management of social issues in supply chains a literature review exploring social issues actions and performance outcomes the social dimension of sustainable development and its impact on supply chains have so far received less attention than the environmental dimension the aim of the research is to explore the intersection between social issues corporate social responsibility csr actions and performance outcomes a structured literature review of social issues in supply chains is presented analysing the research published so far in peer reviewed publications linking csr and supply chain management allows the exploration of strategies and performance outcomes with a focus on social issues the corresponding responsible supply chain actions adopted by firms to address these issues are grouped into communication compliance and supplier development strategies social and economic as well as buyer and supplier performance are identified as the key outcomes but the interactions among these constructs would require further research this paper contributes to the understanding of managing social issues in supply chains by linking social issues responsible supply chain actions and performance outcomes the paper consolidates related research by offering an overarching conceptual framework and points to future research directions and simultaneously provides insights into the management of social issues in supply chains

supply chain coordination for the joint determination of order quantity and reorder point using credit option abstract decisions regarding order quantity and reorder point are two major challenges in supply chain inventory management in this paper a coordination model of the joint determination of these two decision variables is proposed a decentralized supply chain consisting of one buyer and one supplier in a multi period setting is investigated demand and lead times are uncertain in our model an incentive scheme based on credit option has been developed to encourage the buyer to participate in the coordination model in this model the downstream member has the option of using credit to purchase goods during the credit time subject to its commitment to a jointly agreed order quantity and reorder point the credit time is determined in such a way that the two parties have incentives to participate the proposed incentive scheme can share the benefits of coordination between the two members based on their bargaining power the proposed model shows that the coordination of the reorder point together with order quantity can increase the overall chain profitability as well as each member s profitability

a review of trade credit literature opportunities for research in operations abstract trade credit arises when a buyer delays payment for purchased goods or services its nature has predominantly been an area of inquiry for researchers from the disciplines of finance marketing and economics but it has received relatively little attention in other domains in our article we provide an integrative review of the existing literature and discuss conflicting study outcomes we organize the relevant literature into seven areas of inquiry and analyze four in detail trade credit motives order quantity decisions credit term decisions and settlement period decisions additionally we derive a detailed agenda for future research in these areas

local intergovernmental competition and the law of 1 n this article proposes an empirical framework based on a synthesis of the seminal law of 1 n and leviathan theories which models the relationship between government spending and the number of jurisdictions in a federal system as determined by the interplay of the costs related to centralized government which fall as the number of jurisdictions increases and the costs of distributive politics which rise as the number of jurisdictions increases using a panel of u s state and local government spending data empirical tests based on this combined framework show that the effect of intergovernmental competition predicted by the leviathan model is partially offset by the law of 1 n this result helps explain the inconsistent findings in the previous empirical literature

the institutional and political factors which influence taxation the ability of politicians to concentrate the benefits of spending while dispersing the costs of taxation makes taxation attractive distributive politics but the degree to which it is attractive varies widely among the states the objective of the research was to develop a fully specified model of per capita tax revenues of state governments not state plus local and thereby identify the political and institutional factors which cause the attractiveness of taxation to vary the resulting model includes 17 significant explanatory variables which together account for all but 10 of the variation in per capita tax revenue thirteen of the significant variables are institutional or political factors thus providing decisionmakers specific options for influencing the future size of government

the stabilizing effect of inventory in supply chains this paper presents a hierarchical model framework for the analysis of the stabilizing effect of inventories in multiechelon manufacturing distribution supply chains this framework is used to compare the variance of demand to the variance of replenishment orders at different echelons of the system e g retailer wholesaler empirical data and experience with management games suggest that in most industries inventory management policies can have a destabilizing effect by increasing the volatility of demand as it passes up through the chain the bullwhip effect our model helps to explain these observations and indicates mechanisms that can promote stabilization the analysis results also define sufficient conditions for the existence of stabilization and relate these conditions to the optimality of myopic control policies

fiscal decentralization and government size numerous studies have attempted to model the possible factors contributing to universal growth in public sectors this paper analyzes one device that appears capable of controlling some of that growth fiscal decentralization the results reported here also support the use of monopoly government assumptions in models of public policy

