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This chapter provides an empirical assessment of the effects of infrastructure provision on structural change and aggregate productivity using industrylevel data for a set of developed and developing countries over 1995–2010. A distinctive feature of the empirical strategy followed is that it allows the measurement of the resource reallocation directly attributable to infrastructure provision. To achieve this, a two-level top-down decomposition of aggregate productivity that combines and extends several strands of the literature is proposed. The empirical application reveals significant production losses attributable to misallocation of inputs across firms, especially among African countries. Also, the results show that infrastructure provision has stimulated aggregate total factor productivity growth through both within and between industry productivity gains.

Total factor productivity (TFP) change is an important driver of long-run economic growth in the construction sector. However, examining TFP alone is insufficient to identify the cause of TFP changes. Therefore, this paper employs the infrequently used Geometric Young Index (GYI) and stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) to measure and decompose the TFP Index (TFPI) at the firm-level from 2009 to 2018 based on Malaysian construction firms' data.

To improve the TFPI estimation, normally unobserved environmental variables were included in the GYI-TFPI model. These are the physical operation of the firm (inland versus marine operation) and regional locality (West Malaysia versus East Malaysia). Consequently, the complete components of TFPI (i.e. technological, environmental, managerial, and statistical noise) can be accurately decomposed.

The results reveal that TFP change is affected by technological stagnation and improvements in technical efficiency but a decline in scale-mix efficiency. Moreover, the effect of environmental efficiency on TFP is most profound. In this case, being a marine construction firm and operating in East Malaysia can reduce TFPI by up to 38%. The result, therefore, indicates the need for progressive policies to improve long-term productivity.

Monitoring and evaluating productivity change allows an informed decision to be made by managers/policy makers to improve firms' competitiveness. Incentives and policies to improve innovation, competition, training, removing unnecessary taxes and regulation on outputs (inputs) could enhance the technological, technical and scale-mix of resources. Furthermore, improving public infrastructure, particularly in East Malaysia could improve regionality locality in relation to the environmental index.

This study contributes to knowledge by demonstrating how TFP components can be completely modelled using an aggregator index with good axiomatic properties and SFA. In addition, this paper is the first to apply and include the GYI and environmental variables in modelling construction productivity, which is of crucial importance in formulating appropriate policies.

The main goal of this paper is to examine the evolution of Latin American productive integration in terms of the regional value added incorporated in intra-regional exports of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru. In addition, the study traces the trade and productive integration trajectories for each of these countries from 1995 to 2015.

Based on the use of OECD’s global ICIO input-output tables, this paper applies the methodological framework by Wang et al. (2018) for the analysis of trade flows at the bilateral level, which allows breaking down the value of gross exports of each sector-country, depending on the origin of the value added contained in exports, as well as their use.

The estimates show very low shares of value added from regional partners in the intra-regional exports of the countries studied. Conversely, the weight of the value added incorporated in these exports by countries outside the region has increased in tandem with China’s expanding involvement in Latin America. This development, along with the downward trend in domestic value added incorporated in exports, indicates a lack of a regional integration process of any depth.

This article addresses an economic problem of conventional importance from a global value chain perspective using a novel methodology based on the use of global input–output tables.

Recently, there has been a shift toward the embodied energy assessment of buildings. However, the impact of material service life on the life-cycle embodied energy has received little attention. We aimed to address this knowledge gap, particularly in the context of the UAE and investigated the embodied energy associated with the use of concrete and other materials commonly used in residential buildings in the hot desert climate of the UAE.

Using input–output based hybrid analysis, we quantified the life-cycle embodied energy of a villa in the UAE with over 50 years of building life using the average, minimum, and maximum material service life values. Mathematical calculations were performed using MS Excel, and a detailed bill of quantities with >170 building materials and components of the villa were used for investigation.

For the base case, the initial embodied energy was 57% (7390.5 GJ), whereas the recurrent embodied energy was 43% (5,690 GJ) of the life-cycle embodied energy based on average material service life values. The proportion of the recurrent embodied energy with minimum material service life values was increased to 68% of the life-cycle embodied energy, while it dropped to 15% with maximum material service life values.

The findings provide new data to guide building construction in the UAE and show that recurrent embodied energy contributes significantly to life-cycle energy demand. Further, the study of material service life variations provides deeper insights into future building material specifications and management considerations for building maintenance.

This study aims to explore the influence of health-care service quality on customers’ perceived value, satisfaction, effectiveness and behavioural intention concerning district health centres (DHCs) in Hong Kong. This research also intends to assess customers’ perception of the subsidy scheme and its influence on the relationships amongst the aforementioned constructs.

The convenience and snowball sampling approaches were adopted, and the self-administered questionnaire was sent to 309 customers of DHCs.

Service quality attributes in terms of staffing and procedures positively increased customers’ perceived value and staffing, procedures and operations. Physical facilities positively promoted customers’ satisfaction, consequently improving DHCs’ effectiveness and behavioural intention. However, core treatments and services of DHCs did not impact customers’ perceived value and satisfaction. Furthermore, customers receiving subsidies exhibited a more positive perception than those without subsidies.

Health-care organisations are advised to strategically allocate resources (staffing, facilities and procedures and operations management) to optimise overall performance outcomes. DHC operators could reinforce the core services of DHCs and health-care voucher subsidies to local citizens so as to enhance the effectiveness of DHCs and behavioural intention of customers.

This study integrates the input–process–output approach in measuring the effectiveness of and customers’ behavioural intention towards newly established DHCs.

This study aims to analyze and compare the relationship between international trade in global value chains (GVC) and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions for Brazil and China from 2000 to 2016.

