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This paper aims to uncover potential contemporaneous relationship between foreign portfolio investment (FPI) and another popular type of cross-border investment outflow, namely, foreign direct investment (FDI).

The relationship between FPI and FDI are modeled using simultaneous equations approach to take potential endogeneity in to account. In a panel of 45 countries over the period of 2001-2009, FPI and FDI are found to be strategically complimentary to each other.

The two-stage least square estimates suggest existence of both statistically and economically significant relationship between these two types of outflows. In particular, the FDI outflow has empirically significant predictive power in explaining the FPI outflow. Similarly, the FPI outflow also has significant explanatory power for the observed level of FDI outflow. Second, the FPI has greater explanatory power for FDI outflow than the FDI for the FPI outflow.

The authors believe that the paper would contribute to the relevant literature in terms of its originality and scope. The empirical findings of the paper have valuable policy implications.

The nature of construction works has a negative impact on physical, mental and emotional well-being and makes it difficult for the construction industry to attack and retain its workforce. The current study seeks to integrate the current knowledge focused on work–life balance (WLB) in the industry into an understandable whole.

An interpretivist philosophical approach was adopted using a bibliometric review and a narrative review of existing studies from both Scopus and Google databases. The Visualisation of Similarities viewer (VOSviewer) was used to prepare co-occurrence maps from the bibliographic data garnered.

The study reveals that the prominent factors influencing the WLB of the construction workforce are organizational culture, salary earned, heavy workload, long working hours and inflexible working time. The recent WLB discourse is on organisational commitment, job satisfaction and workplace dynamics. While WLB areas for further exploration are job stress, safety performance, employee attrition and an ageing workforce. Meanwhile, Africa and South America are still lagging in WLB research.

The findings reported here will assist stakeholders in identifying appropriate WLB initiatives that can be used to improve the well-being of the construction workforce. Also, the gaps in knowledge for further research were highlighted.

The findings reveal current trends and a road map for future studies on WLB in construction. It also reveals prominent factors influencing the WLB of workers in the construction industry.

Construction delay is the most common issue and creates many adverse effects in any construction industry. This study has investigated the views of engineers, project managers and contractors on the causes of delay during a construction phase to identify potential delay factors, negative effects on project delivery and prioritize the delay factors.

An extensive literature review and interview with construction stakeholders have been conducted to identify potential causes of construction delays and design a questionnaire survey. The final questionnaire was designed with 40 potential delay factors, and a total of 102 valid Bangladeshi construction stakeholders responded to it. The result was analyzed by the relative importance index.

Among the 40 delay factors, the top five most influencing delay factors are “delay in progress payments,” “rework due to mistakes during construction,” “lack of skilled labor,” “poor monitoring and control of activities” and “delays in the making of a decision.” The top five most damaging effects of delay are “time overrun,” “cost overrun,” “disputes,” “arbitration” and “litigation,” among ten negative effects of construction delay. All construction stakeholders believe that the owner-related, consultant-related and contractor-related groups are the first, second and third most important groups of delay factors.

The outcome of this study would enable the Bangladeshi construction industry to develop strategies to overcome delay factors and their harmful effects. By focusing on the outcome of this research and prioritizing the critical factors, the construction industry of Bangladesh will be able to minimize construction delay significantly and propagate the progress of the construction industry by delivering quality projects timely.

Business process workflow is a design conceptualization to automate the sequence of activities to achieve a business goal with involved participants and a predefined set of rules. Regarding this, a formal business workflow model is a prime requisite to implement a consistent and rigorous business process. In this context, majority of the existing research works are formalized structural features and have not focused on functional and behavioral design aspects of business processes. To address this problem, this paper aims to propose a formal model of business process workflow called as business process workflow using typed attributed graph (BPWATG) enriched with structural, functional and behavioral characteristics of business processes.

Typed attributed graph (ATG) and first-order logic have been used to formalize proposed BPWATG to provide rigorous syntax and semantics towards business process workflows. This is an effort to execute a business workflow on an automated machine. Further, the proposed BPWATG is illustrated using a case study to show the expressiveness of proposed model. Besides, the proposed graph is initially validated using generic modelling environment (GME) case tool. Moreover, a comparative study is performed with existing formal approaches based on several crucial features to exhibit the effectiveness of proposed BPWATG.

The proposed model is capable of facilitating structural, functional and behavioral aspects of business process workflows using several crucial features such as dependency conceptualization, timer concepts, exception handling and deadlock detection. These features are used to handle real-world problems and ensure the consistency and correctness of business workflows.

BPWATG is proposed to formalize a business workflow that is required to make a model of business process machine-readable. Besides, formalizations of dependency conceptualization, exception handling, deadlock detection and time-out concepts are specified. Moreover, several non-functional properties (reusability, scalability, flexibility, dynamicity, reliability and robustness) are supported by the proposed model.

Quality is a sensitive and high-priority issue in the global construction including in Bangladesh. This research is intended to provide necessary information to stakeholders and authorities for better management of the construction quality in Bangladesh. Therefore, this study seeks to find and prioritize the factors affecting the construction quality in Bangladesh.

In total 65 factors were extracted and categorized from the literature and expert panel discussion. Subsequently, these factors were designed in a questionnaire under 13 major groups for a survey where 176 construction professionals participated and returned their completed survey form. Collected data were tested by the Cronbach Alpha to check the reliability before proceeding to the Relative Importance Index (RII) analysis for determining the relative ranks of identified factors.