a rent seeking model of tels tax and expenditure limits or tels are constitutional or statutory constraints on the fiscal powers of government since the taxpayer revolt beginning in the late 1970s tels have been introduced in twenty three states in recent years a number of studies attempting to test the impact of tels have found little evidence that tels significantly reduced the growth of state government in this study we challenge the implicit leviathan model that underlies most of these studies and offer an alternative rent seeking model econometric tests provide support for this rentseeking model and indicate that tels have been significant in reducing the growth of state government at least in the short run

the leviathan lottery testing the revenue maximization objective of state lotteries as evidence for leviathan unlike other governmental units statelottery agencies publicly acknowledge thattheir primary objective is revenuemaximization this claim and the inherentmonopoly power of lottery agencies providesa unique arena to test for leviathan withdata obtained from united states lotterygames i perform a laffer curve analysis toderive the optimal lottery tax rates fordifferent categories of games theseoptimal tax rates and monte carlosimulations are then used to test whetherthe current tax structure of lottery gamesis indeed the revenue maximizing structure i find strong empirical evidence for the leviathan lottery

government size and decentralization evidence from disaggregated data public choice models of government behavior draw heavily from the economics literature of industrial organization following the argument that private monopoly in production leads to relatively high prices and profits the public choice literature suggests that similar analysis of government structure may be useful in the modeling of public production brennan and buchanan 3 4 model government as leviathan a public entity which seeks to maximize its revenue the leviathan hypothesis is motivated by the desire to successfully understand government behavior as well as to recommend effective means of controlling its behavior among other suggestions brennan and buchanan offer the private monopoly corollary that competition among different fiscal units is an effective means of controlling the aggregate size of leviathan the resulting decentralization hypothesis is total government intrusion into the economy should be smaller ceteris paribus the greater the extent to which taxes and expenditures are decentralized 3 15 this paper tests the decentralization hypothesis by examining a data set which considers all units of government by disaggregating federal spending on a state by state basis we construct a cross section of state data on federal state and local government activity all previous examinations of the decentralization hypothesis at the level of the state have excluded the activity of the federal government however given that federal government expenditures greatly exceed those of state and local governments previous cross sectional tests of the decentralization hypothesis may have employed grossly incomplete measures of governmental activity in each state our study provides two extensions to the debate one by testing the decentralization hypothesis at the level of state aggregation we suggest that previous cross sectional studies do not report strong evidence in support of the hypothesis because of their exclusion of the federal sector two our study suggests the importance of including all potential competitors in the government arena state local and federal governments our study does not solve all issues concerning aggregation

coordination and profit sharing between a manufacturer and a buyer with target profit under credit option several studies have focused on buyer vendor coordination through quantity discount credit option mechanism but few quantitative models and investigations are available that have explored the mechanism for transfer of surplus generated due to coordination in this paper we develop a coordination mechanism through credit option such that both the parties can divide the surplus equitably after satisfying their own profit targets two situations are explored here in the first situation both the parties have no individual profit target from the business whereas in the second situation there are individual profit target for both the parties the proposed mechanism for division of surplus is studied through a numerical study and the impact of different parameter values on the results are examined

competitive and cooperative inventory policies in a two stage supply chain we investigate a two stage serial supply chain with stationary stochastic demand and fixed transportation times inventory holding costs are charged at each stage and each stage may incur a consumer backorder penalty cost e g the upper stage the supplier may dislike backorders at the lower stage the retailer we consider two games in both the stages independently choose base stock policies to minimize their costs the games differ in how the firms track their inventory levels in one the firms are committed to tracking echelon inventory in the other they track local inventory we compare the policies chosen under this competitive regime to those selected to minimize total supply chain costs i e the optimal solution we show that the games nearly always have a unique nash equilibrium and it differs from the optimal solution hence competition reduces efficiency furthermore the two games equilibria are different so the tracking method influences strategic behavior we show that the system optimal solution can be achieved as a nash equilibrium using simple linear transfer payments the value of cooperation is context specific in some settings competition increases total cost by only a fraction of a percent whereas in other settings the cost increase is enormous we also discuss stackelberg equilibria

a positive model of tax structure the model of tax structure developed in this paper is one in which the composition of revenues and the structure of specific taxes arise naturally as the result of self interested political behavior it is assumed that political agents choose tax structure so as to minimize the political costs or expected net loss in votes associated with raising a budget of given size several hypotheses concerning the nature of political cost functions are developed and applied to an explanation of the differences among u s states in their reliance on income taxation the empirical application emphasizes differences in political constraints across jurisdictions in the belief that much can be learned about the choice of policy instruments by studying structural adjustments in response to varying constraints the paper discusses how the proposed approach differs from or is consistent with that adopted by other authors and how the estimating equation relates to other empirical research in the literature

