production lot sizing and carbon emissions under cap and trade and carbon tax regulations cap and trade and carbon tax are two emission regulations widely used to curb the carbon emissions generated from firms based on economic order quantity eoq model this paper examines the production lot sizing issues of a firm under these two regulations respectively the optimal lot size and emissions under the two regulations are achieved we then investigate the impacts of production and regulation parameters on the optimal lot size and emissions furthermore we compare the firm s optimal carbon emissions under the two regulations it is found that under the cap and trade regulation the firm s decisions of the optimal emissions as well as permits trading depend on the differentiated permits trading prices if setup incurs the same cost as holding incurs per unit of generated emissions both regulations always lead to the same optimal emissions which is also equal to that without emission regulation otherwise neither regulation always leads to lower emissions than the other does

real estate agents in ghana a suitable case for regulation obeng odoom f real estate agents in ghana a suitable case for regulation regional studies this paper uses a qualitative approach to examine whether regulation would improve the effectiveness of the ghanaian estate agency market interviews with landlords estate agents clients and officials of the rent control department suggest that 1 most so called problems with unlicensed agents are actually landlord related problems 2 there is a camaraderie relationship between unlicensed agents and their clients which effectively provides a licence against fraud and 3 regulation would exacerbate unemployment and increase agency fees for these reasons regulation in general may not be in the public interest alternative ways of improving effectiveness in the ghanaian estate agency market are recommended obeng odoom f les agents immobiliers au ghana est ce qu il y a de bonnes raisons pour les reguler regional studies cet article emploie une facon qualitative afin d examiner si oui ou non la re

on inventory control of product recovery systems subject to environmental mechanisms abstract the aim of this paper is to study the impact of inventory control in reducing the carbon footprint of an organization through a stochastic inventory model our research extends the traditional minimization cost problem by incorporating environmental legislation we consider a finite horizon closed loop system whereby decisions are subject to an emissions trading scheme and to random demand and returns demand can be satisfied by two sources the primary source is environmentally friendly but expensive whereas the second is cost effective but with negative environmental consequences the problem is formulated as a stochastic dynamic problem where replenishment and carbon management decisions must be made at each period the objective is to describe how replenishment and carbon management strategies are affected by environmental constraints in particular considering the computation restriction of dynamic programming in order to extend the results we propose a genetic algorithm to find near optimal solutions for larger instances a sensitivity analysis is performed to identify the impact of carbon allowance prices emission cap and other environmental factors in the decision making process the results indicate that environmental strategies and their factors have an impact on replenishment decisions there is an emission cap from which a company must focus on strategic decisions rather than on tactical and operational decisions in addition if the carbon allowance price is such that the environmental benefit absorbs the cost of less polluting technology a change in the inventory policy must be made

productivity growth of newly industrializing economies in heterogeneous capital goods markets the case of the korean machinery and equipment industry although many previous studies have investigated the economic growth of east asian countries from the perspective of productivity growth they have adopted a limited focus only on the national level or on the aggregated level and have overlooked the heterogeneity at the disaggregated level furthermore only a few studies have examined the sources of the remarkable growth and trade performance of the korean machinery and equipment industry despite its importance for sustainable growth of national economy therefore we investigated the total factor productivity growth tfpg of the korean machinery and equipment industry and its 12 sub sectors from 1970 to 2012 using the stochastic frontier production approach as a result we found that the industry has achieved labour input driven tfpg largely due to technical progress this is contrary to the previous result that east asia has expanded the production frontier by capital accumulation in contrast in some sub sectors scale effect and allocation effici

small manufacturing enterprises in developing countries emphasis is often placed on the promotion of small enterprises in developing countries particularly as a means of improving the lot of unskilled workers this focus raises questions about the relationship between establishment size and the pattern and efficiency of factor use and about the nature and effects of price differentials in factor markets this article goes some way toward answering these questions with data from surveys of small manufacturing enterprises in india and colombia sponsored by the world bank and relevant material from other countries the article also examines india s long standing policy unusual among developing countries of providing special support and protection for small enterprises analyses based on disaggregated data found that small firms are not reliably more labor intensive than their larger counterparts nor are they consistently more technically efficient in their use of resources in light of these findings and an analysis of factor markets this article discusses the general implications of the research results for industrial policy in developing countries

market performance in an open developing economy technical and allocative efficiencies of korean industries this paper first examines determinants of technical efficiency in terms of competition and government regulation including protection in korean industries relying heavily upon the concepts of x efficiency and rentseeking activities allocative efficiency measured as profitability is then considered with technical efficiency as a determinant the outcome of the regression shows that both the sheltering of industries from international competition and the financial market distortions strongly affect technical efficiency and that technical efficiency as well as effective protection rate are important determinants of profitability

a survey of agricultural household models recent findings and policy implications semicommercial farms that produce multiple crops make up a large part of the agricultural sector in developing economies these farms or agricultural households combine two fundamental units of microeconomic analysis the household and the firm traditional economic theory has dealt with these units seperately but in developing economies in which peasant farms dominate their interdependence is of crucial importance researchers have developed models of agricultural households that combine producer and consumer behavior in a theoretically consistent fashion recent empirical applications of these models have extended them and expanded the range of policy issues which can be investigated using this general framework this article reports the results of empirical applications of this model in india indonesia japan the republic of korea malaysia nigeria senegal sierra leone taiwan and thailand it provides a comparative analysis of the policy implications of the approach for such matters as the welfare of farm households the size of marketed surplus the demand for nonagricultural goods and services and for hired labor and the availability of budget revenues and foreign exchange

