using industrial ecology and strategic management concepts to pursue the sustainable development goals abstract the subjectivity complexity and often competing interests of sustainable development have limited the effectiveness of integrating these important ideas into mainstream business strategy with the adoption of the un sustainable development goals sdgs in january 2016 there are now global sustainability benchmarks that apply across diverse sectors and national contexts allowing public and private organizations to orient and evaluate their activities strategies and business outcomes however it is not directly apparent where the advantage for business lies in pursuit of these actions within the prevailing economic paradigm highlighting the need for new analytical frameworks and tools industrial ecology ie has been successfully used in engineering practice for decades and has been suggested as a method that can provide the concepts and methods necessary to bridge the gap between traditional business practice and sustainable development to test this literature bridging the fields of industrial ecology business strategy and sustainable development was collected and analyzed using the textual analysis software leximancer the analysis showed that while the sdgs are primarily aimed at the national level they also hold relevance for business through innovation partnerships and strategic positioning inter alia the analysis found that the integration of ie and business strategy is highly relevant for three of the sdgs but captures elements of all 17 to varying degrees ie has a strong focus on innovation and its potential in new markets products and business models ie is also consciously aimed at the efficient use of energy and resources ideas that are relevant to mitigating adapting and building resilience in a changing future but are also relevant to traditional concepts of business strategy and competitive advantage this paper shows that through the combination of ie and strategic management theory commercial organizations can positively contribute to the sustainable development goals while building competitive advantage

strategic responses to resource management pressures in agriculture institutional gender and location effects sustainable management of natural resources by farmers is under increasing public scrutiny in australia the case of water unsustainably used and stored by agricultural businesses has gained attention with communities in catchments potentially deprived of water and placed at downstream risk yet sustainable water management institutional policy mechanisms remain disjointed around the country the study reported here applies a strategic response typology to a survey of 404 farmers in four different institutional environments in australia to explore their responses to institutional pressures findings demonstrate a convergence in typologies that relate to farmers organising each other and communities influencing and networking for the benefit of agricultural resource management thereby questioning the traditional continuum of resistance furthermore the mid range typology avoidance emerges as a highly problematic typology for sustainable water management policymakers especially those in weaker institutional environments where there is a need to develop policy instruments that retain farmer water management decision making power and encourage networks the paper also extends the strategic response typology to enable understanding of how gender and location affect strategic responses to institutional pressures findings provide insight for policy design in times of increasing catastrophic flood and drought conditions exacerbated by poor water management practice

learning from private and public observations of othersʼ actions we study how a continuum of agents learn about disseminated information by observing others actions every period each agent observes a public and private noisy signal centered around the aggregate action taken by the population the public signal represents an endogenous aggregate variable such as a price or a quantity the private signal represents the information gathered through private communication and local interactions we identify conditions such that the average learning curve is s shaped learning is slow initially intensifies rapidly and finally converges slowly to the truth we show that increasing public information always slows down learning in the long run and under some conditions reduces welfare lastly optimal diffusion of information requires that agents strive to be different agents need to be rewarded for choosing actions away from the population average

cultural influence on the development of accounting systems internationally a test of gray s 1988 theory this paper attempts to test the theory developed by gray 1988 linking accounting values and systems with hofstede s 1980 cultural constructs based on data from twenty nine countries it finds that while gray s 1988 model has statistically significant explanatory power it is best at explaining actual financial reporting practices and is relatively weak in explaining extant professional and regulatory structures from a cultural base this paper further finds that both the development of financial markets and levels of taxation enhance the explanations offered by gray 1988

supply chain specific understanding the patchy success of ethical sourcing initiatives as a number of high profile companies have found to their cost corporate reputations can be significantly affected by firms management of sustainability issue including those that are outside their direct control such as the environmental and social impacts of their supply networks this paper begins by examining the relationship between corporate social responsibility reputation and supply network conditions it then looks at the effectiveness of one tool for managing supply network sustainability issues ethical sourcing codes of conduct by examining how the characteristics of three supply networks branded clothes diy wood products and branded confectionary affects the implementation ethical sourcing codes of conduct it ends by setting out conclusions on why implementation of such codes has been so much more successful in some sectors than others and recommendations on effective approaches to managing sustainability issues in supply networks

