Measures Of Economic Performance Research Articles

“A ROSE, by any other name”…: relationship typology and performance measurement in supply chains

Purpose– The aim of this paper is to develop a comprehensive framework of supply chain performance that includes relationship, operational, strategic and economic performance measures.Design/methodology/approach– The literature regarding inter-organizational performance including: supply chain management, logistics and marketing performance measures is reviewed. A synthesis of the review provides the foundation for developing a comprehensive model of supply chain management performance.Findings– The review and synthesis finds that supply chain performance focuses primarily on operational and economic performance measures while paying less attention to relational and strategic performance measures. The comprehensive framework identifies four major categories of supply chain performance measures: relational; operational; strategic; and economic – hence the name ROSE.Originality/value– This comprehensive framework identifies four types of supply chain measures that can be used as a guiding framework by both academics and practitioners. The paper also offers directions for future work in the form of propositions.

Stock Market, Economic Performance, And Presidential Elections

Using stock market and economic data from 1900 to 2008 from 27 separate presidential administrations in the United States (U.S.), including 15 Republican and 12 Democratic, this paper examines the relationships between the market return after each Election Day and economic performance during the presidential term. Using the theoretical framework of political economy, the authors examine how Wall Streets reaction to a presidential election acts as a predictive measure of future economic performance. The analysis shows that the after-election market movement has progressively been more accurate in predicting the future Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth but not the future unemployment rates. Given that the results show a higher correlation over time, the model appears to provide a good starting point for judging the economic potential of future presidential administrations.

Do mergers and acquisitions among small and medium-sized enterprises affect the performance of acquiring firms?

This article investigates the post-merger performance effects resulting from mergers and acquisitions (M&As), drawing on a representative sample taken from all Swiss M&As occurring between 2006 and 2008, the majority of which took place between small and medium-sized firms (SMEs). Using this data, the study was able to investigate the impact of M&As on differing measures of economic performance, and also on innovation for the post-merger period of 2008–2010. The study found positive statistically significant performance effects arising from M&As for three of five critical performance indicators utilized. Furthermore, the evidence suggests that growth is a principal motive for external mergers, while efficiency is more influential on internal mergers.

The Measurement of Environmental Performance and Economic Performance Based on Catastrophe Theory: Case Studies of Thermal Power Industry and Steel Industry in China

We employed catastrophe theory and entropy method to measure and compare the environmental performance and economic performance of 40 listed companies from the thermal power and steel industries in China, to explore their relationship. The results showed that the environmental performance of the steel industry was less than that of the thermal power industry, but their economic performance was similar. This means that steel industry has had lower resource use efficiency and more pollutant emission, and has a larger potential to saving resources, energy and environment pollution. Both the correlation analysis and regression analysis indicated that there existed a significant positive relationship between the environmental performance and economic performance of the steel industry and thermal power industry in China. This means that it is very possible to gain win-win situation of these two performances, if the listed companies tend to make advanced production and environment protection activities come into a benevolent cycle, by means of technology upgrading and transformation.

Scotland's Economic Performance and the Fiscal Implications of Moving to Independence

Scotland's economic performance and fiscal make-up are key elements in the debate leading up to the forthcoming referendum on independence. However, in terms of understanding Scotland's economic performance, the situation is complicated by the high degree of overseas ownership, especially with regards to North Sea activity, and the importance of a natural commodity, oil. This makes the use of traditional measures of economic performance, like GDP or GDP per capita, less relevant than for most countries and suggests a greater need to use both constant price and cash GNI, neither of which are currently available. In terms of its fiscal balance, Scotland's independence would require taxes derived from its offshore (North Sea) activity to be sufficient to offset the extra monies (in per head terms) currently transferred from the rest of the UK (via the Barnett formula system) in order to pay for the current level of public services. Based on current projections, such North Sea related tax revenues would amount to less than the likely Barnett transfer, leading to a net loss in funding at the time of independence. Under such circumstances the question of whether or not Scotland could afford to initiate the building up of an ‘Oil Fund’, is largely a redundant one. However, uncertainties over both future oil and gas revenues and over the continuation of the existing Barnett system make it difficult to predict with any great certainty whether Scotland would see a longer-term net fiscal gain or loss post-independence. Apparent inconsistencies between official GNI and Scottish revenue figures also means that the existing fiscal balance position remains open to question.

Integration of economic, environmental, social and corporate governance performance and reporting in enterprises

Current trends of corporate performance evaluation, i.e. the measurement of environmental, social, economic and governance performance of company and corporate sustainable reporting are discussed in the paper. The relationship between company performance and reporting its key performance indicators is important, therefore, the development of modern and advanced methods and metrics to identify these indicators mainly based on the quantification with the possibility of utilization of information and communication technology are discussed.