entrepreneurship selection and performance a meta analysis of the impact of education in developing economies this meta analytical review of empirical studies of the impact of schooling on entrepreneurship in selection and performance in developing economies looks at variations impact across specific characteristics of the studies a marginal year of schooling in developing economies raises enterprise income by an average of 5 5 percent which is close to the average return in industrial countries the return varies however by gender rural or urban residence and the share of agriculture in the economy furthermore more educated workers typically end up in wage employment and prefer nonfarm entrepreneurship to farming the education effect that separates workers into self employment and wage employment is stronger for women possibly stronger in urban areas and also stronger in the least developed economies where agriculture is more dominant and literacy rates are lower

the impact of subsidies on x efficiency in ldc industry theory and an empirical test the x inefficiency costs of protection and industrial concentration have been topics of considerable interest in the literature on economic development balassa 1975 and bergsman 1974 for example have argued that protection by increasing x inefficiency generates a major welfare cost which is not captured by traditional costs of protection calculations and white 1976 has examined the relationship between inappropriate factor intensities which he associates with xinefficiency and industrial concentration the common theme which emerges from each of these studies is that public policy can have a major impact on economic performance not only by influencing factor proportions but also by influencing the intensity with which a non measurable input x efficiency is employed despite the intuitive appeal of the x efficiency concept there have been very few empirical tests of this hypothesis this partly reflects the imprecise nature of the basic concept but also the lack of adequate micro economic data x efficiency clearly relates to efficiency within firms so that the most appropriate tests would rely on data on firm level efficiency in this paper we propose a direct test of the x efficiency hypothesis using firm level data we build on previous work by corden 1970 1974 and martin 1978 who showed how to model x efficiency effects using the concept of managerial leisure we extend these simple models of managerial behavior emphasizing the role of the external managerial labor market the model is then used to explore the relationship between changes in public policy managerial effort and x inefficiency certain predictions of the model are tested using cross section data from a survey of firms in two subsidized industries in ghana efficiency indices are computed on the basis of a translog frontier production function variations in relative efficiency are then correlated with several explanatory variables including the presence or absence of subsidy payments to the firm subsidized firms in both industries are found to exhibit higher relative levels of x inefficiency

reducing emissions in transportation and inventory management r q policy with considerations of carbon reduction abstract in this study we examine three approaches on the effects of controlling carbon emissions in transportation and inventory management a business as usual scenario model bausm which delineates how carbon footprints from inventory storage and related transportation are captured is firstly developed as the benchmark model based on bausm we then develop three models with different carbon reduction approaches the first one is constructed by adding a constraint to represent the percentage target of emission reduction the second one integrates carbon taxes or cap and trade scheme into inventory management and the last one takes both reduction target and carbon offset opportunities into account our work provides new analytical models which integrate cost and emissions in transportation and storage under the framework of continuous inventory review r q policy for stochastic demand optimization algorithms are developed for solving models and related properties are investigated to examine the effects of carbon reduction and associated costs of three models the policy implications of the models are examined and discussed to provide insights for reference of the practitioners and the policy makers

measuring hotel performance toward more rigorous evidence in both scope and methods abstract this paper extends the literature on hotel performance in both scope and methods we introduce a model that accounts for heterogeneity in a flexible way and allows for the measurement of both efficiency and productivity the model also accounts for the endogeneity problem in inputs and the issue of unobserved prices we use a large sample of hotel companies that spreads across multiple geographical regions and locations and accounts for some interesting and key determinants of hotel performance we provide more validation to some contradictory findings in the literature we show that large hotels do not necessarily outperform small hotels and that hotel efficiency differs based on location geographical region and type of service the results further indicate that productivity growth is not a driving force in the industry

multi product inventory model for cold items with cost and emission consideration while sharing storage and transportation units is common for many product types cold items usually have different temperature requirements and as a result not all items can share a holding transportation unit consequently the type of products and their compatibility with other products needs to be considered in the inventory model in this paper we propose multi product inventory models for cold items the models determine the inventory levels that minimize either the cost or carbon equivalent emissions we model the compatibility of items as a constraint in the inventory model to solve the model we first find an appropriate family of products that can share a storage transportation unit then for each family of products we develop an approximate solution method to determine the order quantity of each product within a family numerical experiments demonstrate the solution procedure and provide managerial insights into cold item inventory policies

non stationary stochastic inventory lot sizing with emission and service level constraints in a carbon cap and trade system firms worldwide are taking major initiatives to reduce the carbon footprint of their supply chains in response to the growing governmental and consumer pressures in real life these supply chains face stochastic and non stationary demand but most of the studies on inventory lot sizing problem with emission concerns consider deterministic demand in this paper we study the inventory lot sizing problem under non stationary stochastic demand condition with emission and cycle service level constraints considering carbon cap and trade regulatory mechanism using a mixed integer linear programming model this paper aims to investigate the effects of emission parameters product and system related features on the supply chain performance through extensive computational experiments to cover general type business settings and not a specific scenario results show that cycle service level and demand coefficient of variation have significant impacts on total cost and emission irrespective of level of demand variability while the impact of product s demand pattern is significant only at lower level of demand variability finally results also show that increasing value of carbon price reduces total cost total emission and total inventory and the scope of emission reduction by increasing carbon price is greater at higher levels of cycle service level and demand coefficient of variation the analysis of results helps supply chain managers to take right decision in different demand and service level situations

rent seeking behaviour and its economic costs in urban land transactions in accra ghana the existing body of knowledge attributes to informal land transactions in sub saharan african cities observed problems in city neighbourhoods substantial resources often backed by donor agencies are therefore being spent in revamping bureaux and governmental bodies in a bid to solve the problems this paper examines the economic impacts of this aspect of market intervention employing insights from rent seeking theory it estimates costs brought to bear on agents by government agencies involvement in the urban land market of accra ghana the sum of these wasteful diversions of resources is found to explain a great deal of the haphazard developments that have come to characterise many neighbourhoods in the city market led regulation emerges as the needed focus of future land policy and management strategy towards this the paper calls for the removal of existing unwarranted market interventions and the reorganisation of responsible bureaux in ways that would induce them to operate efficiently