the loser s curse and information aggregation in common value auctions we consider an auction in which k identical objects of unknown value are auctioned off to n bidders the k highest bidders get an object and pay the k 1st bid bidders receive a signal that provides information about the value of the object we characterize the unique symmetric equilibrium of this auction we then consider a sequence of auctions a r with n r bidders and k r objects we show that price converges in probability to the true value of the object if and only if both k r and n r k r i e both the number of objects and the number of bidders who do not receive an object go to infinity

equilibrium in a market with sequential bargaining this paper considers a market where pairs of agents who are interested in carrying out a transaction are brought together by a stochastic process and upon meeting initiate a bargaining process over the terms of the transaction the basic bargaining problem is treated with the strategic approach the paper derives the steady state equilibrium agreements analyzes their dependence on market conditions such as the relative numbers of agents of different types and discusses their relations with the competitive equilibrium outcome and other results in the search equilibrium literature this paper considers a market that operates in the following way pairs of agents who have mutual interest in carrying out a transaction are brought together by a stochastic process when two agents meet they initiate a bargaining process over the terms of the transaction if two agents reach an agreement a transaction takes place and they leave the market of course the bargaining positions and hence the agreement reached in any particular meeting will be affected by the conditions prevailing in the market these will include the chances that each of the negotiating parties have of meeting other partners in the event that the agreement in the current negotiations is delayed also the expected length of time required to achieve an alternative transaction and the expected behavior of alternative partners the study of such a market mechanism is of interest for two reasons firstly it captures some realistic aspects of the trade in certain specific markets e g asset markets such as housing and some labor markets secondly it contributes to an understanding of the micro mechanisms of price formation and their role in shaping market outcomes in both cases the features studied are largely neglected in the traditional market equilibrium analyses the related literature includes the articles by diamond 4 5 diamond and maskin 6 mortensen 8 9 and zusman and bell 13 these articles consider markets of the type described above in which transactions are concluded at pairwise meetings of agents the major difference between our work and these articles is in the approach to the basic bargaining problem in the cited articles it is assumed that a meeting is concluded with an instantaneous agreement which divides the associated surplus in an arbitrary predetermined way when the surplus is assumed to be divided equally the division rule is in fact nash s axiomatic bargaining solution in contrast the present paper treats the basic bargaining problem with the strategic approach see rubinstein 19 which constitutes an attempt to look into the bargaining black box this approach explicitly models the time dimension of the bargaining process describes in detail the bargaining procedure and justifies the agreement as a perfect equilibrium in

toward a strategic foundation for rational expectations equilibrium a step toward a strategic foundation for rational expectations equilibrium is taken by considering a double auction with n buyers and m sellers with interdependent values and affiliated private information if there are sufficiently many buyers and sellers and their bids are restricted to a sufficiently fine discrete set of prices then generically there is an equilibrium in nondecreasing bidding functions that is arbitrarily close to the unique fully revealing rational expectations equilibrium of the limit market with unrestricted bids and a continuum of agents in particular the large double auction equilibrium is almost efficient and almost fully aggregates the agents information

developing difference social organization and the rise of the auto industries of south korea taiwan spain and argentina theories of economic development as diverse as modernization dependency world system and market reform take a critical factor view proponents of each theory argue that countries fail to develop because of an obstacle to economic growth we argue instead that neither a critical factor nor a single path leads to economic development viable paths vary economic growth depends on linking a country s historically developed patterns of social organization to the opportunities of global markets we formulate a sociological theory of cross national comparative advantage including not only economic factor endowments but also institutionalized patterns of authority and organization such patterns legitimize certain actors and certain relationships among those actors which facilitate development success in some activities but not in others we illustrate this approach to understanding development outcomes with a comparative analysis of the difficult rise of the automobile assembly and components industries in south korea taiwan spain and argentina

rational expectations information acquisition and competitive bidding most rational expectations market equilibrium models are not models of price formation and naive mechanisms leading to such equilibria can be severely manipulable in this paper a bidding model is developed which has the market like features that bidders act as price takers and that prices convey information higher equilibrium prices convey more favorable information about the quality of the objects being sold than do lower prices bidders can benefit from trading only if they have a transactions motive or if they have access to inside information apart from exceptional cases prices are not fully revealing a two stage model is developed in which bidders may acquire information at a cost before bidding and for which the equilibrium price is fully revealing resolving a well known paradox