Statistical analysis of survey data represents that the most significant factors are: lack of management commitment, lack of technical skill and experience of the consultant, delays in progress investigation, political interference and contractor's desire for unrealistic profit. The most crucial major groups of factors influencing the construction quality are management, material, consultant, cost and time and contract-related major groups.

It will contribute to the body of knowledge, as it points out the impact of factors affecting quality in Bangladeshi construction. Authorities and stakeholders can be helped by the overview of the high and low ranks factors, understanding the diverse characteristics of factors and making more aware the industry about the quality issues which need to be a top concern to solve. Other developing countries that share the same socio-economic context as Bangladesh can be benefit from the results of this study to control quality issues in construction.

This paper aims to identify the relationship between efficiency and profitability by using data from Greek meat processing companies over the period 1994‐2007.

The relationship of efficiency and profitability is studied, by applying a new performance decomposition model. This method is capable of making valid and consistent inferences about the performance of a two‐stage production system, as well as the main sources of inefficiencies within a company.

A poor performance over the study period is observed in the sample companies. The low performance is mainly due to the low profitability. The results do not confirm the existence of a positive strong correlation between efficiency and profitability. The companies that have the capability of producing their products with the best practices are not always capable of generating the maximum profits.

The need for the improvement of performance has two aspects: first, it is a demand for the effective use of resources, and simultaneously, it is an urgent requirement for the generation of profits. According to the study findings, the long‐term survival of firms in our sample seems to require adopting mainly profitability‐enhancing strategies.

This paper provides one of the first evaluations of performance focusing on efficiency and profitability, by applying an innovative performance decomposition approach that has not yet been applied in Greek industries.

A positive outlook on the impact of Industry 4.0 (I4.0) on sustainability prevails in the literature. However, some studies have highlighted potential areas of concern that have not yet been systematically addressed. The goal of this study is to challenge the assumption of a sustainable Fourth Industrial Revolution by (1) identifying the possible unintended negative impacts of I4.0 technologies on sustainability; (2) highlighting the underlying motivations and potential actions to mitigate such impacts; and (3) developing and evaluating alternative assumptions on the impacts of I4.0 technologies on sustainability.

Building on a problematization approach, a systematic literature review was conducted to develop potential alternative assumptions about the negative impacts of I4.0 on sustainability. Then, a Delphi study was carried out with 43 experts from academia and practice to evaluate the alternative assumptions. Two rounds of data collection were performed until reaching the convergence or stability of the responses.

The results highlight various unintended negative effects on environmental and social aspects that challenge the literature. The reasons behind the high/low probability of occurrence, the severity of each impact in the next five years and corrective actions are also identified. Unintended negative environmental effects are less controversial than social effects and are therefore more likely to generate widely accepted theoretical propositions. Finally, the alternative hypothesis ground is partially accepted by the panel, indicating that the problematization process has effectively opened up new perspectives for analysis.

This study is one of the few to systematically problematize the assumptions of the I4.0 and sustainability literature, generating research propositions that reveal several avenues for future research.

Flights are often delayed owing to emergencies. This paper proposes a cooperative slot secondary assignment (CSSA) model based on a collaborative decision-making (CDM) mechanism, and the operation mode of flight waves designs an improved intelligent algorithm to solve the optimal flight plan and minimize the total delay of passenger time.

Taking passenger delays, transfer delays and flight cancellation delays into account comprehensively, the total delay time is minimized as the objective function. The model is verified by a linear solver and compared with the first come first service (FCFS) method to prove the effectiveness of the method. An improved adaptive partheno-genetic algorithm (IAPGA) using hierarchical serial number coding was designed, combining elite and roulette strategies to find pareto solutions.

Comparing and analyzing the experimental results of various scale examples, the optimization model in this paper is greatly optimized compared to the FCFS method in terms of total delay time, and the IAPGA algorithm is better than the algorithm before in terms of solution performance and solution set quality.

Based on the actual situation, this paper considers the operation mode of flight waves. In addition, the flight plan solved by the model can be guaranteed in terms of feasibility and effectiveness, which can provide airlines with reasonable decision-making opinions when reassigning slot resources.

Business cycle theory is normally described as having evolved out of a previous tradition of writers focusing exclusively on crises. In this account, the turning point is seen as residing in Clément Juglar's contribution on commercial crises and their periodicity. It is well known that the champion of this view is Schumpeter, who propagated it on several occasions. The same author, however, pointed to a number of other writers who, before and at the same time as Juglar, stressed one or another of the aspects for which Juglar is credited primacy, including the recognition of periodicity and the identification of endogenous elements enabling the recognition of crises as a self-generating phenomenon. There is indeed a vast literature, both primary and secondary, relating to the debates on crises and fluctuations around the middle of the nineteenth century, from which it is apparent that Juglar's book Des Crises Commerciales et de leur Retour Périodique en France, en Angleterre et aux États-Unis (originally published in 1862 and very much revised and enlarged in 1889) did not come out of the blue but was one of the products of an intellectual climate inducing the thinking of crises not as unrelated events but as part of a more complex phenomenon consisting of recurring crises related to the development of the commercial world – an interpretation corroborated by the almost regular occurrence of crises at about 10-year intervals.