carbon emissions and energy effects on a two level manufacturer retailer closed loop supply chain model with remanufacturing subject to different coordination mechanisms abstract this paper presents two models classical and vmi cs coordination for a two level closed loop supply chain with a manufacturer and a retailer with a facility to remanufacture used items the paper considers three critical environmental issues which are the energy used in production manufacturing and remanufacturing processes ghg emissions from production and transportation activities subject to a penalty tax and the number of times to remanufacture recover a used item numerical results show that the traditional optimization approach which minimises the sum of inventory related costs suggested less remanufacturing fewer recovery times and more ghg emissions and energy usage a result of operating at high production rates the vmi cs model was shown to be more economical than the classical model for a wide range of manufacturing rates but not necessarily a more environmentally responsible choice an extensive numerical analysis was conducted to enrich the discussion and to draw some managerial insights on how to make environmentally conscious decisions

sustainable economic production quantity models for inventory systems with shortage abstract recently new economic order production quantity models have shifted away from focusing only on economic issues and towards combined economic environmental concerns because of sustainable development goals despite this shift only a few works have addressed sustainable economic production quantity epq the theoretical sustainable eoq and epq models are basic models that ignore many real life conditions such as the possibility of stock out in inventory systems in this paper we develop four new sustainable economic production quantity models that consider different shortage situations to find optimal values of inventory system variables we solve four independent profit maximization problems for four different situations these proposed models include a basic model in which shortages are not allowed and when shortages are allowed the lost sale full backordering and partial backordering models can be selected by operations managers depending on the manufacturer s motivation to improve service levels we have also proposed an algorithm for determining optimum values of the decision variables for these sustainable economic production quantity models finally the formulated models are explained with some different examples and the obtained results have been analyzed and discussed these results show that the sustainable economic production quantity with partial backordering model is a general and more realistic model that can be used in many real cases with a reasonable profit amount compared with the three other proposed models

customer regulatory and competitive pressure as drivers of environmental innovation we develop an economic analysis in order to examine the effects of consumer regulatory and competitive pressure on firm investments in environmentally friendly production specifically we ask why do firms vary in their levels of environmental innovation under what conditions are such pressures effective in bringing about environmental innovation we first consider a monopolist who faces the twin pressures of reduced customer demand and regulatory penalties as a result of its emissions in response to these pressures the firm has the opportunity to make a costly investment in reduction of emissions secondly we consider a competitive scenario in which two firms compete for environmentally sensitive customers solving our model we find that pressure has the intended effect as long as the firm s initial level of emissions is below a certain threshold if the emissions are above this threshold we find that pressure might have an adverse effect on the firm s environmental investment and that subsidies that support environmental innovation can be a better alternative we also show that competition over environmentally sensitive customers can improve the effectiveness of environmental pressures

inventory management under joint product recovery and cap and trade constraints abstract the influence of environmental legislation in inventory control policies is explored previous work on product recovery is extended using the introduction of a cap and trade mechanism in an infinite horizon inventory system in which demand and returns are uncertain demand is met through two different sources namely manufacturing and remanufacturing which differ in cost and greenhouse gas emissions the main contributions of this paper are 1 comparison of system operation in terms of cost and environmental performance under conventional and green inventory policies and 2 managerial insights into the structure of green inventory policies to illustrate the impact of a cap and trade scheme a numerical example is used we solved the problem as a markov decision process and characterized the inventory policies based on the optimal replenishment strategy we also conducted a sensitivity analysis to examine the effect of underlying environmental parameters such as the emission cap and the allowance price in the policy structures the results indicate that decisions are sensitive to carbon prices the inventory policy could play an important role in compliance with environmental legislation although there is threshold carbon price beyond which the company must focus on strategic decisions rather than tactical decisions

perspectives on the sources of heterogeneity in indian industry abstract this paper examines technical efficiency variation across four industrial sectors in india using a stochastic production frontier technique the results obtained are comparable to technical efficiency distribution patterns obtained in other countries heterogeneity in firm level efficiency is examined against internal firm level and external industry and location characteristics the results suggest that managerial effectiveness significantly influences efficiency and that there are considerable benefits deriving from location within established industrial clusters for particular industries the methodology and findings indicate that the study of industry specific technical efficiency patterns is a useful analytic tool for tracking firm response to ongoing liberalization

delay in payments a strategy to reduce carbon emissions from supply chains abstract the purpose of this paper is to study the effects of various scenarios of delay in payments a form of trade credit by a buyer after receiving items while including various costs such as fuel cost the costs of carbon emissions from manufacturing and transportation activities order cost and setup cost in a two echelon coordinated supply chain the model developed optimizes the environmental and economic performance of a supply chain the study presents a comparison of different scenarios through numerical examples and sensitivity analyses the main contribution of this paper is the joint consideration of delays in payments and the costs of transportation cost and carbon emissions the model has been tested with numerical examples and sensitivity analyses the findings showed that adopting delays in payments improves both environmental and economic performance of a supply chain the analyses also showed that optimizing one of the parameters from the production rate the length of delay in payments or the lot size provides the optimal solution for carbon emissions and the system cost of a supply chain this flexibility makes the model easy to use by practitioners

productivity and technical choice applications to the textile industry abstract this paper analyzes past choices of technology and present levels of productivity in the philippines cotton spinning and weaving industries detailed engineering and economic information are used to assess the costs of alternative technologies to estimate levels of productivity relative to international standards of best practice and to analyze the sources of productivity short falls high costs of production are due both to inappropriate technological choices and to low productivity in the use of the technologies chosen the major sources of low productivity are lack of sufficient firm level specialization among product varieties and deficient firm level technological capabilities inadequate labor skills are not a major problem the discussion emphasizes the general applicability of the analysis wherever low productivity is likely to be a problem

