Interrelations between the dynamics of oil prices and demand: Contemporary characteristics

The article shows that the unprecedented rise in oil prices was in recent years accompanied by an increase in oil consumption. The author considers the growth that was seen in the magnitude of oil sales despite multiple increases in price to be, along with the buying up of oil as a high liquidity asset, a phenomenon that indicates an approaching crisis and allows us to create new approaches to its forecasting.     

Standards and Institutional Capacity: An Examination of Trade in Food and Agricultural Products

The ability of developing countries to cope with emerging standards in food and agricultural products is influenced by their institutional capacity. This paper develops original measures of four dimensions of standards-related, institutional capacity: information, conformity, enforcement, and international standard-setting. These measures are incorporated into a gravity model to investigate whether these capacities offset the negative effects of Aflatoxin B1 standards on food and agricultural product trade. The results indicate that informational capacity and conformity capacity do indeed have such offsetting effects. The evidence with regard to enforcement and international standard-setting is less clear.     

Supply Chain Management Competency and Firm Financial Success

Supply chain management (SCM) plays a major role in creating (or destroying) shareholder value by influencing the three major drivers of firm financial performance: revenue, operating costs, and working capital. Yet, the relationship between SCM competency and firm financial performance is not well‐established. Drawing on the resource‐based view of the firm, this study assesses this relationship using Delphi‐style opinion data from AMR Research’s Supply Chain Top 25 rankings to assess SCM competency and Altman’s (1968) Z‐score statistic as the measure of financial success. The study findings show that firms recognized by industry experts for SCM competency have significantly higher Z‐scores than their close competitors and industry averages.     

May the course of the tuberculosis-mortality chiefly be explained by the movements of the infection-curve (tuberculin-curve)?

Abstract

Let us suppose that we have a population which is kept constant by the birth of 10,000 children annually, and that this has been the case for a number of years.     

Reasonableness and Section 4 of the Employment Act 1980

This article explains the origins of s.4 of the Employment Act 1980 and assesses the place of this provision in the corpus of labour legislation enacted by the Conservative government since 1980. Its principal aim is to concentrate upon the concept of reasonableness which is central to the operation of the provision and to evaluate critically the role of the EAT and the industrial tribunals in interpreting it. Finally, the article seeks to assess the impact of the tribunaľs interpretation of s.4 on union admission and expulsion procedures.