federalism and the growth of government revisited recent research in public economics has been testing for a relationship in federal states between the decentralization of governments and the total and individual size of government shares in gnp according to one view economic theory offers no unambiguous empirical predictions provided there is a competitive political environment at each government level the rivalry between political parties will result in an outcome that conforms approximately to the preferences of the citizens as interpreted in the conventional median voter model under this scenario it is not certain what differences might be caused by more decentralization oates 1985 to determine any difference we would have to possess considerable knowledge about the distribution of tastes and the location of the populace it has been hypothesized nevertheless that increased decentralization could result in a higher level of government expenditure quoting the economic historian john wallis oates 1985 749 suggests that since individuals have more control over public decisions at the local than at the state or national level they will wish to empower the public sector with a wider range of functions and responsibility where these activities are carried out at more localizedlevels of government

public education supply and student performance this paper develops a model of public exchange whereby voters and education policy makers exchange with one another within school districts because school district consolidation lowers alternatives to voters parents consolidation is hypothesized to raise public education spending because weakened intergovernmental competition allows policy makers to promote their own utility rather than that of constituents models of public education spending and academic performance are estimated over 1988 1990 while evidence indicates little support for the traditional treatment of the leviathan hypothesis that greater competition lowers public spending this paper argues that education spending by itself does not fully provide a valid test of the leviathan hypothesis since spending by itself does not necessarily indicate the quality of public education programmes empirical evidence indicates that greater numbers of schools and school districts promote higher student achievement as evidenced by higher math and v

women workers industrialization global supply chains and corporate codes of conduct the restructured globalized economy has provided women with employment opportunities globalisation has also meant a shift towards self regulation of multinationals as part of the restructuring of the world economy that increases among others things flexible employment practices worsening of labour conditions and lower wages for many women workers around the world in this context as part of the global trend emphasising corporate social responsibility csr in the 1980s one important development has been the growth of voluntary corporate codes of conduct to improve labour conditions this article reviews from a feminist interdisciplinary perspective the broad academic literature on women workers covering the more classical debate on women workers in the industrialization process and entering into women workers in the global supply chains and women workers and corporate codes of conduct the main argument is that this research on women workers is crucial to frame the issues of business ethics and in particular csr and codes of conduct in the context of women in the global political economy when this crucial knowledge is ignored then the ethical policies of the companies also ignore the real situation of the women workers at the bottom of their supply chains

searching for leviathan comment and extension in a recent article wallace oates 1985 investigated whether fiscal decentralization tended to act as a constraining influence on the overall size of the public sector this hypothesis has been advanced by several alternative theories of government behavior including richard musgrave s 1959 model of how the distribution function of government would be carried out by subnational governments geoffrey brennan and james buchanan s 1980 leviathan model and the more traditional public choice model for example walter hettich and stanley winer 1984 all contend that the decentralization of tax and spending decisions introduces competition among governmental units seeking to attract citizens and other mobile resources and thereby constrains taxing power oates analyzed two data sets one pertaining to the state and local sector in the united states and the other consisting of a sample of 43 countries and found little empirical support for the decentralization hypothesis the purpose of this paper is to reconsider his analysis in the case of state and local governments specifically it will be argued that oates s measures of decentralization may be inappropriate to test the hypothesis furthermore by taking into account the structure or composition of local governmental jurisdictions within a state empirical support of the decentralization hypothesis can be marshaled for general purpose local governments such as counties and municipalities i measuring fiscal decentralization among the states

an empirical analysis of state and local tax structure in the context of the leviathan model of government this paper has investigated the ability of an extreme and relatively simple model of political behavior to explain the level of revenues generated by state and local governments in general the behavior of these governments appears to be at least consistent with many of the fiscal outcomes predicted by the leviathan theory several although not all of the specific leviathan theory hypotheses considered received empirical support the evidence was consistent with the hypothesis that states utilizing comprehensive tax bases especially a personal income tax can be expected to generate higher levels of aggregate revenues strong support was also observed for the contention that intergovernmental competition by general purpose substate governments may serve as a substitute for constitutional constraints in limiting the revenue generating power of local governments

