Relevance of barriers and facilitators in the use of health technology assessment in Colombia

Objectives: Several studies, mostly from developed countries, have identified barriers and facilitators with regard to the uptake of health technology assessment (HTA). This study elicited, using best-worst scaling (BWS), what HTA experts in Colombia consider to be the most important barriers and facilitators in the use of HTA, and makes a comparison to results from the Netherlands.

Methods: Two object case surveys (one for barriers, one for facilitators) were conducted among 18 experts (policymakers, health professionals, PhD students, senior HTA-researchers) from Colombia. Seven respondents were employees of the national HTA agency Instituto de Evaluación Tecnológica de Salud (IETS). In total, 22 barriers and 19 facilitators were included. In each choice task, participants were asked to choose the most and least important barrier/facilitator from a set of five. Hierarchical Bayes modeling was used to compute the mean relative importance scores (RIS) for each factor, and a subgroup analysis was conducted to assess differences between IETS and non-IETS respondents. The final ranking was further compared to the results from a similar study conducted in the Netherlands.

Results: The three most important barriers (RIS >6.00) were “Inadequate presentation format”, “Absence of policy networks”, and “Insufficient legal support”. The six most important facilitators (RIS >6.00) were “Appropriate timing”, “Clear presentation format”, “Improving longstanding relation”, “Appropriate incentives”, “Sufficient qualified human resources”, and “Availability to relevant HTA research”. The perceived relevance of the barriers and facilitators differed slightly between IETS and non-IETS employees, while the differences between the rankings in Colombia and the Netherlands were substantial.

Conclusion: The study suggests that barriers and facilitators related to technical aspects of processing HTA reports and to the contact and interaction between researchers and policymakers had the greatest importance in Colombia.     

Are College Football Playoff Payouts Becoming More Imbalanced?

Atlantic Economic Journal -     

Barriers and bridges to the adoption of environmentally-sustainable offerings

This research identifies the factors that inhibit the incorporation of environmentally-sustainable offerings into firms' operations, while outlining strategies that environmentally-sustainable suppliers can use to overcome such adoption barriers. A discovery-oriented approach analyzes twenty in-depth interviews with mid- and senior-level managers whose firms were faced with, and yet overcame, adoption barriers. Results indicate that supplier related barriers, such as associated costs, ease of use, suppliers' credibility, and their offerings' creativity and execution, and intraorganizational barriers, such as organizational structure and culture, inhibit adoption. The refinement and alignment of suppliers' actions, communications, and offerings were suggested to aid in overcoming the barriers. This research yields insights for both research and practice, as it provides a series of testable research propositions, supports several theories, and furnishes supplier firms with strategies to better position their firms and offerings.     

The Impact of Innovation in Small Industrial Operations to Increased Competitiveness： Empirical Evidence

The present research work in the Small and Medium Enterprise （SME） and industrial sector explains the impact of the relationship among innovation in the SME operations of Aguascalientes to find the most competitive one; to this end, a questionnaire was intended for managers where the results have been analyzed using the statistical package Structural Equation Modeling Programs （EQS） support which through structural equations has responded to the objective. In this sense, it can be concluded that innovation has a positive relationship with the operations and in turn, this relationship shows a positive impact on the competitiveness of SMEs in Aguascalientes. For this study, a sample of 150 companies has been used.     

Explanatory factors for efficiency in the use of social networking sites—The case of organic food products

In some markets, organic foods face problems such as consumer misinformation and confusion, high prices compared to conventional equivalents, or few points of sale. The answers to these problems include information and communication technologies, particularly social networking sites (SNS), given their potential for conveying information and connecting customers and suppliers at less cost. It would be useful to ascertain the psychology of social media use and which factors determine SNS efficiency among organic producers. This study of the efficiency of SNS use in two strategic sectors for Spain—olive oil and wine—used data envelopment analysis and, in a second stage, qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) to detect the contextual variables that explain the highest efficiency indices. The results showed that the more market‐oriented sector (wine) has a higher average efficiency of SNS use and pointed to the following explanatory factors: SNSs mentioned on corporate websites, number of employees, the manager's educational background, and length of SNS use.     

A Kaleckian model for understanding and responding to the economic policy challenges of remittances

In this work we construct a Kaleckian model for analyzing the impacts of remittances upon economies of receiving countries. The arrival of remittances has two harmful effects: contraction of income, and the so-called Dutch Disease (DD). We use our model to formulate an economic policy with two objective variables and two instrumental variables, to solve or attenuate these problems.     

Board Effectiveness and Short Termism

We examine whether more effective boards in terms of size, experience, shareholding and independence, as discussed in the 2010 UK Corporate Governance Code, limit excessive short‐term risk taking or short‐termism. We use a state‐of‐the‐art asset pricing model that enables the disentangling of short‐term risk (related to short‐term returns) and long‐term risk (related to long‐term returns), and use the former as a proxy for short‐termism, where the short‐term component not only represents the time horizon for which we are interested but also the risk that is not related to fundamentals. We examine 916 firms in the UK over a possible horizon of 18 years, January 1992–December 2010, and find that more effective boards are associated with lower levels of short‐term risk and this result is robust to various types of short‐term risk (overall, downside) and specifications.     

Cooperative learning in creating and managing joint ventures

This study examines how and under what conditions joint ventures facilitate cooperative learning. The study analyzes how a joint-venture approach facilitates initial learning in the cooperative process and considers to what extent inter-organizational factors such as commitment, trust, control and conflict resolution affect the partners involved. The study then compares these hypotheses based on a sample of 74 international joint ventures (IJVs). The results provide empirical evidence to show that commitment is both a significant and essential variable, yet they also illustrate that this type of cooperation is not enough on its own for partners to learn how to cooperate effectively.     

Why does monetary policy respond to the real exchange rate in small open economies? A Bayesian perspective

To estimate how monetary policy works in small open economies, we build a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model that incorporates the basic features of these economies. We conclude that the monetary policy in a group of small open economies (including Australia, Chile, Colombia, Peru, and New Zealand) is rather similar to that observed in closed economies. Our results also indicate, however, that there are strong differences due to the shocks from the international financial markets (mainly risk premium shocks). These differences explain most of the variability of the real exchange rate, which has important reallocation effects in the short run. Our results are consistent with an old idea from the Mundell–Fleming model: namely, a real depreciation to confront a risk premium shock is expansive or procyclical, in contradiction to the predictions of the balance sheet effect, the J curve effect, and the introduction of working capital into RBC models. In line with this last result, we have strong evidence that only in one of the five countries analyzed in this study does not intervene the real exchange rate, the case of New Zealand.