firm size and export behaviour an indian case study in the context of indian industry this article argues that in the presence of capital market imperfections and sub optimal contractual arrangements small firms face higher transaction or selling costs in the domestic market one of the strategic responses by small firms towards overcoming the mobility barriers imposed by high transaction costs in the domestic market is to break into the competitive world market small firms that could realise a critical level of production efficiency and possible information externalities that arise through inter firm linkages might be the ones that could succeed in exports the empirical observations derived from the analysis of firm level survey data provide reasonable support to the main arguments

small enterprise and firm level technical efficiency in the indonesian garment industry this paper examines technical efficieny in the indonesian garment industry based on the country s 1986 census of small industry drawing on a sample of 2250 firms our analysis suggests that inter firm variations in efficiency are very considerable the paper then investigates the correlates of these variations finding in particular a positive correlation between technical efficiency and each of export orientation financial integration and female participation in the workforce it is also found that there is a significant level of labour capital substitution in the industry

supplier selection order allocation a two stage multiple criteria dynamic programming approach this paper proposes a two stage multiple criteria dynamic programming approach for two of the most critical tasks in supply chain management namely supplier selection and order allocation in the first stage to address multiple decision criteria in supplier ranking the analytic hierarchy process ahp is employed in the second stage supplier ranks are fed into an order allocation model that aims at maximizing a utility function for the firm as well as minimizing the total supply chain costs subject to constraints on demand capacity and inventory levels a dynamic programming approach is crafted to solve the proposed bi objective model

the carbon constrained eoq model with carbon emission dependent demand abstract currently companies are looking for solutions to reduce carbon emissions associated with their operations operational adjustments such as modifications in batch sizes or order quantities have proven to be an effective way to decrease emissions in this paper a novel model is proposed that takes into account the link between an inventory policy eoq total carbon emissions and both price and environmental dependent demands in the case of an exogenous price two optimal quantities are determined which maximize a retailer s profit and which minimize carbon emissions conditions that allow a company to maximize profit while minimizing emissions and mechanisms that allow a firm to maximize its profit and to decrease its carbon emissions are determined in the case of an endogenous price some empirical results are also discussed when a firm optimizes its profit through both its selling price and its order quantity some experiments match empirical observations on the one hand an environmental strategy is more significant for cheaper and green labeled products on the other hand a public mechanism such as a carbon tax will decrease total and marginal emissions

organizational economics and institutions as missing elements in economic development analysis abstract the main objective of this paper is to apply x efficiency theory to the analysis of organizations and state enterprises with special reference to developing countries in particular the black box relating to the internal operation of organizations is opened up to understand better the decision mechanisms operating within firms and institutions intrafirm conventions are explored as they relate to the impact of external and internal pressures on the decision making process implications are drawn to improve the internal efficiency of institutions in developing countries

revenue erosion through exemption and evasion in cameroon 1993 abstract the administration of tax statutes materially determines their economic effects a survey of cameroonian businesses a country seemingly typical of its economic level demonstrates widespread erosion of the tax bases paid by businesses through exemptions and evasion businesses seem willing to provide information on these potentially confidential activities the survey provides information on the number of businesses evading taxes or having exemptions on the characteristics of these businesses relative to others on whether businesses maintain information of use to the tax administration on the contacts between the administration and businesses affecting evasion and on penalties imposed by the administration

haulage sharing approach to achieve sustainability in material purchasing new method and numerical applications abstract transportation costs are becoming increasingly important in inventory replenishment decisions and in practice lot sizing decisions are strongly affected by material handling equipment transportation flow paths vehicle capacities and technical constraints companies within a global sourcing context daily experience the cost of transportation as playing a major role in total purchasing costs on the other hand sustainability issues are always more urgent and environmental impact assessment is becoming a key requirement for materials purchasing and transportation choices this work is particularly focusing on an interesting new area of research the haulage sharing in freight transportation when sustainability considerations are taken into account the paper develops and discusses a new haulage sharing lot sizing model in which two partners are cooperating in sharing transportation paths and handling units a three step methodology based on multi objective optimization approach is here proposed to permit the complete evaluation of the costs and savings that arise with an horizontal cooperation the method is described here and applied to two different numerical cases in order to drive useful conclusions and discuss future research steps

in pursuit of monopoly power recent quantitative work in industrial economics this paper reviews empirical work in industrial organization devoted to the question of inferring the existence of monopoly power from data on observed market outcomes like profits and prices the discussion covers inter industry work long conventional in the area newer developments in intra industry analysis and case studies and concludes with some remarks on a small but growing body of work assessing market dynamics the wide range of studies reviewed all generally reveal that market power exists in many industries

privatization technical efficiency and welfare consequences the case of the cote d ivoire electricity company cie abstract in 1990 cote d ivoire privatized the management of its electric power company lease contracting in this paper we are interested in identifying the economic effect of this institutional change by estimating a stochastic production frontier we have found that productive efficiency improved after privatization thanks to organizational innovations total factor productivity gains have been closely associated with a cost reduction strategy the way these gains have been distributed in a monopoly context suggests that consumers have been the main beneficiaries through a significant decrease of the relative price of electricity

technical efficiency measurement within the manufacturing sector in cote d ivoire a stochastic frontier approach this article analyses the productive performance in four manufacturing sectors of the ivorian economy textiles and garments metal products food processing wood and furniture to appraise the productive performance econometric production frontier models are estimated illustrating the maximum output attainable from a given quantity of inputs the frontier and firm efficiency scores are derived from stochastic production functions estimated on cross sectional data the stochastic specification of the models allows for the decomposition of the error term into two components one the normal random effect and the other to account for technical inefficiency that we explain by various exogenous variables describing the economic and institutional environment firm size proves to be a statistically significant determinant of the productive performance across the four sectors the positive impact of being large compensates the negative effect of a formal institutional status in an environment where government

