Market Drivers Research Articles

Design of a System Dynamics Model to Analyze the Styrene Demand in the Brazilian Market

The growth of the petrochemical industry is based on end-user applications such as the automotive and construction sectors, which are the main drivers of the styrene market. However, the use of substitutes for petrochemicals is a reality and creates a competition in the applications of petroleum products. In this sense, this research aimed to design a system dynamics model to evaluate different scenarios, observing the behavior of the styrene demand over time. In the first phase of the project, a greater understanding of the issue was created and a closed loops diagram was elaborated. It was used during the second phase to design an explanatory regression validation model for the styrene demand. In phase three, a visualizing model and scenarios were designed. The scenarios themselves and the results of each scenario were evaluated. The designed and simulated scenarios aimed to evaluate the impact that the use of substitute materials and the variations in gross domestic product cause to the styrene market. The use of system dynamics together with scenario planning was efficient as different strategies for the market could be evaluated based on the simulated scenarios. A critical analysis of the model’s contribution to the decision-making within organizations concludes the study.

Responsible Investment as Market Driver for Sustainable Development

Socially responsible investment (SRI) has grown substantially over time. It has emerged as an important financial system driver for corporate sustainability management. The objective of this paper is to analyse the critical issues in relation to corporate sustainability assessment as has been promoted in the financial markets through the assessment structures developed by SRI actors, i.e. indices and rating agencies. The challenge of this paper is to discuss about the different limitations of this SRI metrics, and whether the different indices and rating agencies are consistent with a strong sustainability approach in the way they are measuring the sustainability of a company.

A Review of Activity Trackers for Senior Citizens: Research Perspectives, Commercial Landscape and the Role of the Insurance Industry.

The objective assessment of physical activity levels through wearable inertial-based motion detectors for the automatic, continuous and long-term monitoring of people in free-living environments is a well-known research area in the literature. However, their application to older adults can present particular constraints. This paper reviews the adoption of wearable devices in senior citizens by describing various researches for monitoring physical activity indicators, such as energy expenditure, posture transitions, activity classification, fall detection and prediction, gait and balance analysis, also by adopting consumer-grade fitness trackers with the associated limitations regarding acceptability. This review also describes and compares existing commercial products encompassing activity trackers tailored for older adults, thus providing a comprehensive outlook of the status of commercially available motion tracking systems. Finally, the impact of wearable devices on life and health insurance companies, with a description of the potential benefits for the industry and the wearables market, was analyzed as an example of the potential emerging market drivers for such technology in the future.

Do carbon traders behave as a herd?

This paper shows the existence of herding behavior in the European Carbon Futures Market and studies its possible causes and consequences. This market is characterized by leading the carbon price discovery process and by being highly dominated by professional traders. Both features make it an appropriate environment for the existence of herding. A patterns analysis indicates that the herding level increases in speculative periods, on those days on which the price and size clustering effect is stronger, and with the arrival of carbon-related news. Regarding possible market drivers, we find that herding behavior is positively related with the number of trades, the intraday volatility and on days with extreme returns. Our results appear to support the claim that the lower the availability of information, the higher the level of herding. Finally, we show that herding increases market volatility and leads carbon traders to overreact.

The long shadow of public policy; Barriers to a value-based approach in healthcare procurement

Procurement in the UKs National Health Service (NHS) is facing its most significant financial challenge. Despite the sheer scale and complexities of the public healthcare sector, the Government's solutions are all too often packaged as "collaborate more", "standardise products" and "leverage spend". Unfortunately, these over simplistic solutions take a myopic view of market drivers, conflate spend with potential savings and fail to deliver value. Many contracts have already been commercially optimised yet the funding crisis continues to deepen. New value-based procurement approaches are needed to drive longer-term innovation and cost reduction and to move debates from efficiencies to embrace effectiveness in integrated supply chains. In this research, we adopt the resource-based view (RBV) as a lens to explore the extent to which NHS resources support the strategic adoption of value-based approaches. An empirical case study on a regional cluster of six NHS Trusts in England, confirms the dominance of narrow price-based approaches that create barriers to moving towards longer-term, valuebased procurement. The antecedent roots of price-based approaches are unpicked through a hermeneutic analysis of recent Government commissioned reports to show how these have set the tone, culture and priorities for healthcare procurement in the UK. The analysis provides explanatory power to the case study by illustrating how Government reports have led to, and legitimised the dominance of price-based approaches and caused relational and resource-based barriers to adopting value-based procurement, despite stakeholder enthusiasm. The findings provide unique insights into why public procurement has struggled to reach beyond its traditional cost orientated scope. We contribute to an extended consideration of the RBV in public organisations through identifying the role of the policy environment in determining and legitimatising an organisation's strategic direction.

