New Technology in Unionized Firms: Advantages of Mandatory Bargaining

U.S. Labor Law currently allows employers whose work forces are unionized to introduce new technologies without bargaining over the decision to do so. This forces unions to adopt inefficient strategies when negotiating collective bargaining agreements in an effort to minimize the impact of technological change on their members. Allowing unions to bargain over the decision to introduce new technologies would obviate their having to resort to these inefficient strategies. In addition, it might increase the likelihood of employees suggesting alterations in production processes that would increase the rate of technological change. For these reasons, this article advocates amending U.S. labor law to require employers to bargain over the introduction of new technologies.     

农民工的社会网络变迁

采用系统模式研究了进城农民工的社会网络重构过程,指出随着谋生方式由农业生产向非农产业的转移,进城农民工正在逐步建立起以业缘关系为基础的新的社会纽带,并使之成为其社会网络的重要组成部分.这些由进城农民工一手构建的社会关系网络正在成为他们在城市生活中赖以生存和发展的重要资本.     

审视并消除不利因素加快新疆工业化进程

工业化是实现现代化不可逾越的发展阶段,要缩短东西部地区之间的差距,振兴新疆经济,就必须走新型工业化之路。目前新疆工业化发展虽有一些有条件,但也存在制约工业化进程的因素,如工业结构层次较低、工业经济发展地区分布不均衡等。只有通过统筹规划、走特色经济之路、发展壮大工业园区等措施才能加快新疆工业化进程。     

论制度变迁的成本约束

制度变迁的关键是成本约束，这是制度本身产生的根本性要求。制度变迁是成本和收益相权衡和比较的产物，制度设计和安排必须充分考虑到制度变迁的成本和收益，减少制度变迁的阻力，提高制度运行的效率。     

Technological change in energy systems: Learning curves, logistic curves and input-output coefficients

Learning curves have recently been widely adopted in climate-economy models to incorporate endogenous change of energy technologies, replacing the conventional assumption of an autonomous energy efficiency improvement. However, there has been little consideration of the credibility of the learning curve. The current trend that many important energy and climate change policy analyses rely on the learning curve means that it is of great importance to critically examine the basis for learning curves. Here, we analyse the use of learning curves in energy technology, usually implemented as a simple power function. We find that the learning curve cannot separate the effects of price and technological change, cannot reflect continuous and qualitative change of both conventional and emerging energy technologies, cannot help to determine the time paths of technological investment, and misses the central role of R&D activity in driving technological change. We argue that a logistic curve of improving performance modified to include R&D activity as a driving variable can better describe the cost reductions in energy technologies. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the top-down Leontief technology can incorporate the bottom-up technologies that improve along either the learning curve or the logistic curve, through changing input-output coefficients. An application to UK wind power illustrates that the logistic curve fits the observed data better and implies greater potential for cost reduction than the learning curve does.     

Implementation of land and ecosystem accounts at the European Environment Agency

The European Environment Agency has started the implementation of a programme of land use and ecosystem accounts, following the System of Environmental and Economic Accounts (SEEA) guidelines of the United Nations. The purpose is to integrate information across the various ecosystem components and to support further assessments and modelling of these components and their interactions with economic and social developments. This programme reflects the increasing demand for environmental policy integration in Europe, both vertically through thematic policies as well as horizontally across policies in those sectors that contribute most to environmental impacts. The construction of land and ecosystem accounts is now feasible due to continuous improvements in monitoring, collecting and processing data and progress with the development of statistical methods that facilitate data assimilation and integration. The accounts are based on explicit spatial patterns provided by comprehensive land cover accounts that can be scaled up and down using a 1 km² grid to any type of administrative region or ecosystem zone (e.g., river basin catchments, coastal zones or bio-geographic areas). Land cover accounts have been produced for 24 countries in Europe and first results published in the European Environment State and Outlook2005 report of the EEA.¹     

汽车市场订单管理流程实施

论文探讨了汽车厂商订单管理流程的具体实施,分析了订单管理对区域市场经营模式和经销商能力提升的促进。随后,论文详细研究了订单管理流程中最为重要的年采购目标管理流程、月采购计划流程和周采购计划流程。     

A longitudinal study of supply organizational change

This research examines the high level of change in supply organizations of large North American companies using data collected from 51 large North American supply organizations in 1987, 1995 and 2003. Analysis is supplemented by an additional 55 companies for which data were collected in 1995 and 2003. The availability of longitudinal data from individual companies over a 16-year period provided a unique opportunity to trace changes made to each company's supply organizational structure and their roles and responsibilities. Findings suggest that the respondents made major changes in supply organizational structure, supply chain responsibilities, use of purchasing teams, supply involvement in major corporate activities (MCA) and CPO reporting line, title and background.     

Important Intermediate Transactions and Multi-sectoral Modelling

For the maintenance and development of a disaggregated econometric model, the present paper deals with some aspects related to the identification of important intermediate transactions. First, some methodological aspects related to earlier works are discussed. By comparing the properties of different selection methods based on the recent West German input–output table, the calculations confirm the common finding that the necessary level of endogenization can be bounded meaningfully by an a priori investiga tion of the intersectoral transactions. This is also valid if the selection method considers restrictions that deal with the consistence of input–output tables and if some broader error criteria are applied. The main result of the empirical applications seems to be that some attention should be paid to temporal changes of important coefficients.     

Linking performance drivers in production planning and inventory control to process choice

This study investigates how process choice relates to production planning and inventory control decisions. We empirically examine the validity of deductively derived patterns about these types of decisions. More importantly, we look for normative insights by exploring how production planning and inventory control decisions affect operations performance. Our findings show that production line and continuous flow plants use more of a level production strategy, and carry less raw material and work-in-process inventory. The performance drivers for these plants, through which the operations function excels, are effective utilization of equipment, reduced finished goods inventory, and reduced setup down time. To gain forward demand visibility and batching economies, job and batch shops rely much more on backlogs in their planning process. These plants use more of a production chase strategy and position inventory lower in the bills of materials. Four performance drivers for top-performing job and batch shops are to find ways that better anticipate customers' orders, have a more responsive chase strategy, carry less raw material or purchased inventory, and shorten production planning horizon, partly through less reliance on backlogs. It is intriguing that top-performing plants not only do the expected things, given their choice of process, but also excel in selected dimensions—some of which fit the profile normally associated with a different process choice. To monitor and continuously improve operations, evaluation ‘scorecards’ should pay particular attention to performance drivers, which change depending on the plant's process choice.