The input-output method apply to multiregional tables from Eora-26 to decompose the GHG emissions of the Brazilian and Chinese productive structure.

The data reveals that Chinese production and consumption emissions are associated with power generation and energy-intensive industries, a significant concern among national and international policymakers. For Brazil, the largest territorial emissions captured by the metrics come from services and traditional industry, which reveals room for improving energy efficiency. The analysis sought to emphasize how the productive structure and dynamics of international trade have repercussions on the environmental dimension, to promote arguments that guide the execution of a more sustainable, productive and commercial development strategy and offer inputs to advance discussions on the attribution of climate responsibility.

The metrics did not capture emissions related to land use and deforestation, which are representative of Brazilian emissions.

Comparative analysis of emissions embodied in traditional sectoral trade flows and GVC, on backward and forward sides, for developing countries with the main economic regions of the world.

Businesses are increasingly vulnerable and exposed to physical climate change risks, which can cascade through local, national and international supply chains. Currently, few methodologies can capture how physical risks impact businesses via the supply chains, yet outside the business literature, methodologies such as sustainability assessments can assess cascading impacts.

Adopting a scoping review framework by Arksey and O'Malley (2005) and the PRISMA extension for scoping reviews (PRISMA-ScR), this paper reviews 27 articles that assess climate risk in supply chains.

The literature on supply chain risks of climate change using quantitative techniques is limited. Our review confirms that no research adopts sustainability assessment methods to assess climate risk at a business-level.

Alongside the need to quantify physical risks to businesses is the growing awareness that climate change impacts traverse global supply chains. We review the state of the literature on methodological approaches and identify the opportunities for researchers to use sustainability assessment methods to assess climate risk in the supply chains of an individual business.

Urbanization is driving the growth of China’s carbon footprint. It’s important to investigate what factors, how and to what extent, affect carbon footprints embedded in various categories of rural and urban households’ consumption.

We employ an environmental extended input-output model to assess and compare the rural-urban household carbon footprints and perform a multivariant regression analysis to identify the varying relationships of the determinants on rural and urban household carbon footprints based on the panel data of Chinese households from 2012 to 2018.

The results show evidence of urbanity density effect on direct carbon footprints and countervailing effect on indirect carbon footprints. The old dependency ratio has no significant effect on rural family emissions but has a significantly negative effect on urban direct and indirect carbon footprints. A higher child dependency ratio is associated with less rural household carbon emissions while the opposite is true for urban households. Taking advantage of recycled fuel saves direct carbon emissions and this green lifestyle benefits urban households more by saving more carbon emissions. There is a positive relationship between consumption structure ratio and direct carbon footprints while a negative relationship with indirect carbon footprints and this impact is less significant for urban households. The higher the price level of water, electricity and fuel, the lower the rural household’s direct carbon footprints. Private car ownership consistently augments household carbon footprints across rural and urban areas.

This paper provides comprehensive findings to understand the relationships between an array of determinants and China’s rural-urban carbon emissions, empowering China’s contribution to the global effort on climate mitigation.

Although multiple effective vaccines against the COVID-19 pandemic have been discovered, produced and deployed worldwide at exceptional rates, multiple countries have been left out due to numerous reasons, and the vaccination rates among these countries have been dismally low, while at the other end, some nations were able to inoculate almost all of their people. There have been studies concerning this issue, trying to understand the factors causing such inequity, and most of them look at socio-economic conditions like income and the behavioural factor of vaccine acceptance. This chapter, however, emphasises the role of trade and the global value chains (GVCs) in providing countries access to vaccines, which are being manufactured in a distributed system of production stages. The main concerned variables are vaccination rates and the GVC participation measure. Such analysis could help us understand whether being part of the production chain gives the countries an advantage in accessing the vaccine stocks, and the results suggest that the GVC participation rate does have an effect on the vaccination rate of a country.

This study reviews scholarly work in sustainable green logistics and remanufacturing (SGLR) and their subdisciplines, in combination with bibliometric, thematic and content analyses that provide a viewpoint on categorization and a future research agenda. This paper provides insight into current research trends in the subjects of interest by examining the most essential and most referenced articles promoting sustainability and climate-neutral logistics.

For the literature review, the authors extracted and sifted 2180 research and review papers for the period 2008–2023 from the Scopus database. The authors performed bibliometric and content analyses using multiple software programs such as Gephi, VOSviewer and R programming.

The SGLR papers can be grouped into seven clusters: (1) The circular economy facets; (2) Decarbonization of operations to nurture a climate-neutral business; (3) Green sustainable supply chain management; (4) Drivers and barriers of reverse logistics and the circular economy; (5) Business models for sustainable logistics and the circular economy; (6) Transportation problems in sustainable green logistics and (7) Digitalization of logistics and supply chain management.

In this review, fundamental ideas are established, research gaps are identified and multiple future research subjects are proposed. These propositions are categorized into three main research streams, i.e. (1) Digitalization of SGLR, (2) Enhancing scopes, sectors and industries in the context of SGLR and (3) Developing more efficient and effective climate-neutral and climate change-related solutions and promoting more environmental-related and sustainability research concerning SGLR. In addition, two conceptual models concerning SGLR and climate-neutral strategies are developed and presented for managers and practitioners to consider when adopting green and sustainability principles in supply chains. This review also highlights the need for academics to go beyond frameworks and build new techniques and instruments for monitoring SGLR performance in the real world.

This study provides an overview of the evolution of SGLR; it also clarifies concepts, environmental concerns and climate change practices, particularly those directed to supply chain management.