Monitoring Subjective Well-Being: Some New Empirical Evidence for Germany

What is subjective well-being influenced by? Since the Report by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress by Stiglitz, Sen and Fitoussi a huge number of studies has raised this question – with partly different findings. In addition, international organizations are increasingly addressing subjective well-being issues. The post-2015 development agenda of the United Nations as well as the inclusive growth strategy of the OECD may be quoted as examples. Facing the current state of national and international discussion, this paper analyses appropriate indicators for the mostly named factors influencing subjective well-being. The goal of the empirical study for Germany is twofold: First of all, the indicators discussed prominently are analysed with regard to the relevance for explaining the degree of subjective well-being (micro level). Secondly, it is examined, whether the relevance of these indicators changes over time. The empirical results presented in this paper are mainly based on yearly longitudinal data of private households in Germany. Currently, the data set covers about 21,000 individuals living in more than 12,000 private households. The data set provides information on various indicators for subjective well-being mentioned by most of the recent studies, like for instance people’s life-circumstances and individual assessments. Concluding remarks concern on one hand the question if data from EU-SILC (because of its Europe-wide coverage) are useful in this context. On the other hand the combination of data at the micro level with indicators at the aggregate level is discussed as well.

Mineral Accounts in India – Towards Environmental Accounting Approach

Gross domestic product (GDP) does not account for depreciation of natural capital stock as a result of economic exploitation and environmental degradation. In other words, GDP may increase even when the stock of natural capital, such as minerals, soils and forests, is being depleted. Depletion of natural and human capital is excluded from total national wealth of a nation, and hence, the measures of economic performance are wrong and misleading. Natural resources such as water, soil, air, forest and woodland, minerals are very important to mankind and needed to be explicitly considered both at the macro and micro planning levels. Therefore, the inclusion of the natural environment in national accounts is important as it provides information on the use of natural resources in economic activities. The traditional system of national accounts (SNA) has a number of well-known shortcomings regarding the treatment of the environment. Mining generates income, (which is included in the national accounts and economic indicators like gross domestic product (GDP)), but at the same time, the process of mining depletes national wealth by using up the limited supply of mineral assets. To correct this omission, the 1993 System of National Accounts (SNA) (United Nations 1993), proposed inclusion of minerals as a set of satellite accounts to the SNA in order to provide a more accurate picture of extent to which an economy relies on minerals. Based on the significant contribution of minerals to the development of a developing nation, this paper presents a basic overview of the mining sector in the Indian economy and its accounting prospect to ensure sustainable development in India. To enable proper accounting of mineral wealth in India, we have developed physical accounts for five minerals (bauxite, gold, iron ore, limestone, lead and zinc) in the format suggested by SEEA, 2003. The paper also points towards the direction of developing a concrete methodology for the construction of monetary accounts for minerals in India and rectifying the problem of data lags.

Environmental sustainability in supply chains

In almost all industries companies are confronted with the sustainability challenge induced by climate change, end of fossil fuel and scarcity of natural resources, just to name a few. In general, sustainability management—the so-called triple bottom line—seeks to balance the economic, social and environmental performance (e.g. CO2, waste, or resource consumption). Traditionally, the development of supply chains is driven by measures like costs and customer service. More recently, in view of the sustainability challenge environmental issues are increasingly taken into consideration, for instance, by adding environmental constraints to supply chain models or by considering carbon taxes and emission trading schemes or by including the effect of green house gas emissions in the choice of the transportation mode. This naturally leads to multi-objective considerations in order to analyze the trade-off between economic and environmental performance measures. The primary objective of this special issue is to reflect the recent developments in sustainability management in supply chains and related transport systems and to examine research issues concerned with quantitative and other modeling techniques to improve the environmental performance of supply chains in industry. For this special issue twelve papers have been selected for publication after a thorough peerreview according to the standards of the FSM journal.

The Public Market Equivalent and Private Equity Performance

We provide a formal and rigorous justification for the Kaplan and Schoar (2005) public market equivalent (“PME”) measure of historical performance of private equity (“PE”) funds. The PME provides a valid economic performance measure when the investor (“LP”) has log-utility preferences and the return on the LP’s total wealth equals the market return. Notably, the PME is valid regardless of the risk of PE investments, and it is robust to variations in the timing and systematic risks of the underlying cash flows along with potential GP manipulations. Formally, we show that the PME is a generalized method-of-moments estimator using the stochastic discount factor implied by Rubinstein (1976)’s version of the capital asset pricing model.