quasi option value and climate policy choices in the climate change issue the environmental irreversibility risk of an acceleration of mitigation policies if the worst happens has to be balanced with the investment irreversibility risk of over cautious policies to explore this balance we define an option value for a precautionary climate policy using the simplest decision making model we expose how option value relates to the expected value of future information using quantitative data from an integrated assessment model we find that most of the time the environmental irreversibility dominates the investment irreversibility for all cases explored here the order of magnitude of the option value was significant about 50 of the opportunity cost

the role of the board of directors in disseminating relevant information on greenhouse gases in today s world the corporate image of the largest companies is closely linked to their performance in the field of corporate social responsibility and the disclosure of information on that topic specifically on climate change since the board of directors is the body responsible for this process the aim of this article is to show the role that companies boards of directors play in the accountability process vis a vis stakeholders in relation to one specific aspect which has enormous significance in environmental information practices used to monitor greenhouse gas emissions in order to achieve this we shall verify certain business characteristics in addition to the size and activity of the board of directors and we shall take different dependence models into consideration these models will include variables related to the level of independence and diversity of the board of directors which interact with dummy variables representing the company s litigation risks regarding environmental behavior and the institutional macro context of the organization s country of origin the results make it clear that boards of directors are basically focused on the traditional responsibility of creating economic value instead of dealing with today s broader business world concepts which include social responsibility this focus therefore does not favor the accountability process before other stakeholders if this makes it more difficult to protect the interests of shareholders

is corporate responsibility converging a comparison of corporate responsibility reporting in the usa uk australia and germany corporate social reporting while not mandatory in most countries has been adopted by many large companies around the world and there are now a variety of competing global standards for non financial reporting such as the global reporting initiative and the un global compact however while some companies e g henkel bhp johnson and johnson have a long standing tradition in reporting non financial information other companies provide only limited information or in some cases no information at all previous studies have suggested that there are country and industry specific differences in the extent of csr reports e g kolk et al 2001 business strategy and the environment10 15 28 kolk 2005 management international review45 145 166 maignan and ralston 2002 journal of international business studies33 3 497 514 however findings are inconclusive or contradictory and it is often difficult to compare previous studies owing to the idiosyncratic methods used in each study graafland et al 2004 journal of business ethics53 137 152 furthermore previous studies have relied mainly on simple measures such as word counts and page counts of reports to compare the extent of reporting that may not capture significant differences in the content of the reports in this article we seek to overcome some of these deficiencies by using textual analysis software and a more robust statistical method to more objectively and reliably compare the csr reports of firms in different industries and countries we examine a sample of leading companies in four countries us uk australia and germany and test whether or not membership of the global compact makes a difference to csr reporting and is overcoming industry and country specific factors that limit standardization we conclude that globalcompact membership is having an effect only in certain areas of csr reporting related to the environment and workers and that businesses from different countries vary significantly in the extent to which they promote csr and the csr issues that they choose to emphasize in their reports these country differences are argued to be related to the different institutional arrangements in each country

the role of ethical leadership versus institutional constraints a simulation study of financial misreporting by ceos this article examines the proposition that a major cause of the major financial accounting scandals that received much publicity around the world was unethical leadership in the companies and compares the role of unethical leaders in a variety of scenarios through the use of computer simulation models it shows how a combination of ceo s narcissism financial incentive shareholders expectations and subordinate silence as well as ceo s dishonesty can do much to explain some of the findings highlighted in recent high profile financial accounting scandals furthermore it shows that the nature and impact of ethical leadership depends greatly on the institutional setting and can be expected to vary greatly by country and culture in certain circumstances ethical leadership can have either a negligible or even opposite effect to that expected

is the international business research agenda running out of steam this research note challenges international business researchers to think of their future work in terms of the past achievements of their discipline it identifies three key research areas corresponding to attempts to tackle crucial empirical questions the explanation of foreign direct investment the multinational firm and the globalization of business it ends by considering the future research agenda

learning and price discovery in a search market we introduce learning into an otherwise standard two sided search and bargaining market there is uncertainty about the price distribution due to uncertainty about an underlying exogenous state of relative demand in the high state buyers are on the long side otherwise they are on the short side in equilibrium prices are on average higher in the high state individual agents learn about the distribution while searching agents typically start out by experimenting with a tough bargaining position buyers may initially insist on a low price and sellers on a high price after successive failures to trade agents become increasingly pessimistic about the market conditions and soften their bargaining stance when frictions are small equilibrium transaction prices are approximately market clearing despite aggregate demand being unknown thus the search and bargaining procedure enables price discovery in a decentralized market

