Health Care Matters: Supply Chains In and Of the Health Sector

Providing health care involves a complex enterprise, and the trade‐off between quality and cost has been particularly stark compared to other industries. However, a recent focus on health sector supply networks is now producing significant innovations and improvements. This Special Topic Forum illustrates for the academic and practitioner community how health care supply chain research can benefit from our evolving understanding of supply chains and help push that understanding even further. We classify health care supply chain research into two broad categories—supply chain in health care and supply chain of health care—to set an agenda for future research.     

Fundamentals and Oil Price Behaviour: New Evidence from Co‐integration Tests with Structural Breaks and Granger Causality Tests

As the world economy has undergone various changes and shocks, the oil market went through significant fluctuations during the period 1994–2015. This study focuses on discussing the possible factors that determine crude oil prices, which include world economic growth, market power of Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), non‐OPEC supply and the value of dollar, taking into account the structural changes that influence the study period, which is quarterly data for the period of 1994.Q1–2015.Q3. For time series stationarity tests, Zivot and Andrews (1992) and Perron (1997) unit root test with structural break is used. To test the existence of a long relationship in the presence of structural changes, the Gregory and Hansen (1996a, 1996b) method of co‐integration is used. For long‐run coefficient, we proceed to estimate fully modified least squares. The result shows a significant influence of non‐OPEC supply, the dollar appreciation and world gross domestic product growth, but OPEC did not have a significant effect on the price of oil, which is indicated by the structural break for OPEC capacity utilisation at 2002.Q1, that indicates the starting point of the loss of OPEC power. Establishing the presence of co‐integration, we apply the evaluation of Granger causality for co‐integrated data, using vector error‐correction model.     

Risk tolerance,gender, and entrepreneurship: The Palestinian case

This paper analyzes the inter‐relationships between entrepreneurial propensity, fear of failure (FoF), and gender in Palestine, using the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) adult population survey (APS) data for 2009, 2010, and 2012, and it is the first that addresses Gender, fear of failure, and entrepreneurship for Palestine. The paper extends the analysis of the endogeneity issue of FoF by using the conditional mixed process (CMP), which improves the efficiency of the estimates. The results show that the fear of failure negatively affects entrepreneurial status, while skill perception does the opposite. It is also found that fear of failure is higher among women, although this result is not stable over time. Using the CMP specification, we find that gender and fear of failure both reduce the predicted probability of entrepreneurship consistently over time. The only variable that consistently predicts fear of failure and is significant is skill perception, which has a negative impact. Policy implications of this research point to the importance of reducing the gender gap in entrepreneurship. In particular, there is a need to improve their skill perception in order to encourage more females to be entrepreneurs. Networking, vocational education and media coverage of success stories are among the tools that could potentially achieve this result.     

The Emergence of Consolidated Service Centers in Health Care

Hospital supply chains can be conceptualized as complex systems with a large number of players and a high degree of interrelatedness among them, creating an environment that is difficult to optimize and manage. In recent years, a consolidated service center (CSC) strategy (sometimes also referred to as “self‐distribution” strategy), has emerged in some healthcare systems, showing a strong potential for reducing the complexity in a hospital's supply chain to achieve high levels of performance and innovation. We examine three CSCs using a qualitative case method to understand the unique characteristics of this supply chain strategy, and how CSCs move hospital supply chains toward a less complex state. We find that CSCs demonstrate characteristics that distinguish them from other supply chain strategies. These characteristics enable the CSC to orchestrate supply base rationalization and disintermediation initiatives in the hospital's supply chain to effectively reduce the number of components and interrelatedness in this complex system.     

Skill shortages and labor market outcomes in Central Europe

The new Central European members of the EU have been characterized by low employment rates, especially among unskilled workers, despite the GDP recoveries and large private sector shares in output and employment. Evidence points at skill shortages in Central Europe as a key impediment to faster labor reallocation and convergence to the EU-15 employment structures. In this paper, we develop a simple model of labor reallocation with transaction costs and show how skill shortages can inhibit firm creation and increase income inequality. We use the model to examine the impact of training subsidies and their financing on skill acquisition and start-ups of new private firms, and show that the positive effect of subsidies would be mostly offset by high wage taxes. Shifting financing from wage to consumption taxes would improve incentives for workers’ training and firm start-ups, while relying more on income taxes could reduce the income gap between workers and entrepreneurs.     

The Political Economy of Interwar Egyptian Cotton Policy

The optimal tariff was a central concern to economists and policymakers in interwar Egypt. The government took the position that Egypt conformed to the small-country assumption in world cotton markets. Using time-series and panel data for the period 1895–1939, this article demonstrates that Egyptian long-staple cotton commanded significant market power in international markets. An optimal export tariff would have encouraged economic diversification and generated huge government revenues, making it possible to finance industrialization plans. However, the burden of taxation would have been shared by Egyptian landlords and British interests. Thus, an optimal export tariff was incompatible with the goals of Egypt's ruling elite, who dictated the orientation of trade policy until the 1950s.     

Commitment and turnover intention in the UAE oil industry

This paper aims to explore the links between two components of commitment – affective and continuance – and employees' intention to stay/quit in the oil industry. A self-administered questionnaire was used in order to collect study data from 600 employees representing three levels of management. Eight hypotheses were developed such as there is no significant relationship between affective commitment and intention to quit the organization, there is no significant relationship between affective commitment and intention to stay with the organization, there is no significant relationship between personal variables and organizational commitment and its dimensions, and there is no significant relationship between job-related variables and organizational commitment and its dimensions. These hypotheses were examined using various tests drawn from the SPSS program, for example, correlations, factor analysis and multiple regressions. Findings confirmed the multidimensionality nature of commitment. A significant negative relationship between organizational commitment and intention to quit was also reported. The results related to demographic factors and commitment show some evidences that support these links. The implications of the findings for both practitioners and researchers are discussed in the paper with some guidelines for future research in this field.     

Egypt's Growth Performance Under Economic Liberalism: A Reassessment With New GDP Estimates, 1886–1945

The stagnation of Egyptian living standards in the first half of the 20th century has been widely presumed in economic history. However, this conventional wisdom is partially based on a fragmented body of evidence on aggregate output. In particular, no estimates of national income exist for any extended period prior to World War II. Using a money–based cointegration approach and a new measure of broad money, we exploit Egypt's intimate economic links with the U.K. to provide the first continuous estimates of GDP for the period 1886–1945. Our estimates are consistent with trends in agriculture and other stylized facts about the Egyptian economy in the late 19th and early 20th century. The empirical results provide qualified support to the conventional wisdom about Egypt's growth performance in addition to offering a detailed characterization of output cycles.     

Green and competitive? An empirical test of the mediating role of environmental innovation strategy

This study examines links between the adoption of an environmental innovation strategy and firms’ business performance. It illustrates ways in which an environmental innovation strategy is itself influenced by significant environmental pressures, including government environmental regulation, perceived importance of stakeholder pressures, and managerial environmental concerns. Survey data from the chemical industry in Jordan show that (1) environmental innovation strategy is associated with improved perceived firms’ business performance; (2) the adoption of an environmental innovation strategy is influenced by certain environmental pressure forces, and (3) environmental innovation strategy fully mediates between certain environmental pressure forces and firms’ business performance.