how many parts to make at once reprinted from factory the magazine of management volume 10 number 2 february 1913 pp 135 136 152 interest on capital tied up in wages material and overhead sets a maximum limit to the quantity of parts which can be profitably manufactured at one time set up costs on the job fix the minimum experience has shown one manager a way to determine the economical size of lots

mean downside risk and mean variance newsvendor models implications for sustainable fashion retailing abstract newsvendor models have been well established for studying supply chain management problems with fashionable products in this paper we explore the mean downside risk mdr and mean variance mv newsvendor models under both the exogenous and endogenous retail price decision cases we first construct analytical models with the mdr and mv objectives we then show that the analytical solution schemes for both the mdr and mv problems are the same with the measures for sustainability such as the expected quantity of goods leftover the expected sales to expected goods leftover ratio the rate of return on investment and the probability of achieving a pre determined profit target we proceed to compare the levels of sustainability by the fashion retailers which employ the mean risk and the risk neutral models insights are generated

including sustainability criteria into inventory models research on sustainability performance has considerably enriched operations management literature in recent years however work with quantitative models is still scarce this paper contributes by revisiting classical inventory methods taking sustainability concerns into account we believe that reducing all aspects of sustainable development to a single objective is not desirable we thus reformulate the classical economic order quantity model as a multiobjective problem we refer to this model as the sustainable order quantity model then a multi echelon extension of the sustainable order quantity model is studied for both models the set of efficient solutions pareto optimal solutions is analytically characterized these results are used to provide some insights about the effectiveness of different regulatory policies to control carbon emissions we also use an interactive procedure that allows the decision maker to quickly identify the best option among these solutions the proposed interactive procedure is a new combination of multi criteria decision analysis techniques

a century of evolution from harris s basic lot size model survey and research agenda abstract determining the economic lot size has always represented one of the most important issues in production planning this problem has long attracted the attention of researchers and several models have been developed to meet requirements at minimum cost in this paper we explore and discuss the evolution of these models during one hundred years of history starting from the basic model developed by harris in 1913 up to today following harris s work a number of researchers have devised extensions that incorporate additional considerations the evolution of eoq theory strongly reflects the development of industrial systems over the past century here we outline all the research areas faced in the past by conducting a holistic analysis of 219 selected journal papers and trying to give a comprehensive view of past work on the eoq problem finally a new research agenda is proposed and discussed

political violence and farm household efficiency in colombia abstract this article estimates farm household levels of technical efficiency and their determinants in colombia with particular reference to political violence i e guerrilla fronts homicides kidnappings and forced population displacements an input oriented stochastic frontier is estimated simultaneously with a technical inefficiency model that incorporates an index of political violence at the local level using survey data from 822 farm households the findings show that household productivity is lower in areas with high political violence due mainly to disruptions in rural labor markets and in the operation of large farms should political violence be eliminated the ensuing increases in the farrell s technical efficiency indexes of farm households in the sample would increase substantially pointing to significant peace dividends for rural households in colombia

a sustainable production inventory model for a controllable carbon emissions rate under shortages abstract carbon emissions are the key factor of global warming nowadays some countries have focused on reducing carbon emission carbon tax and cap policies are the key mechanism utilized in many countries to achieve this keeping this issue in mind a sustainable economic production quantity sepq carbon tax and cap model has considered for a controllable carbon emissions rate by investing in green technology gt efforts under different with and without shortage situations this study has three models a a sustainable economic production quantity carbon tax and cap model with no shortages b a sustainable economic production quantity carbon tax and cap with partial backordering and c a sustainable economic production quantity carbon tax and cap with full backordering with and without green technology investment a solution methodology has been proposed for determining the optimal strategies of cycle time green technology investment and the fraction period length in positive inventory level several numerical examples have studied to validate the sustainable economic production quantity models the results of this paper are a sustainable economic production quantity carbon tax and cap partial backlogging case has a better justifiable profit with the highest cycle time and the lowest value of the fraction length period as well as the lower green technology investment cost compared with other models finally sensitivity analysis has provided with the managerial implication of the optimal feasible solution with respect to some key parameters

rates of return on physical and human capital in africa s manufacturing sector in this paper two sets of issues are addressed using panel data from the manufacturing sector of five african countries first how high are the returns to human relative to physical capital second what is the relative importance of technology and endowments of human and physical capital in determining differences in earnings and productivity across the countries evidence from earnings functions shows that the private returns to both experience and education rise with the level of education private returns rise from 3 per cent at the primary level to 10 per cent at the secondary level and 35 per cent for tertiary evidence from the production function gives lower returns on education than from the earnings function rates of return on physical capital exceed 20 per cent and greatly exceed the average return on human capital data is available on the stocks of human and physical capital across the countries productivity and earnings differentials are shown to be large between cameroon and ghana these differences are due almost entirely to differences in physical not human capital endowments this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

managing carbon footprints in inventory management abstract there is a broad consensus that mankind must reduce carbon emissions to mitigate global warming it is generally accepted that carbon emission trading is one of the most effective market based mechanisms to curb the amount of carbon emissions this paper investigates how firms manage carbon footprints in inventory management under the carbon emission trading mechanism we derive the optimal order quantity and analytically and numerically examine the impacts of carbon trade carbon price and carbon cap on order decisions carbon emissions and total cost we make interesting observations from the numerical examples and provide managerial insights from the analytical results

total factor productivity growth technological progress and technical efficiency change dimensions of productivity change in yugoslavia 1965 1978 this article total factor productivity growth technological progress and technical efficiency change dimensions of productivity change in yugoslavia 1965 78 was reprinted with permission from the december 1982 issue of the economic journal this article proposes a methodology that decomposes total factor productivity change into two distinct elements technological progress and changes in technical efficiency technological progress is defined as the change in the best practice production frontier all other productivity change is attributed to technical efficiency change the article provides a theoretical framework for decomposing total factor productivity growth as well as a specification and estimation of the deterministic frontier production function it employs a programming technique to estimate a flexible functional form of the production frontier the paper then applies this technique to empirical data from yugoslavia of the period from 1965 to 1978 it concludes that for yugoslavia improvements to technical efficiency comprise the dominant contribution to total factor productivity change this agrees with accumulating evidence that in many developing economies productivity gain due to technological mastery of imported technology is substantial