globalization and ngos transforming business government and society journal of international business studies 2004 35 564 566 doi 10 1057 palgrave jibs 8400114 it is both easy and hard to define something by what it is not ngos by their title are non governmental organizations in other words all organizations that are not governments that is the easy definition the problem is that ngos by this definition include everything but the proverbial kitchen sink that is private firms religious and charitable organizations universities advocacy groups newspapers and other media and so on doh and teegen s book globalization and ngos transforming business government and society is designed to reduce this open endedness by focusing on what ngos are rather than what they are not the book has three cross cutting themes what are ngos how and why they differ from governments and firms and how they operate in the global economy fit within societies and influence other organizations there are 10 chapters in the book which explore the rise of ngos and their impacts on governments and firms several nice case studies are included global climate change world wildlife fund genetically modified organisms trade policy and forestry the conclusions chapter sums up and provides a research agenda jone pearce in her forward to the book defines ngos as the name given to those nonprofit associations focused on social change via political influence or to those providing social and humanitarian services in highly politicized cross national contexts p xi doh and teegen in their conclusion chapter define ngos as organizations of individuals and donors committed to the promotion of a particular set of issue s through advocacy work and or through operational activities whereby services are delivered pp 206 207 ngos are seen as one of three key actors in the global economy together with governments and firms ngos not only have their own dyadic relationships with the other two actors but also mediate and moderate the business government dyad doh and teegen argue that ngos are agents for change in the global economy therefore scholars and practitioners need to focus more on understanding which ngos matter how firms and governments should best engage ngos and how ngos can play a more definitive role on supranational issues that the public and private sectors have failed to address journal of international business studies 2004 35 564 566 2004 palgrave macmillan ltd all rights reserved 0047 2506 30 00

are firms with foreign ceos better citizens a study of the impact of ceo foreignness on corporate social performance this study examines whether firms corporate social performance csp varies when local firms have foreign ceos building on the social identity perspective we argue that because foreign ceos are perceived as outgroup or nonprototypical leaders by the local firms stakeholders local firms with foreign ceos need to achieve a higher level of csp than do local firms with local ceos to enhance their legitimacy and trustworthiness furthermore we propose that the predicted difference in csp between foreign and local ceo led firms will be larger a for more authentic and thus trust enhancing csr activities and b in those socio economic environments where the salience of ceo foreignness and thus the need to build trustworthiness with locals is more pronounced in a sample of 1001 local firms across 18 developed countries during the period between 2003 and 2015 our empirical results support most of our predictions

taboo or technical issue an empirical assessment of taxation in sustainability reports abstract prior literature offers mixed evidence on the existence of a link between corporate taxation and corporate social responsibility csr this article contributes to this debate by examining the level of tax disclosure in sustainability reports by firms listed in the united states the united kingdom and germany from 2007 to 2012 the aim is to offer micro level evidence of whether firms themselves perceive corporate tax payments as being part of their csr on the basis of a hand collected 540 firm year dataset of ninety publicly listed firms the article shows that the level of tax disclosure was rather low however it did increase over time and was most prevalent in the united kingdom moreover the reports indicate considerable variation in attitudes toward taxation overall the widespread silence on tax issues and a non uniform treatment of taxation in sustainability reports underline the complex role of tax payments when it comes to csr examination of determinants of disclosure shows that firms with lower effective tax rates negative media coverage in tax matters and industry specific stakeholder pressure were generally more inclined to disclose tax information which is in line with predictions based on stakeholder and legitimacy theory finally the article discusses the importance of cultural and social norms when it comes to tax related sustainability reporting and provides theoretical as well as regulatory implications

factors influencing voluntary annual report disclosures by u s u k and continental european multinational corporations this study examines factors influencing the voluntary disclosures of three types of information strategic nonfinancial financial contained in the annual reports of mncs from the u s u k and continental europe while company size country region listing status and to a lesser extent industry are the most important factors explaining voluntary disclosures overall the importance of the factors varies by information type

