inventory inaccuracies in the wholesale supply chain abstract the inventory level shown in the information system contrary to popular belief and assumptions in most academic papers and in spite of the considerable amounts invested in information technology is often inaccurate the inventory inaccuracy occurs when the inventory shown in the information system is not in agreement with the actually available inventory in this paper we first describe the major factors generating inventory inaccuracy then we provide situations permitting to manage an inventory system subject to errors we provide a general framework permitting to model the inventory inaccuracy issue in particular we link the inaccuracy issue with the well known random yield problem the shown link permits us to derive the optimal ordering policy of an inventory framework where demand satisfaction is done based on the inventory records which are subject to inaccuracies we also propose an analysis permitting to show the added value of an advanced identification system such as the rfid technology

multiperiod sales production decisions under uncertainty abstract this paper studies the behavior of an expected profit maximizing multiperiod firm under uncertainty in output and demand the firm s problem is to determine in each period the level of sales and inventory and the expected output for the coming period the optimal policy is derived in an explicit closed form and is proved to be myopic it is shown that the observed phenomenon of downward price inflexibility can be explained and further specified by using the results of our model

macroeconomic consequences of the russian mortality crisis abstract this paper examines macroeconomic consequences of the russian mortality crisis life expectancy in russia decreased from 70 to 65 years during the first half of the 1990s which we estimate accounts for approximately 1 6 million excess deaths during 1990 1995 coupled with its disproportionate impact on working age males the large number of excess deaths suggests the crisis may have had a significant negative impact on the level and growth of russia s per capita income we estimate the economic cost of the crisis using two alternative approaches first we estimate the capitalized value of the income forgone due to the crisis which represents between 1 8 and 2 7 of russia s 1990 gdp there are however both theoretical and empirical problems with this approach to estimating the cost of the crisis second we estimate the parameters of a macroeconomic growth model and use it to calculate the effect of the crisis on russia s rate of economic growth our calculations suggest that the net effect of the drop in life expectancy the decline in the rate of total population growth and the even larger decline in the rate of growth of the working age population have been to lower the annual rate of growth of income per capita in russia by roughly one third of one percentage point given that russia s per capita income fell at an average annual rate of 9 during 1990 1995 we conclude that the mortality crisis which has unquestionably been catastrophic in human terms has been at most a small contributor to russia s poor macroeconomic performance the paper also discusses the effects of the crisis on other macroeconomic variables such as income inequality and the fiscal balance of the pension system the paper concludes with a discussion of possible new approaches to modeling the two way linkages between health status and economic growth

the structure of periodic review policies in the presence of random yield this work provides a comprehensive analysis of a general periodic review production inventory model with random variable yield existence of an order point whose value does not depend on yield being random is proved in the single period case without specifying the yield model and using a very general cost structure when yield is a random multiple of lot size the nonorder up to optimal policy is characterized for a finite horizon model the finite horizon value functions are shown to converge to the solution of an infinite horizon functional equation and the infinite horizon order point is shown to be no smaller than when yield is certain

natural resource management and household well being the case of posaf ii in nicaragua summary measuring the impact of natural resource programs is a key element in the formulation and implementation of policies designed to promote farm income while enhancing the quality of the surrounding environment in this paper we analyze the economic impact of natural resource technologies delivered by the socio environmental and forestry development program ii posaf ii in nicaragua we use cross sectional data for 1 483 households from 212 treated and control communities results obtained from propensity score matching psm ordinary least squares ols weighted least squares regression wls based on psm and instrumental variables iv regression indicate that posaf ii has had a positive impact on the total value of agricultural production of beneficiary farmers an internal rate of return analysis supports the hypothesis that increasing household income while encouraging the sustainable use of natural resources through the implementation of suitable management programs can be complementary development objectives

hiv status and labor market participation in south africa abstract we use econometric methods based on the propensity score to estimate the causal effect of hiv status on employment outcomes in south africa relying on rich data from a national survey which included hiv testing we control for systematic differences between hiv positive and hiv negative individuals we provide the first nationally representative estimates of the impact of hiv status on employment outcomes for southern africa being hiv positive is associated with an increase of 6 to 7 percentage points in the likelihood of unemployment overall and 10 to 11 percentage points for those who are less educated this disadvantage reinforces existing inequalities in south africa

the effect of inventory record inaccuracy in information exchange supply chains abstract the goal of this paper is to quantify the impact of inventory record inaccuracy on the dynamics of collaborative supply chains both in terms of operational performance i e order and inventory stability and customer service level to do so we model an information exchange supply chain under shrinkage errors in the inventory item recording activity of their nodes present the mathematical formulation of such supply chain model and conduct a numerical simulation assuming different levels of errors results clearly show that inventory record inaccuracy strongly compromises supply chain stability particularly when moving upwards in the supply chain important managerial insights can be extracted from this analysis such as the role of benefit sharing strategies in order to guarantee the advantage of investments in connectivity technologies