using cross section data to adjust technical efficiency indexes estimated with panel data this article proposes a procedure to incorporate cross sectional information in the estimation of technical efficiency indexes obtained from panel data a conventional index of technical efficiency is estimated in a first stage using panel data on inputs and outputs the individual effects from the first stage are then adjusted using cross sectional information obtaining a corrected technical efficiency index the model is applied to a panel of eighty two spanish dairy farms where only cross sectional information about input quality is available an analysis of variance is performed between some variables and both the corrected and the uncorrected indexes finding that the conclusions derived from the two analyses are different

technical efficiency and farm size a conditional analysis the relationship between technical efficiency and size might be affected by farm heterogeneity we analyse this relationship conditional on a set of control variables these control variables are chosen using a production model where technical efficiency is introduced as a parameter as a result technical efficiency affects both the input demand and the output supply of a profit maximising producer the empirical application explores these issues using panel data of dairy farms in spain

firm size age and efficiency evidence from kenyan manufacturing firms translog stochastic frontier production functions are estimated using an unbalanced panel of 235 kenyan manufacturing firms in the food wood textile and metal sectors the sectors are estimated individually in order to investigate whether technical efficiency is systematically related to the size and age of firms the evidence suggests that firm size has a positive and significant effect in the wood and textile sectors the age effect is less systematic but is insignificant in all sectors except textiles

fdi trade and spillover efficiency evidence from china s manufacturing sector using firm data from the 1995 third industrial census of china this paper finds that the presence of foreign ownership has a positive and significant effect on domestic firms productivity moreover trading with more advanced countries helps china gain access to new technology and information which improves its productivity and enables it to compete in international markets it is found that china s imports from oecd and the four asian tigers and exports to oecd have positive effects on domestic firms productivity by dividing industries into high technology gap and low technology gap groups it is found that the spillover effects of fdi are larger for the low technology gap group than for the high technology gap group however the estimation results of the trade induced technology spillover effect support the technology gap learning theory and the significance of importing appropriate technology

improving supply chain sustainability using exergy analysis abstract sustainable supply chain management is the improved level of management through the integration of environmental and social issues in parallel to the economic issues it has emerged as a growing subject that now receives increasing interest from practitioners and academicians limited attempts have been made to take a broader look at the overall issues that form the core topics of this type of supply chain in fact there have been many exclusive studies that investigated the impact of inadvertent or unavoidable costs of supply chain processes exergy analysis is a powerful thermodynamic tool that may be employed to analyze and identify the inefficiencies in a process or a system it has also been extended to efficiently evaluate how sustainable an industrial system process or product is this paper introduces exergetic models that compute and compare the consumed exergy for two coordination policies it also evaluates the consumed exergy when producing ordering locally versus globally it recognizes the importance of financial social and environmental aspects of choosing the more sustainable destination to produce and distribute a product numerical examples are presented and discussed to provide some insights for managers and decision makers to select between domestic policies based on the consumed exergy and the monetary cost results show that societies can gain more from less consumed exergy and firms can save on some costs when producing ordering domestically this paper recommends to governments and other stakeholders to take actions that are effective in making societies consume resources wisely

trends in inventory management abstract inventory management is one of the success stories of recent years and it is changing rapidly in response to international competition and new technology this paper examines some of these developments inventory is a major investment in most companies it strongly influences the internal flexibility of a company e g by allowing production levels to change easily and by providing good delivery performance to customers yet inventory ties up working capital and space and it can suffer from obsolescence deterioration and shrinkage it can also add to administrative complexity in recent years attention in manufacturing industry has concentrated on an inventory is waste philosophy using jit production usually accompanied by visible pull or consumer demand driven systems the approach is also very effective in supermarket retailing and at its best provides very high stock turn and high profits to the company at the same time as providing good service and fresh items to customers at low cost current changes in inventory management consider the total logistics chain under the term logistics management place a greater emphasis on purchasing rather than producing in house and use more international sourcing changes to recording methods include the use of different methods of information collection and processing e g bar coding in retailing and manufacture and electronic exchange of information control methods are more computer based and are becoming part of increasingly integrated systems there are some obvious problems still to be solved procedures are needed to bring one off analyses of inventory to become part of routine systems work needs to be done to produce performance measures which are consistent between different levels of the organisation and the modelling of dynamic performance needs to become part of the design of our production inventory systems more fundamentally we still do not know how to classify companies let alone how to determine the best approach to inventory planning and control for a particular kind of company

environmentally responsible inventory models non classical models for a non classical era abstract mathematical models of inventory typically include the three inventory associated costs of surplus shortage and ordering these classic inventory models are then analysed so as to choose inventory parameters that usually minimise the total cost of operating the inventory system being investigated unfortunately classic inventory models do not provide a meaningful basis for analysing many real and increasingly important practical inventory problems and situations it is therefore not surprising that over recent years several authors have discussed these issues in broad terms and suggested that a new paradigm needs to be developed this paper develops some specific aspects of this discussion in particular the paper identifies a range of inventory problems that are not covered appropriately by traditional inventory analysis one of these is to design responsible inventory systems i e systems that reflect the needs of the environment the paper then examines the importance of inventory planning to the environment in greater detail for example packaging is important not only because of its costs and the protection that it provides to the inventory items but also because of its eventual effects on the environment in terms of the use of resources and potential landfill for similar reasons waste which can result from poor inventory management is highly important the location of stores is important because location affects transport costs thus the influence of the secondary aspects of most inventory models packaging waste and location are important but even more important are the inter relations with the total system in particular the location of the manufacturing plants and the effect that inventory planning has on the logistics chain potentially have considerable environmental implications inventory is part of a wider system however until the cost charged for an activity reflects the true environmental cost of that activity it is likely that decisions will be made on the basis of erroneous data in that situation we are faced with either determining the environmental cost of specific actions or to use environmental costs that are somewhat contrived in which case it may be more sensible to use very different performance measures and models the paper discusses these ideas and ways in which inventory policies may reassure us with our environmental concerns