a decentralized market with common values uncertainty non steady states we analyse a market where i trade proceeds by random and anonymous pairwise meetings with bargaining ii agents are asymmetrically informed about the value of the traded good and iii no new entrants are allowed once the market is open we show that information revelation and efficiency never obtain in equilibrium even as discounting is removed this holds whether the asymmetry is two sided or one sided in some cases there exist equilibria where a substantial amount goes untraded this contrasts with the earlier literature which was based on the steadystate equilibria of a model where agents enter the market every period

information revelation in a market with pairwise meetings the paper presents a simple pairwise meetings model of trade the new feature is that agents have asymmetric information about the true state of the world the focus is on the transmission of the information through the process of trade the qualitative question is to what extent is the information revealed to uninformed agents through the trading process when the market is in some sense frictionless in particular does the decentralized process give rise to full revelation results as derived by the literature on rational expectations for centralized and competitive environments in the context of the model of this paper it turns out that the information is not fully revealed to uninformed agents even when the market is in some sense approximately frictionless

an introduction to the theory of rational expectations under asymmetric information every good economics textbook contains the cliche that market prices provide signals which facilitate the allocation of resources to their best use in a world not subject to random shocks consumers and producers when faced with competitive prices need look no further than their own preferences or production technology to be able to make a decision they need give no thought to the tastes endowments or technology of other agents however in a world subject to random shocks this is no longer the case agents are faced with the problem of forecasting future states of nature and more importantly of forecasting the impact of these states on the actions of other agents rational expectations theories provide a model of how agents make those forecasts in a world subject to random shocks it will be the case that agents acquire or at least attempt to acquire information about the future realization of the shocks it will in general be the case that different agents have access to different information the fact that information is dispersed throughout the economy has the potential to cause a misallocation of resources relative to what would be the case if all agents knew everything an efficient allocation of resources will in general require the transfer of information from consumers who have some information about their future demands to producers who can take current actions to mitigate avoidable scarcities or surpluses though many classical and neo classical writers emphasize the informational role of prices the standard marshallian or walrasian model of competitive equilibrium does not involve prices transferring information across traders the purpose of this paper is to show that rational expectations models are radically different from walrasian models in an economy where traders have diverse information this is demonstrated by showing that unlike what occurs in a walrasian equilibrium of an economy with heterogeneous information if there is a complete set of insurance markets and utility is additively separable over time then there exists a rational expectations equilibrium which gives consumers the same allocation as if each consumer has access to all of the economy s information this implies that under the above assumptions a central planner with all the economy s information could not pareto dominate the competitive allocation achieved when traders have diverse information and rational expectations this paper makes no attempt to survey the literature on rational expectations the reader is referred to shiller 1978 barro 1981 for a survey of macroeconomics and rational expectations and radner 1980 for a survey of the microeconomics and mathematical theory of rational expectations this paper will however try to outline the evolution of the rational expectations concept from a notion of optimal forecasting to a virtually complete departure from the walrasian model of equilibrium the rest of this section is devoted to a discussion of pre rational expectations ideas

the ethical foundations of responsible investment in the area of investment responsibility may be expressed via four types of ethical concern value based ethics resulting in the exclusion of so called vicious companies from the investment portfolio fructification oriented ethics with a view to long term investment consequence based ethics aimed at initiating a behavioural change in the investment target and ethics envisaged as a discriminating criterion in the search of the best financial performance no single formula of responsible investment is available and the responsible approach necessarily implies the active involvement of a free acting subject striving to tackle fundamental ethical issues the practice of responsible investment cannot be reduced to simply applying a particular legal rule or mathematical formula

information percolation in large markets we introduce a simple model of the percolation of information of common interest through a large market as agents encounter each other over time and reveal information to each other some of which they may have received earlier from other agents we are particularly interested in the evolution over time of the cross sectional distribution in the population of the posterior probability assignments of the various agents we provide a market example based on privately held auctions and obtain a relatively explicit solution for the cross sectional distribution of posterior beliefs at each time our results contribute to the literature on information transmission in markets hayek 1945 argues that markets allow information that is dispersed in a population to be revealed through prices grossman s 1981 notion of a rational expectations equilibrium formalizes this idea in a setting with price taking agents milgrom 1981 pesendorfer and swinkels 1997 and reny and perry 2006 provide strategic foundations for the rational expectations equilibrium concept in centralized markets a number of important markets however are decentralized these include over the counter markets and private auction markets wolinsky 1990 and blouin and serrano 2002 study information transmission in decentralized markets in contrast to these two papers equilibrium behavior in our market example leads to full revelation of information we happily acknowledge conversations with manuel amador frank kelly jeremy stein and pierre olivier weill and research assistance from sergey lobanov rubinstein and wolinsky 1985 and gale 1986a 1986b study decentralized markets without asymmetric information satterthwaite and shneyerov 2003 study decentralized market with private value asymmetric information amador and weill 2006 study a more abstract setting regarding transmission of common and private i nformation