Eco-Innovation Drivers in Value-Creating Networks: A Case Study of Ship Retrofitting Services

Previous studies discuss how regulatory, technological and market drivers increasingly challenge manufacturing industries to adopt eco-innovations. However, the understanding of the process by which eco-innovations are developed and commercialized as a result of these drivers is not yet well established, in particular because these drivers are perceived differently by the end-users and their suppliers. In this paper, we address the following research question: How do eco-innovation drivers shape processes in value-creating networks? To answer this question, we carried out a case study purposely selected to understand how eco-innovation drivers, such as regulation, market pull and technology, interact and affect the eco-innovation decisions in a given industry. We analyzed the processes in an eco-innovation initiative about retrofitting old ships, contextualized in the maritime equipment and supply industry. The paper makes two novel contributions: First, we develop a framework that can support supply-network eco-innovation initiatives to deal with changes at the regulatory, market and technology levels. The framework includes elements, such as value co-creation to explore technological opportunities emerging from the interaction of the drivers or value proposition development to align multiple actors’ interests in the network and agree on shared expectations to exploit the opportunities. Second, we contribute to the emerging research area on eco-innovation processes by highlighting the lesser-known role of value-creating network dynamics. Value-creating networks can be a platform for the development of more radical eco-innovations if actors in the networks can align their value creation and capture objectives.

Implementation of industrial waste heat to power in Southeast Asia: an outlook from the perspective of market potentials, opportunities and success catalysts

As an important way to increase industrial energy efficiency, Waste Heat to Power (WHP) technologies have been gaining popularity in recent years. In order to appraise the market potential of WHP technologies in Southeast Asia, a techno-economic assessment for WHP technologies is conducted in this paper. The technical and economic market potential of WHP in Southeast Asia is estimated to be 1788MW and 1188MW respectively. The main market drivers and barriers for WHP market expansion in Southeast Asia are also analyzed. Given the fact that WHP is a far cheaper power generation technology as compared with traditional and renewable power generation, the WHP market is expected to increase fast in the coming years. Mounting electricity price from grid, government emissions regulations and subsidies, the integration of WHP products with original equipment manufacturer, capital cost reduction induced by technology development are identified as the key drivers for the market growth. The above arguments are proofed through the analysis of a power plant WHP project in Southeast Asia.

Has China’s new round of collective forest reforms caused an increase in the use of productive forest inputs?

Forestland tenure and financial incentives are the most important policy issue to sustainable forest resource management. The new wave of reform of collective forestland tenure (NRCFT) has been launched since 2003 and the governmental matching reform measures (MRMs) for the NRCFT have been introduced since 2009. The objective of these reforms is to enhance sustainable forest resource management in Chinese collective regions by encouraging rural households’ productive forest inputs. We use a unique dataset of 1778 sample households in 18 counties of nine provinces with six years and employ a fixed effects model with clustered standard errors. Our empirical results indicate that: 1) the NRCFT has increased households’ forestland area of different tenure types, and the effects of the MRMs on rural households’ labor input and production expenditures for forestry purposes are generally positive, especially household used forestland as collateral for a loan and afforestation or reafforestation subsidy and reform of Annual Allowance Cut (AAC) have significantly contributed to increase in the use of productive forest inputs; 2) the NRCFT and the MRMs have different impacts on the use of productive forest inputs for different tenure forests, and these reforms have caused the most significant changes in rural households’ production decision changes for household responsibility forestland; 3) both the NRCFT and the MRMs have significant effects on rural households’ rent-in and rent-out forestland; and 4) forestland fragmentations have caused additional labor and investment inputs for rural households’ forest resource management and protection. And finally, market drivers and household and village characteristics factors also affect households’ decisions for productive inputs for their managing forests.

The trouble with cover crops: Farmers’ experiences with overcoming barriers to adoption