the convergence of fiscal regimes and the decline of the tiebout effect i have argued that the spatial convergence of per capita incomes and income distributions lead to the spatial convergence of fiscal regimes and that convergence diminishes opportunities for tiebout type moves in the economy considerable empirical evidence confirms the hypothesis states with relatively low initial levels of taxation have had relatively higher growth rates of taxation low per capita income states have had higher growth rates of real per capita incomes than have had high per capita income states the high economic growth rate states have had lower growth rates of taxation than the low income growth rate states spatial convergence of per capita incomes is associated with spatial convergence of fiscal regimes furthermore there has been a spatial convergence in income distributions increased equality of income empirically is associated with increased size of the fiscal regime confirming the public choice insight the spatial convergence of fiscal regimes has diminished the gains from tiebout type moves as such fiscal convergence diminishes the opportunity for citizen voters to reveal their preference for collective goods through migration of course at the limit where per capita incomes and the income distribution are invariant spatially the spatial convergence of fiscal regimes makes the musgrave samuelson problem of revealed preference for collective goods as intractable at the state and local levels as at the national level tiebout type moves no longer allow escape from leviathan

private regulation and trade union rights why codes of conduct have limited impact on trade union rights codes of conduct are the main tools to privately regulate worker rights in global value chains scholars have shown that while codes may improve outcome standards such as occupational health and safety they have had limited impact on process rights such as freedom of association and collective bargaining scholars have though only provided vague or general explanations for this empirical finding we address this shortcoming by providing a holistic and detailed explanation and argue that codes in their current form have limited impact on trade union rights due to i buyers paying lip service to trade union rights ii workers being treated as passive objects of regulation in codes of conduct iii auditing being unable to detect and remediate violations of trade union rights iv codes emphasizing parallel means of organizing v suppliers having limited incentives for compliance and vi codes being unable to open up space for union organizing when leveraged in grassroots struggles our arguments suggest that there is no quick fix for codes limited impact on trade union rights and that codes in their current form have limited potential to improve trade union rights we conclude by discussing ways in which codes of conduct and private regulation of worker rights more generally could be transformed to more effectively address trade union rights

centralization and government competition this paper examines the relationship between government size and fiscal centralization with specific focus on the separate influences of centralism and fragmentation on the size of public sector in the united states the empirical findings at the national level provide support to the hypothesis that fiscal decentralization leads to a smaller government the findings at the state and local levels however show no empirical relationship between government size and the degree of centralization

tax structure and the size of government an empirical analysis of the fiscal illusion and fiscal stress arguments this study attempts to fulfill a number of objectives one is the possible reconciliation of two divergent strains of thought concerning the size of government fiscal illusion and fiscal stress in this respect the results show little evidence of fiscal illusion but provide support for some of the notions associated with the fiscal stress hypothesis namely the effects of revenue and income variability on the size of government

a median voter analysis of variations in the use of property taxes among local governments this paper explores the variations among local governments in the composition of tax revenues or more specifically in the relative use of property taxes using a median voter framework various hypotheses are developed concerning the factors that should influence the relative use of property taxes a cross sectional sample of central cities is employed to test the hypotheses the empirical results are consistent with the hypotheses

federalism and the size of government over the last few decades the size of the public sector in both absolute and relative terms has increased in all of the western economies this has led to considerable investigation of the factors determining government size factors considered have included income elasticity of voter demand for public goods i e wagner s law relative price changes threshold effects e g wars or depressions interest group demands e g public sector employees or unions 17 productivity differentials 1 and redistributional motivations 18 10 one factor which has received little more than passing interest is government structure that is centralization of government activities as opposed to decentralization or federalism authors such as fratianni and spinelli 7 musgrave and musgrave 12 beck 2 and buchanan 4 make no mention of government structure as a factor in the determination of government size when considered the impact of government structure on government size is treated more as an afterthought for example mueller and murrell 11 incorporate a centralization variable in only two of their twenty two regression equations and then only in their two stage least squares equations and offer little analysis of its expected impact on government size exceptions to this standard treatment of federalism include brennan and buchanan 3 oates 15 nelson 13 14 and marlow 9 brennan and buchanan consider the structure of government and its impact on public sector size in the context of a revenue maximizing government model they argue that with mobile voters and local public goods decentralization of government taxing and expenditure powers would serve to constrain the size of the public sector in a tiebout like world any attempt on the part of one jurisdiction to exploit its citizenry would result in instantaneous and complete migration on the part of the citizenry to an alternative nonexploitive jurisdiction this competition among jurisdictions for the patronage of the citizenry limits the extent of fiscal exploitation possible and as such the size of the public sector brennan and buchanan note however that w ithin a constitutionally designed federal structure one would predict that there would be constant pressures by competitive lower level governments to secure institutional rearrangements that would moderate competitive pressures 3 182 these institutional rearrangements would take the form of collusive agreements between the central and lower level governments which assign to the central government what were previously lower level revenue raising powers subject to the revenues being returned to the lower level governments by

