Financial Development,Institutional Quality and Poverty Reduction: Worldwide Evidence

Social Indicators Research - There is a burgeoning literature on wealth in the rich world. It mainly focuses on the top. This paper shows that assets can also matter for the analysis of poverty and...     

The management of international manufacturing networks: a missing link towards total management of global networks

Abstract

The purposes of this article are to provide a brief overview of the research on international manufacturing networks (IMNs), identify corresponding gaps and provide background for the papers published in this special issue. First, this article shows the importance of addressing the management of IMNs, especially in times of global turbulence as a result of new economic, political and technological trends. Second, it highlights research into the management of IMNs as a missing link in the Operations Management (OM) discipline, as most of the current OM research neglects the fact that the internal structures and relationships of multi-plant organizations inside firms play a critical role in how a supply chain/network operates and relies mostly on scholars in other fields for insights into high-level and strategic issues in the management of global operations. Finally, this article argues there is still a lot to do in order to develop new theories towards the total management of global networks that can holistically analyze different global (intra- and inter-firm multi-functional) networks and address the complex interdependencies between them.     

The labor market costs of conflict: closures, foreign workers, and Palestinian employment and earnings

In this paper, we provide a lower bound estimate of the labor market costs of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The conflict is quantified by the number of overseas foreign workers in the Israeli labor market and the frequency of temporary closures of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. IV estimates, which exploit a source of exogenous variation in the number of overseas foreign workers, yield significant negative effects of the conflict on Palestinian employment rates in Israel and monthly earnings. Our cost-of-conflict estimates are also relevant for the literature on the economics of immigration.     

Expanding uses of building information modeling in life-cycle construction projects

BIM is targeted at providing information about the entire building and a complete set of design documents and data stored in an integrated database. In this paper, we study the use of BIM in two life-cycle construction projects in Kuopio, Finland during 2011. The analysis of uses of BIM and their main problems will constitute a foundation for an intervention. We will focus on the following questions: (1) How different partners use the composite BIM model? (2) What are the major contradictions or problems in the BIM use? The preliminary findings reported in this study show that BIM has been adopted quite generally to design use but the old ways of collaboration seem to prevail, especially between designers and between designers and building sites. BIM has provided new means and demands for collaboration but expansive uses of BIM for providing new interactive processes across professional fields have not much come true.