AbstractCover crops are known to promote many aspects of soil and water quality, yet estimates find that in 2012 only 2.3% of the total agricultural lands in the Midwestern USA were using cover crops. Focus groups were conducted across the Corn Belt state of Iowa to better understand how farmers confront barriers to cover crop adoption in highly intensive agricultural production systems. Although much prior research has focused on analyzing factors that help predict cover crop use on farms, there is limited research on how farmers navigate and overcome field-level (e.g. proper planting of a cover crop) and structural barriers (e.g. market forces) associated with the use of cover crops. The results from the analysis of these conversations suggest that there is a complex dialectical relationship between farmers' individual management decisions and the broader agricultural context in the region that constrains their decisions. Farmers in these focus groups shared how they navigate complex management decisions within a generally homogenized agricultural and economic landscape that makes cover crop integration challenging. Many who joined the focus groups have found ways to overcome barriers and successfully integrate cover crops into their cropping systems. This is illustrated through farmers' descriptions of their ‘whole system’ approach to cover crops management, where they described how they prioritize the success of their cover crops by focusing on multiple aspects of management, including changes they have made to nutrient application and modifications to equipment. These producers also engage with farmer networks to gain strategies for overcoming management challenges associated with cover crops. Although many participants had successfully planted cover crops, they tended to believe that greater economic incentives and/or more diverse crop and livestock markets would be needed to spur more widespread adoption of the practice. Our results further illustrate how structural and field-level barriers constrain individual actions, as it is not simply the basic agronomic considerations (such as seeding and terminating cover crops) that pose a challenge to their use, but also the broader economic and market drivers that exist in agriculturally intensive systems. Our study provides evidence that reducing structural barriers to adoption may be necessary to increase the use of this conservation practice to reduce environmental impacts associated with intensive agricultural production.

Sensitivity Analysis of Macroeconomic Forces and Sectoral Returns: Evidence from Energy and Textile Sectors of Pakistan

The basic purpose of this study is to empirically test the impact and sensitivity of macroeconomic factors on Energy and Textile sector of Pakistan. Secondary data is used for Macroeconomic variables, KSE-100, Textile and Energy Sector for the period 2008-2015. OLS, Unit Root Test, Granger-Causality and GARCH (1,1) tests have been used to analyze the senstivity behaviour. Resutls reveal that energy sector has most strong and positive relationship with market returns and this element is one of the major drivers of Pakistani equity market and the Textile sector has strong and negative relationship with change in crude oil price. Textile has also strong and positive relationship with change in exchange rate. Moreover, it is concluded that change in oil prices has negative and significant impact on energy sector. Further Exchange rate, inflation rate and market return have positive and significant impact on energy sector. There exists negative sensitivity and significant relationship between lagged textile return to present textile return. Further it is concluded that there exists negative sensitivity and significant relationship between lagged changes in crude oil price to present textile return. Moreover, there exists positive sensitivity and significant relationship between lagged changes in exchange rate to the current textile returns.

Techno-economic assessments of advanced Combined Cycle Gas Turbine (CCGT) technology for the new electricity market in the United Arab Emirates

In this study, a dynamic cost model was constructed to compare the Levelised Costs of Electricity (LCOE) for advanced Combined Cycle Gas Turbine (CCGT) technology in comparison to traditional CCGT technology. The key technical and economic factors that affected the competitiveness of these CCGT units were evaluated. The results showed that advanced H-class CCGT technology has the lowest LCOE for the base case scenario at 4.93UScents/kWh versus 5.32 and 5.71UScents/kWh for F- and E-class technologies respectively. It is evident that the more advanced CCGT technology matches the major market drivers for the United Arab Emirates (UAE) energy transition, namely; competitive lifecycle costs, high thermal efficiencies which reduce fuel costs and limit CO2 emissions and a high operational flexibility. The LCOE model outputs summarise the overall financial competitiveness of the different CCGT technologies for the UAE up to the year 2030 considering the future power generation demand profile. There are no H-class gas turbines installed in the UAE and this was one of the drivers behind this paper to show the benefits of the latest advanced CCGT technology. The study conveniently facilitates future discussions on the opportunities and challenges of the UAE’s energy transition for developers, electricity suppliers and national policy makers.

Social Housing Organisations in England and The Netherlands

Social Housing Organisations in England and The Netherlands

An Overview of Global Wheat Market Fundamentals in an Era of Climate Concerns

Wheat is a key global commodity in terms of acreage and tradeable value and as a staple in household diets. Many factors affect wheat prices including climate, yields, oil prices, lagged prices, and imports. In addition to gradually and consistently increasing global wheat demand, these market drivers are posited to impact world prices and, ultimately, food security. To investigate how these factors differentially influence wheat markets, an extensive survey of literature regarding wheat market fundamentals was conducted, as well as a trend analysis using a uniquely compiled data set specific to significant wheat-producing areas. Previous studies show that imports, climate, oil prices, and past prices, among other factors, have a significant relationship with changes in the world wheat price. This study compiles and compares these same key variables from five major wheat export countries/regions for the time frame from 1980 to 2013.

