Using composite indicators to evaluate the efficiency of health care system

This article produces a system-level composite indicator on population health in publicly provided primary health care. We first summarize information from various indicators of care by principal component analysis (PCA). We then regress the costs of care against these indicators to evaluate whether they are related. The existing health status indicator provides a point of comparison. Our results suggest that PCA can be used to extract information efficiently and thus to reduce the dimensionality of data. Furthermore, the use of the existing health status indicator to estimate cost-efficiency leads to invalid inference on overall efficiency, while the use of composite indicator significantly reduces the bias.     

The effect of subsidizing continuous training investments — Evidence from German establishment data

This paper evaluates the impact of a training voucher program on establishments' investments in further training. The voucher program that was implemented in the German federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia increased training incentives for employees in small and medium-sized establishments by reducing training costs by 50%. The estimation is based on a quasi-experimental research design exploiting variation across time, regions and establishment size. Using establishment data, I find that the share of establishments that invest in training increased by 4–6 percentage points. Training intensity and the educational structure of participants remained unaffected among those establishments investing in training.     

Green supply chains and the missing link between environmental information and practice

Within the field of green supply chain management (GSCM), an interest in supply chain cooperation to create sustainable competitive advantage, i.e. the collaborative paradigm, has made researchers turn their attention to information related aspects of the supply chain. This study contributes to an understanding of a suboptimal use of environmental information, which is critical for all collaborative efforts aiming at sustainable competitive advantage. The aim of this article is to describe the use of environmental information at different stages of the Swedish food supply chain. The results from this case study of the Swedish food supply chain indicate that environmental information is perceived and used differently by purchasers in the supply chain depending on where (in the supply chain) they are situated in relation to other chain actors. The main contribution of this study is the suggestion of a stage‐dependent connection between perceived environmental cost and perceived environmentally informed consumer demand, which are barriers to GSCM practice discussed in recent GSCM literature. The missing link between information sharing and (environmental) performance of supply chains is explained as distance to end‐consumer in terms of supply chain stages. Implications for GSCM practice and theory are discussed. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

China and India in the global economy

The purpose of this overview paper is to present the economic growth in China and India over the last three decades with a specific focus on the integration of these countries into the global economy. In the first part, we briefly review the long-run process of growth and institutional change, emphasizing the reforms leading to the “opening” of the two economies. Then, we focus on key structural features and compare the recent development processes of the two countries. At the end, there are some hints about certain persisting imbalances and the sustainability of the growth processes.     

An economic analysis of the EU Commission’s proposal for a new consumer credit directive

The debate on ratification or revision of the proposed new Consumer Credit Directive continues. The European Parliament neither rejected nor approved the Commission’s proposal at the plenary session on November 5, 2003. While the Commission insists on defending the merits of the proposal, the LAC Rapporteur Würmeling calls for a complete modification. This article is intended to serve as a navigation guide past the holes and obstacles on the winding ratification path.     

Set-valued solution concepts using interval-type payoffs for interval games

Uncertainty is a daily presence in the real world. It affects our decision making and may have influence on cooperation. Often uncertainty is so severe that we can only predict some upper and lower bounds for the outcome of our actions, i.e., payoffs lie in some intervals. A suitable game theoretic model to support decision making in collaborative situations with interval data is that of cooperative interval games. Solution concepts that associate with each cooperative interval game sets of interval allocations with appealing properties provide a natural way to capture the uncertainty of coalition values into the players’ payoffs. In this paper, some set-valued solution concepts using interval payoffs, namely the interval core, the interval dominance core and the interval stable sets for cooperative interval games, are introduced and studied. The main results contained in the paper are a necessary and sufficient condition for the non-emptiness of the interval core of a cooperative interval game and the relations between the interval core, the interval dominance core and the interval stable sets of such a game.