decentralized trading with private information the paper studies how asset prices are determined in a decentralized market with asymmetric information about asset values we consider an economy in which a large number of agents trade two assets in bilateral meetings a fraction of the agents has private information about the asset values we show that over time uninformed agents can elicit information from their trading partners by making small offers this form of experimentation allows the uninformed agents to acquire information as long as there are potential gains from trade in the economy as a consequence the economy converges to a pareto efficient allocation

corporate social responsibility in europe and the u s insights from businesses self presentations the paper compares the extent and content of businesses communications about corporate social responsibility csr in france the netherlands the u k and the u s in particular the study investigates the nature of csr principles processes and stakeholder issues discussed in web pages the results show that businesses in the four countries do not display the same eagerness to appear as socially responsible and employ diverse means to convey social responsibility images

determinants of social disclosure quality in taiwan an application of stakeholder theory this study adopts a stakeholder theory framework to examine determinants of social reporting quality and empirically test the ability of the theory to explain disclosure quality in an emerging economy using a sample of 246 listed companies and a hand collected dataset that included 2 years of data based on survey questions reflecting international disclosure trends we apply an aggregate measure of quality with five facets to a variety of corporate social responsibility areas the results support the application and demonstrate that measures of stakeholder power strategic posture economic resources firm size and media visibility are related to social disclosure quality this paper adds to the scarce evidence on social reporting in taiwan and provides a useful method for evaluating disclosure quality it also illustrates the impact of two dominant foreign stakeholder groups on social disclosures in taiwan 1 organizational buyers in the global supply chain and 2 listing and social rating agencies in international capital markets

experiments on percolation of information in dark markets in dark markets order submissions are bilateral and transaction prices are known only to the trading counterparties here we study to what extent the information aggregation theory proposed by duffie and collaborators predicts outcomes in a laboratory version of such markets we find that prices aggregate the available information but not in the strict sense of the theory where prices converge exponentially fast to average private signals prices instead fluctuate within bands around this average the band widths reflect in the best case the precision of the average signal and otherwise the precision of a single private signal

do corporate codes of ethics reflect national character evidence from europe and the united states this paper analyses the usage and contents of corporate codes of ethics the results from a sample of 600 large european companies are contrasted with findings reported for similar u s firms the comparison reveals that significantly fewer european than u s firms adopted codes of ethics in europe the large majority of codes have been introduced only very recently and there are indications that codes made their way into europe via subsidiaries of u s firms however there are striking differences in content between u s and european codes of ethics pointing to the existence of a distinctly european approach to codifying ethics

the relationship between disclosures of corporate social performance and financial performance evidences from gri reports in manufacturing industry whether the corporate social performance affects the financial performance is still unclear in many manufacturing companies we commonly expect on one side that profitable corporations have stronger incentives to reveal information on the social performance in order to improve their publicity on the other hand companies may face the fear of rising costs due to corporate social responsibility csr activities with increasing concerns of csr it is timely to investigate the relationship between the disclosure of corporate social performance and the financial performance in this paper with the above study objective we use global reporting initiative gri reports of 75 sample companies collect evidences by applying the method of structured content analysis of the cases and attempt to identify this relationship the corporate social performance is measured by the indicators according to the gri guidelines i e within the categories of labor practices and decent work human rights society as well as product responsibility financial performance is measured by return on equity sales growth and cash flow sales ratio using statistical evaluation methods our results indicate that the categories of human rights society as well as product responsibility display a significant and positive correlation with the return on equity same conclusion also holds for many csr indicators nevertheless when examining the csr practices across different manufacturing sectors we have not observed significant differences the study results are important for understanding the development and implementation of csr practices in the manufacturing industry