a gendered value chain approach to codes of conduct in african horticulture codes of conduct covering the employment conditions of southern producers exporting to european markets mushroomed throughout the 1990s especially in the horticulture sector linking uk and european supermarkets with export firms in africa the majority of employment in this sector is informal a significant proportion of which is female this paper explores the gender sensitivity of codes currently applied in the african export horticulture sector from an analytical perspective that combines global value chain and gendered economy approaches through an analysis of these two approaches it develops a gender pyramid which provides a framework for mapping and assessing the gender content of codes of conduct the pyramid is applied to codes that cover employment conditions in three commodity groups and countries exporting to european markets south african fruit kenyan flowers and zambian vegetables and flowers it concludes that the gender sensitivity of codes needs to be greatly enhanced if they are to adequately address employment conditions relevant to informal and especially women workers

tax decentralization and local government size this paper investigates the relationship between fiscal federalism and the sizes of local governments while many empirical studies emphasized that grants encourage the growth of local public spending and local taxes constrain it they are more silent regarding the effects of different types of tax autonomy the paper addresses this issue by arguing that tax decentralization as organized on tax bases used only by local governments tax separation rather than on tax base sharing would restrain local public expenditures using an unbalanced panel of oecd countries the key finding is that only property taxes mostly based on a tax separation scheme seem to favor smaller local governments thus while tax decentralization is a necessary condition for limiting the growth of local governments it does not appear sufficient as tax separation schemes among government levels would in fact be required

fiscal decentralization and government size an extension this paper analyzes one method governments employ to circumvent the discipline of a competitive system of fiscal federalism intergovernmental collusion in the form of intergovernmental grants grants it is argued serve to encourage the expansion of the public sector by concentrating taxing powers in the hands of the central government and by weakening the fiscal discipline imposed on governments forced to self finance their expenditures the results reported suggest that intergovernmental grants do encourage growth in the public sector the results offer further support for the use of monopoly government assumptions in public sector modeling

exit voice and mimicking behavior evidence from swiss cantons previous empirical literature hasshown that in order to overcome agencyproblems voters make inter jurisdictionalcomparisons of fiscal performance whenmaking electoral decisions incumbents therefore anticipate voters feedback by copying fiscal policy decisionsfrom neighbors this paper argues thatfiscal autonomy exit as well as directlegislation voice enrich politicalcompetition reducing thus the influence of electoral competition onfiscal decisions consequently policymimicking does not matter in circumstancesof direct legislation and fiscal autonomywhere the impact of voters on the politicalagenda is particularly strong based onpanel data between 1980 and 1998 we findencouraging evidence supporting ourtheoretical arguments

does fiscal decentralization constrain leviathan new evidence from local property tax competition this paper reexamines whether fiscal decentralization constrains leviathan government using panel data for pennsylvania we compare actual property tax rates to the leviathan revenue maximizing rates for municipalities school districts and counties using spatial econometric methods we also estimate the degree of spatial dependence at the three levels of local government we find that fiscal decentralization results in stronger intergovernmental competition and lower tax rates we also find evidence of collusion among school districts that exhibit high interdependence but also high tax rates this calls into question the current literature s blind use of spatial dependence as a measure of intergovernmental competition

tax competition rent seeking and fiscal decentralization abstract the present paper provides a basis for evaluating fiscal decentralization of expenditure and tax responsibilities by encompassing the literature on tax competition and rent seeking both tax and rent seeking competitions are conceived of as being wasteful and self defeating we find that rent seeking activities account for political distortions which may be mitigated in the process of fiscal decentralization while tax competition results in economic distortions associated with decentralization welfare evaluation should be based on the balance of the political gain and the economic cost