The effectiveness of the combined use of VIX and Support Vector Machines on the prediction of S&P 500

The aim of this research is to analyse the effectiveness of the Chicago Board Options Exchange Market Volatility Index (VIX) when used with Support Vector Machines (SVMs) in order to forecast the weekly change in the S&P 500 index. The data provided cover the period between 3 January 2000 and 30 December 2011. A trading simulation is implemented so that statistical efficiency is complemented by measures of economic performance. The inputs retained are traditional technical trading rules commonly used in the analysis of equity markets such as Relative Strength Index, Moving Average Convergence Divergence, VIX and the daily return of the S&P 500. The SVM identifies the best situations in which to buy or sell in the market. The two outputs of the SVM are the movement of the market and the degree of set membership. The obtained results show that SVM using VIX produce better results than the Buy and Hold strategy or SVM without VIX. The influence of VIX in the trading system is particularly significant when bearish periods appear. Moreover, the SVM allows the reduction in the Maximum Drawdown and the annualised standard deviation.

Current trends of corporate performance reporting tools and methodology design of multifactor measurement of company overall performance

Enterprises normally have a different approach to performance reporting. Performance reporting, and unfortunately reporting globally, at small and middle enterprises are not widely supported or popular. It perceived as something what enterprises must do, not what they like to do. The reason could be because its time consuming for them or it gives not a good (or none) feedback to the enterprises. But there are also some of the enterprises, that have their performance reporting as normal part of the corporate culture and want to have reporting as part of their information system (ideally automated). The first step of successful implementation of the automated performance reporting into the information system is to formalize the business rule from natural language expression. Current trends of corporate performance reporting and performance evaluation, i.e., the measurement of environmental, social, economic and governance performance of a company, and corporate sustainable reporting, are discussed in the paper. The relationship between corporate performance and reporting is an important issue; and the design of modern and advanced methods to identify key performance indicators is discussed here along with the possibility of the utilization of XBRL taxonomy or/and Complex event processing (CEP) techniques and methods.

Changing Economic Leadership. A new benchmark of sector productivity in the United States and Western Europe, ca. 1910

TSEG (Tijdschrift voor Sociale en Economische Geschiedenis) - The Low Countries Journal of Social and Economic History, is het Nederlands-Vlaamse vaktijdschrift op het gebied van de sociale en economische geschiedenis

Measuring the social and economic performance of catch share programs: Definition of metrics and application to the U.S. Northeast Region groundfish fishery

In May 2010 the New England Fishery Management Council introduced a catch share, program in the Northeast Multispecies (groundfish) Fishery. Amendment 16 of the Northeast Multispecies Fishery Management Plan allocated quota to 17 self organized groups of permit holders based on their collective catch history. These groups are commonly referred to as Sectors and are similar to harvest cooperatives. Sectors represented a significant shift from previous management approaches reliant on limits to days at sea and other input controls. Given the potential for significant social and economic effects of catch shares and other management programs, social and economic performance measures were developed from 2009 to 2010 by Northeast Fisheries Science Center (NEFSC) social scientists. Previous social and economic monitoring of management outcomes had been ad hoc and provided minimal opportunity for inter-fishery comparison. This paper describes the process of identifying performance measures and associated indicators to serve as the foundation of monitoring social and economic outcomes for all federal fisheries in the U.S. Northeast Region, and for planning NEFSC social and economic research priorities. It then presents how these performance measures were applied to assess the first year of the Amendment 16 Sector program. Challenges and limitations of this process are presented along with a description of efforts underway to broaden the use of these social and economic metrics to other fisheries.

Intangible assets and firm heterogeneity: Evidence from Italy

The positive impact of intangible assets on several measures of economic performance is well documented in the literature. Less clear is what initially leads firms to invest in intangible assets. The latter is particularly important because, at least for the Italian manufacturing sector, firms exhibit strong heterogeneity in their investments in intangible assets. In line with the capability-based theory of the firm, we argue that the firm's propensity to invest in intangible assets can be explained by factors that are internal and specific to the firm. Making use of a rich dataset, we test and provide support for our hypotheses. In particular, we find that the propensity to invest in intangible assets increases with the firm's size, human capital, and historical intangible asset base. This points towards the existence of a cumulative process of intangible asset accumulation, which may account for most of the heterogeneity observed in the data. The paper adds to the previous literature in two ways: first, it highlights the existence of strong intra-industry heterogeneity in intangible asset investments, and second, it offers an explanation for such heterogeneity.