the economic order quantity model revisited an extended exergy accounting approach abstract the economic order quantity eoq model has been popular among academicians and practitioners for decades despite the many variants of the eoq that have appeared in the literature to fine tune it to reality it still has limitations a major one is that it does not take into account the hidden costs inherent in inventory systems some of these costs relate to sustainability issues including environmental social labor and economic effects this paper considers some of these costs referred to as the exergetic costs and estimates them using the extended exergy accounting eea approach extended exergy accounting assigns equivalent exergetic values to capital labor and environmental remediation costs of a system the analysis combines the classical exergy analysis with the sustainability factors which are the labor capital and environment the paper uses an exergetic model to determine the eoq inventory policies for three firms operating in the usa germany and china the results show that the eoq is different for the three firms because the equivalent exergy of capital labor and environment remediation costs is different in each country

competition and cooperation between supply chains in multi objective petroleum green supply chain a game theoretic approach petroleum supply chain is one of the most important and sophisticated managing missions in both developing and developed countries nowadays environmental pollution is another critical factor in designing the petroleum supply chain this importance encourages the governments to minimize the amount of environmental pollution and maximize their obtained profit simultaneously by enacting required legislations on the transportation modes and the refineries considering maximizing the job creation and each stakeholder s profit and minimizing the emission of co2 and other greenhouse gases at the same time is called sustainable petroleum supply chain which has been paid little attention despite its significance therefore the modelling of petroleum supply chain considering sustainability and pricing issues is investigated for the first time in this work and a sustainable competitive petroleum supply chain scpsc model is developed to minimize pollution while maximizing the profits and job creation this problem is a two level model the first level in scpsc is the competition between the supply chains of the government and the private sectors which is modelled by the game theory approach including nash and stackelberg equilibria the optimal price and demand for each supply chain determined in the first level are considered as the second level parameters in the second level the optimal values of the decisions in designing the petroleum supply chain will be obtained by solving mixed integer linear programming milp under the mentioned three objective functions finally the proposed model is applied to a real world case in the national iranian oil company nioc based on the results of the stackelberg equilibrium the government profits increase by 11 12 while that of the private sector decreases by 25 4 and 28 11 increasing in the government profit is due to increased demand provided by government the results show that the whole profit of the petroleum supply chain in nash equilibrium is 9 8 more than that in the stackelberg equilibrium

taxation wage controls and the informal sector abstract in this paper we study the effects of taxation and wage controls in a developing economy with an informal sector for that purpose we build a model with firm heterogeneity in which a formal and an informal sector endogenously emerge in some productive branches of the economy based on the assumption that the marginal cost of tax and regulation evasion increases with the size of the firm our model offers an explanation for the observed discontinuity in the distribution of firms size the missing middle three forms of dualism scale wage and evasion consistent with market segmentation are obtained the model accounts for the presence of waiting unemployment that seems particularly pervasive in urban regions a computable general equilibrium cge model for cameroon is built incorporating these features various reforms of the tax and regulation system are simulated and their effects on the extent of the informal sector are analyzed

the measurement of productive efficiency a reconsideration the purpose of this paper is to generalize the farrell indexes of productive efficiency to nonhomothetic production technologies and at the same time maintain the cost interpretation of the farrell measures since the generalized indexes rely heavily on recent developments in the estimation of frontier cost and production functions several frontier models are reviewed in addition to generalized indexes of technical allocative and overall productive efficiency a variety of single factor efficiency measures are discussed the applicability of the proposed efficiency measures is illustrated with a numerical example of electric power generation

firm size and technical efficiency applications of production frontiers to indian survey data abstract this paper is an empirical investigation of the relationship between relative technical efficiency and firm size in four indian manufacturing industries a frontier translog production function is used to derive measures of technical inefficiency at the enterprise level given the properties of the estimated production frontier these indices of technical efficiency are also indices of total factor productivity tfp which is the single most widely accepted measure of productive efficiency variations in technical efficiency are correlated with several explanatory variables including size of firm firm size is found to be positively associated with relative productive efficiency in only one of the four industries

developing an input output activity matrix ioam for environmental and economic analysis of manufacturing systems and logistics chains abstract an activity matrix am shows the activities that transform an organization s inputs into outputs the inputs are the system targets and the materials energy and other resources that are used to achieve these the outputs are the system performance expressed in terms of production quality profit environmental performance waste etc performance may be measured against the financial environmental technical social or other system targets a concurrent enterprise view is used to represent the manufacturing system activities and the paper examines how an am may be used to represent and design systems two kinds of am are examined an unconstrained activity matrix and an input output activity matrix ioam with an unconstrained am the system designer chooses system outputs attributes or requirements intuitively this provides great flexibility and allows e g the social and organisational implications of proposed changes to be investigated the inputs are not formally stated although a systems designer normally focuses on identifying the stages of a product life cycle and analysing their impact on the system s outputs the main emphasis of the paper is on the ioam and its use to represent the transformation of an organization s inputs into outputs the input output representation developed in the paper is used to examine manufacturing and logistics systems first the ioam is used to represent a manufacturing system as one tier of a logistics chain and its performance secondly the ioam representations may be derived for a multi tier system to represent its production economic and environmental performance

ethics and lobbying the case of real estate brokerage members of licensed occupations benefit from legal standards that limit entry into their professions is it ethical for these professionals to give political support to these standards i examined the case of real estate brokers and found that their educational requirements raise average commissions by one quarter of a percentage point costing consumers 5 4 billion per year without improving the quality of brokerage services the case raises interesting ethical issues which are difficult to resolve