further results on the macroeconomic effects of aids the dualistic labor surplus economy this article generalizes and extends the earlier analyses of cuddington 1993 and cuddington and hancock forthcoming by incorporating the presence of underemployment and dual labor markets considerations that seem particularly important when assesssing the likely impact of aids in many african countries the dual economy simulations of the economic impact of aids using tanzanian data suggest that the macroeconomic consequences of the epidemic are of the same order of magnitude as those obtained using a single sector full employment model gross domestic product gdp is 15 to 25 percent smaller by 2010 than it would have been wtihout aids and per capita gdp is 0 to 10 percent smaller the output loss from aids in the dual economy framework is roughly the same as the output gain achievable through policies designed to increase labor market flexibility the exercise is crude but it suggests that meaningful efforts at economic reform in economies devastated by aids may at least ameliorate some of the negative economic effects of the epidemic although they would certainly not offset its personal and social costs

the long run economic costs of aids a model with an application to south africa primarily a disease of young adults acquired immuno deficiency syndrome aids imposes economic costs that could be devastatingly high in the long run by undermining the transmission of human capital the main driver of long run economic growth across generations aids makes it harder for victims children to obtain an education and deprives them of the love nurturing and life skills that parents provide these children will in turn find it difficult to educate their children and so on an overlapping generations model is used to show that an otherwise growing economy could decline to a low level subsistence equilibrium if hit with an aids type increase in premature adult mortality calibrating the model for south africa where the hiv prevalence rate is over 20 percent simulations reveal that the economy could shrink to half its current size in about four generations in the absence of intervention programs to combat the disease and to support needy families could avert such a collapse but they imply a fiscal burden of about 4 percent of gross domestic product gdp

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

adult mortality and consumption growth in the age of hiv aids the authors use a 13 year panel of individuals in tanzania to assess how adult mortality shocks affect both short and long run consumption growth of surviving household members using unique data which tracks individuals from 1991 to 2004 they examine consumption growth controlling for a set of initial community household and individual characteristics the effect is identified using the sample of households in 2004 which grew out of baseline households the authors find robust evidence that an affected household will see consumption drop 7 percent within the first five years after the adult death with high growth in the sample over this time period this creates a 19 percentage point growth gap with the average household there is some evidence of persistent effects of these shocks for up to 13 years but these effects are imprecisely estimated and not significantly different from zero the impact of female adult death is found to be particularly severe

aids crisis and growth abstract we investigate an olg economy where an aids epidemic influences human capital accumulation and growth through the creation of large numbers of orphans we study how intra family allocations regarding school and work time of children are adjusted in the face of aids within a family and how in turn these adjustments influence accumulation of physical and human capital we compute the aggregate effects of an aids epidemic on human and physical capital accumulation and growth we find that growth effects of an aids epidemic are large some policies such as subsidization of aids medication have relatively small effects

how much of a threat to economic growth is a mature aids epidemic the article models the impact on economic growth of hiv aids when the epidemic is in a mature phase in contrast with previous studies focused on periods of expansion as it is typically the case in african countries simulations for honduras the epicentre of the epidemic in central america show that aids is not likely to threaten economic growth neither through labour nor capital accumulation channels impacts are estimated between 0 007 and 0 27 points of gross domestic product gdp growth annually for the period 2001 to 2010 increasing spending on prevention higher public treatment subsidies and increasing treatment access will not jeopardize economic growth prospects critical factors that slash economic growth in africa such as human capital reductions and shifts in relative skills are not strong in honduras

links between rural poverty and the environment in developing countries asset categories and investment poverty abstract this paper presents a framework for analyzing the links between poverty and the environment in rural areas of developing countries it introduces the concept of investment poverty and relates it to other measures of poverty in analysis of these links the notion of poverty is examined in the context of categories of assets and categories of environment change with particular focus on farm household income generation and investment strategies as determinants of the links the strength and direction of the poverty environment links are shown to differ even invert depending on the composition of the assets held by the rural poor and the types of environmental problems they face policy strategies need to focus on conditioning variables that affect market development community wealth infrastructure household asset distribution and the affordability and appropriateness of natural resource conservation technologies

the impact of aids on income and human capital this paper studies the impact of hiv aids on per capita income and education it explores two channels on how hiv aids affects income that have not been sufficiently stressed by previous literature the reduction of the incentives to stay in school due to shorter expected longevity and the reduction in productivity of experienced workers in the model individuals live for three periods may get infected in the second period and with some probability die of aids before reaching the third period of their lives parents care for the welfare of the future generations so that they will maximize lifetime utility of their dynasty the simulations predict that the most affected countries in sub saharan africa in the future will be on average 30 poorer than they would be without aids schooling will decline in some cases by 40 these figures are dramatically reduced with widespread medical treatment as it increases the survival probability and productivity of infected individuals

