Indoor Climate Control: The Global Demand for Heating,Ventilating, and Air-Conditioning Equipment

World demand for heating, ventilating, and air-conditioning (HVAC) equipment is expected to rise in absolute terms during the current five-year period, but the rate of growth is slowing. However, growth is still in excess of that recorded by both global building construction expenditures and world gross domestic product. In 2007, $63.1 billion was spent on HVAC. The Asia-Pacific region now accounts for about 45 percent of the total. The two major categories of HVAC are cooling equipment, which accounts for 71 percent of the total, while heating equipment is responsible for the remaining 29 percent. The commercial market dominates the residential market by a ratio of 65:35. There are hundreds of suppliers around the world, but the eight leading firms have about 50 percent of the market.     

Refractory Materials: The Global Market,The Global Industry

World demand for refractory products—heat-resisting ceramic materials used in metal refining, glass making, and other high-temperature industrial applications—will be slowing down considerably from an annual rate of 10.8 percent during 2002–07 to 3.5 percent during 2007–12. Such slower growth reflects many factors, but is due primarily to: unsettled economic conditions; better efficiencies in steelmaking (which accounts for about half of all end uses of refractories); and the preference of end-users for maintenance rather than new facilities. The four key markets or end uses for refractory materials are: iron and steelmaking; other metal-making; nonmetallic materials such as glass; and an all-other category. In 2007, world refractory demand was 38.1 million metric tons valued at $22.9 billion; the corresponding figures for 2012 are projected at about 45.2 million metric tons valued at $28.5 billion. The Asia-Pacific region accounted for about 45 percent of total weight in 2007; its share by 2012 should rise to about 69 percent, with China becoming the dominant producer and consumer of refractory materials.     

Sustainability policy as if people mattered: developing a framework for environmentally significant behavioral change

International climate accords like the Paris agreement set the broad agenda for climate action. To realize their potential however, it is vital to ‘get the context right’ so that environmentally significant behaviors can be repeated over time. This paper reviews the extant interdisciplinary literature to outline how a richer understanding of the interrelationships between individual and contextual factors is required to cultivate behavioral change. In this manner, 18 distinct behavioral determinants are identified. We argue that the likelihood of behavioral change and overall environmental impact are thereby reliant on the complex interaction between individual behavior and the multiple distinct layers of context that frame its expression. Our behavior-informed approach thus helps to explain processes of behavioral change more fully, establish the types of obstacles that exist, and delineate a fuller and more substantial role for individual-driven behavioral change that is able to build on the initial impetus of global-level frameworks.     

Hausarzt nicht erreichbar?

Medizinische Akutversorgung in Heimen - In vielen Heimen muss sofort der Rettungsdienst ran, wenn es um akute medizinische Probleme geht. Das ist teuer, führt zu sinnlosen Krankenhausaufenthalten und missachtet allzu oft den Willen des Patienten. Das Problem ist bestens bekannt, doch auch in Zukunft wird sich kaum etwas ?ndern: Die Krankenkassen scheuen zus?tzliche Honorare für die ?rztliche Betreuung im Heim.     

The causes of unemployment in France: a flow approach

A flow model is used to identify the causes for rising unemployment in France between 1978 and 1990. Two flow equations are estimated as functions of exogenous factors such as aggregate demand, factor costs, structural shifts and long-term factors and then used in simulations for the level of unemployment. It is shown that the main reason for high unemployment in France is a slow down in the demand for labour due to high labour and energy costs in the early 1980s and to tight aggregate demand over the whole period.Change in the labour supply have had an increasing impact in recent years.     

The influence of external reference price strategies in a nonprofit arts organization's “pay‐what‐you‐want” setting

Nonprofit arts organizations face conflicting objectives to balance—or more specifically, to create—artistic and educational value and to generate financial income from various sources. Pay‐what‐you‐want (PWYW), a participative pricing mechanism where services have no fixed price and customers actively decide what to pay, is a novel pricing mechanism and is of high interest for organizations and researchers alike. Based on the concepts of loss aversion and gain, this study presents a field experiment to test the effects of different PWYW pricing strategies on the amount of money paid by visitors of a German photo biennial. Explicitly, the provisions of minimum, maximum, and suggested external reference prices are compared to a setting with no external reference prices. We test the derived hypotheses, discuss the results, and provide implications for future research, as well as for the management of nonprofit arts organizations.