productive efficiency of specialty and conventional coffee farmers in costa rica accounting for technological heterogeneity and self selection a steep decline in coffee prices at the producer level led to considerable pressure for farmers in costa rica and producer countries all over the world one possible reaction was moving to specialty markets where price pressure was perceived to be lower we use original survey data from 2002 2003 and 2003 2004 to analyze the factors influencing participation in specialty markets and to estimate separate production functions for specialty and conventional coffee farmers allowing for farm specific inefficiencies applying a sample selection framework we find significant selection bias in the sub sample of specialty farmers and evidence for the overestimation of efficiency if this bias is not adequately controlled for among the most important factors that influence farm specific efficiency levels in the two sub samples are the availability of additional income activities experience in coffee cultivation and membership in cooperatives based on the results we derive policy recommendations to improve farmers production performance and ability to cope with the effects of the coffee crisis these policy measures include the provision of extension services with respect to farm management skills the creation of income opportunities in rural areas and the support of farmer owned cooperatives

the measurement and sources of technical inefficiency in the indonesian weaving industry production function models are estimated with a time series of cross section data on indonesian weaving establishments the sources of technical inefficiency are investigated three firm attributes are identified as being potentially related to firm efhciency tbey are firm ownership age and size the importance of these attributes as sources of inefficiency in the indonesian weaving industry is investigated and the implications of the find ings discussed

sustainable trade credit and replenishment decisions with credit linked demand under carbon emission constraints abstract in this paper we consider issues of sustainability in the context of joint trade credit and inventory management in which the demand depends on the length of the credit period offered by the retailer to its customers we quantify the impacts of the credit period and environmental regulations on the inventory model starting with some mild assumptions we first analyze the model with generalized demand and default risk rates under the carbon cap and trade policy and then we make some extensions to the model with the carbon offset policy we further analytically examine the effects of carbon emission parameters on the retailer s trade credit and replenishment strategies finally a couple of numerical examples and sensitivity analysis are given to illustrate the features of the proposed model which is followed by concluding remarks

productivity growth technical progress and efficiency change in industrialized countries this paper analyzes productivity growth in 17 oecd countries over the period 1979 1988 a nonparametric programming method activity analysis is used to compute malmquist productivity indexes these are decomposed into two component measures namely technical change and efficiency change we find that u s productivity growth is slightly higher than average all of which is due to technical change japan s productivity growth is the highest in the sample with almost half due to efficiency change jel c43 d24 in this paper we apply recently developed

the single period inventory model under dual sourcing and product carbon footprint constraint abstract important drivers for environmental sustainability efforts in purchasing and supply management are top management initiatives and compliance with laws and regulations on the other hand market forces are largely ignored although it is shown that the product carbon footprint contained on the product s eco label influences the purchasing decisions of consumers if it is disclosed by several companies in an industry then the product carbon footprint turns out to be a relevant competitive differentiator i e the company with lower emissions can increase its market share in this paper we consider the single period inventory model with product carbon footprint constraint an upper bound for the carbon footprint is specified as a benchmark derived either from the company s environmental target or from an industry standard in the case of one supply option the optimal order quantity is characterized by a one sided control limit policy especially for high profit products the environmental constraint is binding thus has a negative impact on the economic performance i e expected profit if a second supply option exists in the resulting dual sourcing framework with quick response two scenarios with different additional costs and emissions for the second emergency order are considered in the first scenario for both options the same supplier is used it applies to an offshore supplier because a fast transportation mode is considered here the structure of the optimal first order quantity is a two sided control limit policy in scenario two the second order comes from a different onshore supplier by comparing the fast and the onshore scenario the trade off between economic expected profit and environmental expected emissions performances is discussed

technology creation in semi industrial economies abstract technological activities in the semi industrial economies of latin america leading to the adaptation of imported technologies as well as the development of new products and processes have been both an involuntary byproduct of manufacturing activities and the result of deliberate decisions to set up technological research facilities technological research reported by latin american firms is shown to be largely complementary to production and carried out to reap the extra benefits of protection external effects are thus disregarded since the benefits from industrial production suffice to induce the requisite adaptive research the paper suggests that the as yet not well understood interaction between industrial and technological development be studied by focusing on technology as information and engineers as its processors looking at the learning stages from using imports to the creation of new products and examining these processes in terms of a progression toward increasing technological complexity

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

integrated economic and environmental models for a multi stage cold supply chain under carbon tax regulation abstract the elevated level of public and organizations awareness concerning sustainability has necessitated the adoption of environmentally conscious practices in the management of supply chains as such classical inventory models wherein the sole measure of performance is cost minimization are no longer appropriate to handle such emerging and pressing issue this paper assesses the impact of accounting for carbon emissions resulting from transportation and storage activities of a cold item in the context of a multi stage supply chain comprised of a plant warehouse a distribution center dc and a retailer we present an operational cost minimization model a carbon footprint minimization model and a hybrid economic and environmental minimization model where all models seek to determine the optimal lot sizing and shipping quantities alongside the number of trucks to be used in the upstream and downstream directions of the supply chain as well as the number of freezer units utilized at the dc which is owned by a third party logistics provider the structural properties for the optimal solution of the three models are identified and solution algorithms are also proposed upon conducting computational experiments it turns out that the incorporation of carbon related costs through carbon tax regulation may call for adjusting the adopted operational policy which results in a minor increase in the operational cost however this increase is outweighed by the savings resulting from the carbon related costs numerical results of the sensitivity analysis on the carbon tax policy indicate that as the tax rate increases substantial reductions in the amount of carbon footprint emitted are realized and cost savings are also achieved when adopting the lot sizing and shipping policy of the third integrated model over the operational cost minimization model