way recovery options namely product remanufacturing component remanufacturing and raw material recovery to determine the optimal manufacturing remanufacturing and recycling quantity sensitivity analysis suggests that there is a trade off between the extra benefit generated through remanufacturing and the cost of acquisition of used products due to the employment of buy back offer a condition for the buy back offer to be simultaneously advantageous for both manufacturer and retailer under revenue sharing contract is derived a comparative study is also undertaken to examine the performance of the clsc when collection is made through buy back offer vs third party collection the proposed clsc model is further extended by adding a separate demand for remanufactured products and the performance of the initial model with the extended model is compared

the impact of carbon pricing on a closed loop supply chain an australian case study concerns about industrial and supply chain implications on our natural environment have existed for decades climate change and greenhouse gas emissions have caused countries to implement various instruments ranging from taxes permits and voluntary incentives to required regulatory policies given this environment we develop a unified optimization model for a closed loop supply chain in which the carbon emission is expressed in terms of dollar carbon cost this study is one of the first to evaluate the forward and reverse supply chain influences on the carbon footprint a comparative analysis is completed with a decomposition of cost and environmental influences across supply chain functions we utilize data from a company located in australia where the government is currently introducing a carbon pricing scheme we find that variations in cost and environmental impacts occur over ranges of carbon pricing characteristics and patterns of the numerical results over these ranges provide insights for corporate key strategies and potential additional government policies these results and implications are analyzed along with limitations and directions for future research

equilibrium exchange rates in transition economies taking stock of the issues in this paper we present an overview of a number of issues relating to the equilibrium exchange rates of transition economies of the former soviet bloc in particular we present a critical overview of the various methods available for calculating equilibrium exchange rates and discuss how useful they are likely to be for the transition economies amongst our findings is the result that the trend appreciation usually observed for the exchange rates of these economies is affected by factors other than the usual balassa samuelson effect such as the behaviour of the real exchange rate of the open sector and regulated prices we then consider three main sources of uncertainty relating to the implementation of an equilibrium exchange rate model namely differences in the theoretical underpinnings differences in the econometric estimation techniques and differences relating to the time series and cross sectional dimensions of the data the ensuing three dimensional space of real misalignments is probably a useful tool in determining the direction of a possible misalignment rather than its precise size copyright blackwell publishers ltd 2006

driving factors of carbon emissions embodied in china us trade a structural decomposition analysis abstract based on the environmental multi regional input output model this study employed structural decomposition analysis to investigate the driving factors of carbon emissions embodied in china us trade over the period of 1995 2009 effective driving factors were classified into six groups and each group included both factors at home and abroad the results show that factors trade structure of intermediate products at home and export market shares of final products at home presented the largest positive impacts to increments in carbon emissions embodied in chinese exports to the us while the majority of negative impacts was generated by changes in energy intensities at home the increment in carbon emissions embodied in us exports to china was mostly contributed by total demands abroad impacts of other driving factors were much smaller at the sectoral level both positive and negative impacts of driving factors were largely limited to a few sectors e g textiles products machinery transport equipment and electrical equipment here positive impacts were mostly contributed by export market shares of final products at home and total demands abroad and negative impacts were mainly contributed by energy intensities at home policy implications deduced from the results were discussed

which fundamentals drive exchange rates a cross sectional perspective standard present value models suggest that exchange rates are driven by expected future fundamentals implying that exchange rates contain information about future fundamentals we test this key empirical prediction of present value models in a sample of 35 currency pairs ranging from 1900 to 2009 employing a variety of tests we find that exchange rates have strong and significant predictive power for nominal fundamentals inflation money balances nominal gdp whereas predictability of real fundamentals and risk premia is much weaker and largely confined to the post bretton woods era overall we uncover ample evidence that future macro fundamentals drive current exchange rates

analyzing the impacts of carbon regulatory mechanisms on supplier and mode selection decisions an application to a biofuel supply chain this paper analyzes the impacts of carbon regulatory mechanisms on replenishment decisions in a biofuel supply chain we employ mathematical models for operations which integrate replenishment and supplier transportation mode selection decisions these models explicitly account for carbon emissions that may result from transportation and inventory storage activities this research is motivated by observations indicating that nearly 19 of the energy consumption and 25 of the energy related carbon dioxide emissions worldwide arise from transportation because freight transportation is expected to continue to grow we consider the impacts of different carbon regulatory mechanisms on transportation and inventory replenishment decisions in a biofuel supply chain a set of extensive numerical experiments uses the biofuel supply chain context to analyze the impacts of different regulatory mechanisms including carbon cap carbon tax carbon cap and trade and carbon offset on performance we use existing methodologies to calculate emissions as a function of distance traveled load weight and transportation mode used we also use publicly available data to derive representative biomass transportation costs as a consequence our numerical results are meaningful and give a realistic representation of the relationships between emissions from different transportation modes and the resulting costs the results of our computational experiments indicate that carbon regulatory mechanisms have a non trivial impact on replenishment schedules and as a consequence costs and emissions in the supply chain