Market Drivers and Packaging Trends for Automotive Electronics

Market Drivers and Packaging Trends for Automotive Electronics

What Drives Export Market Shares? It Depends! An Empirical Analysis Using Bayesian Model Averaging

What drives external performance of countries? This is a recurring question in academia and policy. The factors underlying export growth are receiving great attention, as countries struggle to grow out of the crisis by increasing exports and as protectionist discourses take foot again. Despite decades of debates, it is still unclear what the drivers of external performance are and, importantly, which ones policy makers can influence. We use Bayesian Model Averaging in a panel setting to investigate the drivers of export market shares of 25 EU countries, considering a wide range of traditional indicators along with novel ones developed within the CompNet. We find that export market share growth is linked to different factors in the old and new EU Member States, with one exception: for both groups, competitive pressures from China have strongly affected export performance since the early 2000s. In the case of the old EU Member States, investment, the quality of institutions and liquidity available to firms also appear to play a role. For the new EU Member States, labour and total factor productivity are particularly important, while inward FDI matters more than domestic investment. Price competitiveness does not seem to play a very important role in either set of countries: relative export prices do show correlation with export performance for the new EU Member States, but only when they are adjusted for quality. Our results point to the importance of considering the exporting stage of a country when discussing export-enhancing policies.

Analysis of Market Orientation on Business Performance in the Multinational Service Industries

The paper examined the extent of market orientation on business performance in the multinational service industries in Ghana. It applied the behavioral viewpoint of market orientation measurement using MKTOR scale as a base in eliciting information from eleven marketing managers through in - depth interview while one hundred and sixty-three marketing managers were also surveyed using structured questionnaires. Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) statistical technique was used in analysing the data using Partial Least Square (PLS) software version 3.0. The findings revealed that, customer orientation and competitor orientation have significant positive relationships with business performance of the multinational service companies' activities whereas, inter-functional coordination did not have any influence on business performance. The study contributes to the negligible studies on market orientation measurement as a uni-dimensional construct as well as the limited studies on marketing managers as drivers of market oriented activities in the Sub-Saharan African countries.

Ethanol and sugarcane expansion in Brazil: what is fueling the ethanol industry?

This case study describes Brazilian ethanol industry and strategic issues faced by sugarcane farmers and processors as a result of recent industry expansion into the states of Goias and Mato Grosso do Sul. It provides detailed description of the ethanol supply chain in Brazil from field to market and discusses market drivers influencing the industry. Shaped by government regulations, market liberalization, globalization, and technological change, the Brazilian ethanol industry provides a rich context for learning and applying strategic analysis tools. The case is designed to be used in a graduate or undergraduate agribusiness management or strategic management course. The specific teaching objective for this case is to refine and reinforce students’ understanding of industry analysis and the effect of market drivers on competitive forces in an industry. Students will be expected to conduct an industry analysis and provide strategy recommendations to managers of ethanol plants and farmers. The case study incorporates all of the essential information for students to understand the underlying economics of the ethanol value chain and how the external forces shape strategic growth opportunities.

Market and policy drivers of antibiotic use in smallholder periurban dairy farms: A scoping literature review

Market and policy drivers of antibiotic use in smallholder periurban dairy farms: A scoping literature review

Developments in clinical food and nutrition science in Indonesia.

Indonesia, as a major population in the Asia Pacific region, threatened with food and health insecurity through climate change and rapid economic development, faces the challenge to build capacity among its science-based food and health professionals and institutions. The nutrition research agenda is now being more actively set within the region, rather than by external imposition. A series of papers emanating from a new generation of public health and clinical nutrition scientists is reported in this issue of APJCN. It draws attention to the importance of food patterns and background culture as contributors to the failure of the nutrient rather than a food, food system and socio-ecological approach to solve the region's intransigent nutritionally-related health problems. New understandings of human eco-social biology are providing opportunities to accelerate the resolution of these problems. The challenge is to transform the food-health construct from one which is not sufficiently concerned about the precarious state of ecologically dysfunctional health and its nutrient market drivers to one which strives for more sustainable and affordable solutions. The present reports address a range of options to these ends.

Marketing curriculum preparedness for Thailand

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to identify the key areas of marketing research inefficiencies for marketing education development in Thai colleges and universities so that possibilities of future research development can be encouraged and enhanced. It is a direct reflection of the drivers of marketing in the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) cross-correlated with issues that affect the development of adult learner curriculums with regard to the level of preparedness of future marketing leaders. Design/methodology/approach This is a quantitative focus on three different factors, but is not mutually exclusive since some research and reports resulted in multiple responses. Frequency distribution is used with both single and multiple answers. Findings The data reveals focuses on scholarly excellence from a nationalistic Thai cultural perspective that is devoid of impact to the future Thai social environment. Research limitations/implications The limitations are linear showing a unified vision across Thailand’s educational development with little variations in concept and outcome, using only Thai sensibilities as the guidepost for progression. Practical implications The benefit garnered from this type of study will be useful for corporate entities looking for trained and prepared marketing leaders of the future in the country of Thailand and throughout the AEC. Originality/value The scope is unique with very little likewise research previously conducted, focusing on a more effective model can be seen for Thailand’s future marketing curriculum development.