Quantifying Overall Performance of Highway Design, Construction, and M&R Practices Using ECC & ASL

Developing a method that quantitatively evaluates and compares the overall performance from economic (agency) and user service perspectives of the highways constructed with different designs, different construction practices, in different places with different environments, and under different traffic conditions with different Maintenance and Rehabilitation (M&R) histories, has been challenging. The factors (costs, effectiveness and traffic volume) are studied in this paper and then an economic and user service-based performance measure method is proposed to identify high or low pavement overall performance. The two indicators, Equivalent Comprehensive Cost (ECC) and an Average Service Level (ASL), in this method are proposed to evaluate the unit agency costs and average service level over the analysis period of the project quantitatively. Two different pavement projects were generated with hypothetical data to illustrate the ability of the proposed method to compare the overall performance of different projects, and a sensitivity analysis of the discount rate was also studied and discussed. Future research is recommended.

NegotiAuction: An experimental study

We investigated and compared economic performance of auction, negotiation and hybrid mechanisms of the NegotiAuction software. With the auction mechanism, bidders are required to submit bids consisting of quantity needed and other relevant non-price attributes, then they are returned with suggested prices to make them active. With the negotiation mechanism, the requested price button is turned off and the auction owner and the bidder are free to negotiate on one-on-one basis with other issues besides price and quantity. With the hybrid mechanism, characteristics of both negotiation and auction are combined. Twelve hypotheses involving economic performance measures were tested. On many measures, the hybrid mechanism was best for the auction owners.

Adaptive Flood Risk Management Under Climate Change Uncertainty Using Real Options and Optimization

It is well recognized that adaptive and flexible flood risk strategies are required to account for future uncertainties. Development of such strategies is, however, a challenge. Climate change alone is a significant complication, but, in addition, complexities exist trying to identify the most appropriate set of mitigation measures, or interventions. There are a range of economic and environmental performance measures that require consideration, and the spatial and temporal aspects of evaluating the performance of these is complex. All these elements pose severe difficulties to decisionmakers. This article describes a decision support methodology that has the capability to assess the most appropriate set of interventions to make in a flood system and the opportune time to make these interventions, given the future uncertainties. The flood risk strategies have been explicitly designed to allow for flexible adaptive measures by capturing the concepts of real options and multiobjective optimization to evaluate potential flood risk management opportunities. A state-of-the-art flood risk analysis tool is employed to evaluate the risk associated to each strategy over future points in time and a multiobjective genetic algorithm is utilized to search for the optimal adaptive strategies. The modeling system has been applied to a reach on the Thames Estuary (London, England), and initial results show the inclusion of flexibility is advantageous, while the outputs provide decisionmakers with supplementary knowledge that previously has not been considered.

Agricultural producers' groups in the Czech Republic: introductory review and discussion of the problem area economic performance measurement

Each company is surrounded by the micro- and macro-environment affecting also its economic performance. These factors are not only individual accounting entries, but also analytical inputs as the internal company processes, management of costs or short-term financial decisions and specifically in the case of agriculture within the EU also the public subsidy schemes implemented through the EU Common Agricultural Policy. Groups of agricultural producers are created as a response to current market dynamics and the opportunity for each agricultural enterprise regardless the size. In this paper, the basis for agricultural cooperation is provided, traditional economic performance measures are presented and their applicability on the sample of agricultural producers’ groups and wholesale entities is empirically verified. Wholesale entities are analysed by its business activity and performance features to consider whether they are suitable peer group for comparing economic performance of examined agricultural producers’ group. Since the economic performance of agricultural producers’ groups directly affects the economic performance of all participating entities, and vice versa, their economic performance measurement may involve specific constraints. According to the structure and characteristics of agricultural producers’ groups may be inferred that whilst the common performance measurement techniques are applicable on the majority of companies, agricultural producers’ groups represent specific entities and therefore need adjusted performance measurement approach.

Variables selection for quality of life evaluation in the European Union

In 2008 Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress introduced eight dimensions characterizing the economic performance as well as social well-being without proposing concrete list of variables. The aim of the article is therefore to propose a set of indicators for overall quality of life evaluation in the European Union in accordance to the dimensions introduced by the Commission. Part of the main objective is to propose a methodological tool for selection of indicators reflecting the needs of evaluating quality of life in the European Union. At the beginning a set of 114 variables was completed as a result of the findings listed by the Commission and based on empirical literature. The primary data set was reduced in two consecutive steps. The first step aims to reduce the correlation among the variables. As a result of the second steps, variables reflecting the different levels among consistent groups of states were selected. Therefore, the methodical approach in the second step was based on nonparametric procedures (tests) used to identify variables that are of significantly different levels in clusters identified by cluster analysis. As a result set of 52 variables for quality of life evaluation drawn from 4 different data sources was introduced.