assessing the impact of aids on the growth path of the malawian economy abstract a modified solow growth model is used to simulate the impact of the aids epidemic on output capacity and other key macroeconomic aggregates in malawi comparing a counterfactual no aids scenario to medium and extreme aids projections suggests that average real gdp growth over the 1985 2010 period will be 0 2 0 3 1 2 1 5 percentage points lower in the medium extreme case relative to the no aids case as a result the size of the economy by the year 2010 will be reduced from a real gdp of 5 03 billion constant 1985 kwacha without aids to 4 81 4 77 3 80 3 46 billion kwacha in the medium extreme scenario

assessing poverty deforestation links evidence from swat pakistan abstract this paper contributes to the debate on the links between poverty and forestry degradation the view that due to poverty and the meeting of subsistence needs the poor use natural resources more intensively and hence cause them to degrade using the case of the forest rich swat district pakistan the paper addresses the issue empirically historically and institutionally we do not find empirical support for the poverty environment nexus in that the poor and other income groups are equally resource dependent and also show that resource degradation is not associated with poverty our historical and institutional analyses provide alternative explanations for resource degradation selective and rotating ownership patterns starting with the 17th century provided limited incentive for resource conservation it also created tension between de jure and de facto owners that has persisted and is one source of forest degradation ill defined resource rights have also exacerbated the impacts of several other factors contributing to forest degradation which is compounded by poor management corruption and perverse incentives

environmental externalities and immiserizing structural changes in an economy with heterogeneous agents the way in which natural and physical capital are accumulated distributed and harnessed underpins the functioning and sustainability of the productive system of each society as well as its social stratification significant changes in the interactions between natural and physical capital accumulation give rise to processes of structural change sc which affect not only sectoral composition of the productive system but also social equity and environmental quality we propose a taxonomy of different scs on the basis of distributive environmental and economic outcomes and we study a two sector model with environmental externalities to identify under which conditions each sc can occur our model shows how the type of sc is shaped by the link between agents heterogeneity in terms of productive asset endowment and their vulnerability to environmental degradation in particular we find that a sc associated with reduction in poverty and in environmental pressures can occur only if productivity of the physical capital intensive sector increases but its rate of environmental impact remains relatively lower than that of the natural capital intensive sector

effects of demographic and related microeconomic change on land quality in hills and mountains of developing countries abstract more than 70 empirical studies indicate that local population growth and its microeconomic manifestations in hills and mountains of developing countries do not necessarily threaten forest production agriculture livestock production or watershed stability population growth can make the cost of land relative to labor increase as this cost increases people often change their methods of managing economic plants and animals and make land improvements to offset initial declines in productivity that result from more frequent use of land thus the relationship between land productivity and relative land labor costs often resembles a u halting population growth or removing people from well settled areas might not improve productivity or reduce some off site damages

poverty and environment in latin america concepts evidence and policy implications abstract who is responsible for the ongoing degradation of natural resources such as agricultural soils rangeland and forests evidence from across latin america suggests that the nonpoor and the poor are both at fault while the poor lack the means to invest in protecting natural resources both the nonpoor and the poor often lack the incentives for good resource stewardship policies for agricultural intensification and livelihood diversification can alleviate poverty and its capacity constraint but incentive policies for good stewardship are critically needed such policies should be targeted to specific environmental problems and tailored to the motivations of rural decision makers

poverty alleviation and tropical forests what scope for synergies abstract this paper explores the state of the art of the two way causal links between poverty alleviation and natural tropical forests microimpacts of rising poverty can increase or slow forest loss at the macrolevel poverty also has an ambiguous effect but it is probable that higher income stimulates forest loss by raising demand for agricultural land the second question is what potential forest led development has to alleviate a country s poverty in terms of producer benefits consumer benefits and economy wide employment natural forests widely serve as safety nets for the rural poor but it proves difficult to raise producer benefits significantly urban consumer benefits from forest an important target for pro poor agricultural innovation are limited and seldom favor the poor absorption of poor unskilled labor is low in forestry which tends to be capital intensive natural forests may thus lack comparative advantage for poverty alleviation there are few win win synergies between natural forests and national poverty reduction which may help to explain why the loss of tropical forests is ongoing this may have important implications for our understanding of sustainable forest development and for the design of both conservation and poverty alleviation strategies

hiv aids and development a reappraisal of the productivity and factor accumulation effects besides the dreadful direct effects enduring epidemics like hiv aids induce much more subtle effects in the economy principally via labor productivity and factor accumulation concerning the former the impact of morbidity on effective labor has been recognized and accounted for since the early work of over 1992 and cuddington and hancock 1994 the impact of mortality shocks on savings and therefore on factor accumulation has also been documented in this early literature with an emphasis on the detrimental role of the induced health expenditures recently asiedu jin and kanyama 2015 show that hiv aids has a negative but diminishing effect on foreign direct investment fdi and this adverse effect occurs even when the prevalent hiv rate is low in contrast the consequences of hiv aids on human capital accumulation have been more rarely treated in particular its impact on schooling time n generally omitted in the macroeconomic literature ferreira pessoa and dos santos 2011 is an exception the inherent mechanism is known as the ben porath mechanism ben porath 1967 a downward trend in life expectancy following mortality shocks reduces the profitability of schooling leading to a decline of human capital accumulation in the medium and long run boucekkine de la croix and licandro 2002 have proposed a theory of endogenous growth based on the ben porath mechanism notice also that the same essential argument that shorter time horizons discourage investment can be applied to physical capital accumulation the latter may collapse not only because of the massive increase in health expenditures undermining savings as in the early literature but also via this indirect mechanism both channels are taken into account by freire 2004 in her analysis of saving behavior in south africa after the outbreak of the hiv aids crisis

aids and economic growth a human capital approach abstract using a model that combines growth and health capital equations this study analyses the impact of hiv aids on economic growth the econometric results indicate that the epidemic s effects have been substantial in africa the marginal impact on income per capita of a 1 increase in hiv prevalence rate is minus 0 59 even in countries with lower hiv prevalence rates the marginal impacts are non trivial hence while the human and social costs of the hiv aids epidemic are major causes for concern these results indicate that the macroeconomic affects of the hiv aids epidemic are important

bullwhip effect and supply chain costs with low and high quality information on inventory shrinkage abstract inventory inaccuracy is the mismatch between the recorded inventory and the physical inventory which is severe and widespread in industry a few studies have investigated the bullwhip effect with the existence of inventory inaccuracy the development of information technologies has provided companies with access to accurate inventory information in real time this will surely affect the bullwhip effect and supply chain costs the aim of this paper is to build an analytical model to systematically investigate these effects we consider a retailer manufacturer supply chain in which the retailer faces inventory shrinkage which is the main cause of inventory inaccuracy both the situations with accurate real time inventory information i e high quality information and the situation with statistical inventory information i e low quality information are studied we examine the relationships between the bullwhip effect information distortion and supply chain costs with different levels of information quality the results of our analysis enrich the existing literature on the bullwhip effect first we show that the bullwhip effect is magnified along the chain when higher quality information on inventory shrinkage specifically real time rather than statistical data is obtained second we show that the magnification of the bullwhip effect does not necessarily result in higher costs third we demonstrate that higher quality information increases the benefits of information sharing our paper provides new insights into the causes extent and economic dynamics of order variability in the presence of inventory inaccuracy and may thus suggest ways of more effectively managing the bullwhip effect and inventory

modeling the macroeconomic effects of aids with an application to tanzania a solow style model is developed to study the effects of the aids epidemic on the growth path of the economy and gdp per capita the model uses conjectures about the demographic effects of aids in tanzania to estimate the macroeconomic effects on the economy the findings suggest that without decisive policy action aids may reduce tanzanian gdp in the year 2010 by 15 to 25 percent in relation to a counterfactual no aids scenario per capita income levels are expected to fall by 0 to 10 percent by 2010

hiv testing subjective beliefs and economic behavior this paper examines the effects of learning hiv status on economic behavior among rural malawians according to economic life cycle models if learning hiv results is informative about additional years of life being diagnosed hiv positive or negative should predict changes in consumption investment and savings behavior with important micro and macro economic implications using an experiment that randomly assigned incentives to learn hiv results i find that while learning hiv results had short term effects on subjective belief of hiv infection these differences did not persist after two years consistent with this there were relatively few differences two years later in savings income expenditures and employment between those who learned and did not learn their status

the long run economic costs of aids primarily a disease of young adults aids imposes economic costs that could be devastatingly high in the long run by undermining the transmission of human capital the main driver of long run economic growth across generations aids makes it harder for victims children to obtain an education and deprives them of the love nurturing and life skills that parents provide these children will in turn find it difficult to educate their children and so on an overlapping generations model is used to show that an otherwise growing economy could decline to a low level subsistence equilibrium if hit with an aids type increase in premature adult mortality calibrating the model for south africa where the hiv prevalence rate is over 20 percent simulations reveal that the economy could shrink to half its current size in about four generations in the absence of intervention programs to combat the disease and to support needy families could avert such a collapse but they imply a fiscal burden of about 4 percent o