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The purpose of this paper was to assess the economic impact of investment in different animal welfare–enhancing flooring solutions in Swedish dairy farming.

The authors developed a bio-economic model and used stochastic partial budgeting approach to simulate the economic consequences of enhancing solid and slatted concrete floors with soft rubber covering.

The findings highlight that keeping herds on solid and slatted concrete floor surfaces with soft rubber coverings is a profitable solution, compared with keeping herds on solid and slatted concrete floors without a soft covering. The profit per cow when kept on a solid concrete floor with soft rubber covering increased by 13%–16% depending on the breed.

Promoting farm investments such as improvement in flooring solution, which have both economic and animal welfare incentives, is a potential way of promoting sustainable dairy production. Farmers may make investments in improved floors, resulting in enhanced animal welfare and economic outcomes necessary for sustaining dairy production.

This literature review indicated that the economic impact of investment in specific types of floor improvement solutions, investment costs and financial outcomes have received little attention. This study provides insights needed for a more informed decision-making process when selecting optimal flooring solutions for new and renovated barns that improve both animal welfare and ease the burden on farmers and public financial support.

Companies are constantly striving for superior customer service that meets consumers' expectations. Products that do not provide consumers with good service quality are unlikely to meet the expectations of consumers. The aim is to maximize customer satisfaction and achieve financial success by closing gaps to provide high-quality service to consumers. Customers use quality of service to choose a service provider. This does not only include the quality of products or service but also the quality of customer service. The five essential elements (5Es) – experience, emotions, exclusivity, execution and engagement – must be used by companies to ensure that their products and services meet defined standards or customer's expectations. The customer's opinion of a service is formed immediately, regardless of whether it is positive or negative. The result of a negative customer experience is negative word of mouth, which would cause loss in business from dissatisfied customers as well as from potential customers who will no longer use the services. Using the gap model for service quality, this study proposes the essential 5Es of service quality. As a result of the synthesis of this current research, the company's service delivery will be improved by identifying weaknesses. The use of these 5Es for the control of service quality and monitoring of quality defects leads to better understanding and reduction of cost.

Management and leadership in health care are described as complex and challenging, and the span of control is known to be a key component in the manager’s job demands. The implementation of change can be a challenge in health care, and managers often have roles as implementation leaders. Little attention has been given to how managers perceive the process of implementation. Thus, this study aims to explore second-line managers’ perceptions of, prerequisites for and experiences from the implementation of changes in their manager’s work conditions.

A grounded theory–based qualitative design was used. Data were collected from a purposive sample of nine second-line managers by individual semi-structured interviews. The three stages of initial coding, focus codes and axial coding were used in data analysis.

Three thematic areas were identified: engagement, facilitation and achievement. The second-line managers’ descriptions suggest that the change work entails a complex challenge with an unclear result. Involvement, consideration for the context and facilitation are needed to be able to conduct a cohesive implementation process.

This study findings outline that to succeed when implementing change in complex organizations, it is crucial that managers at different levels are involved in the entire process, and that there are prerequisites established for the facilitation and achievement of goals during the planning, implementation and follow-up.

Spare Parts Management (SPM) and Industry 4.0 has proven their importance. However, employment of Industry 4.0 solutions for SPM is at emerging stage. To address the issue, this article is aimed toward a systematic literature review on SPM in Industry 4.0 era and identification of research gaps in the field with prospects.

Research articles were reviewed and analyzed through a content-based analysis using four step process model. The proposed framework consists of five categories such as Inventory Management, Types of Spares, Circularity based on 6Rs, Performance Indicators and Strategic and Operational. Based on these categories, a total of 118 research articles published between 1998 and 2022 were reviewed.

The technological solutions of Industry 4.0 concepts have provided numerous opportunities for SPM. Industry 4.0 hi-tech solutions can enhance agility, operational efficiency, quality of product and service, customer satisfaction, sustainability and profitability.

The review of articles provides an integrated framework which recognizes implementation issues and challenges in the field. The proposed framework will support academia and practitioners toward implementation of technological solutions of Industry 4.0 in SPM. Implementation of Industry 4.0 in SPM may help in improving the triple bottom line aspect of sustainability which can make significant contribution to academia, practitioners and society.

The examination uncovered a scarcity of research in the intersection of SPM and Industry 4.0 concepts, suggesting a significant opportunity for additional investigative efforts.

With the recognition that generating economic growth is not the same as sustaining it, the challenge to catch-up and growth literature is discerning between these processes. Recent research suggests that the decline in the frequency of “shrinking” episodes is more important for long-term development than higher growth rates. By using a framework centred around social capabilities, this study aims to investigate the effects of income inequality and poverty on economic shrinking frequency, as opposed to previous literature that has exclusively had a growth focus. The aim is to investigate how and why some societies might be more resilient to economic shrinking.

The research is a quantitative study, and the authors build a longitudinal data set including 23 developing countries throughout 42 years to test the paper’s purpose. This study uses country and period fixed-effects specifications as well as cross-sectional graphical representations to investigate the relationship between proxies of economic inclusivity and the frequency of shrinking episodes.

The authors demonstrate that while inclusive societies are more resilient to shrinking overall, it is changes in poverty levels, but not changes in income inequality, that appear to be correlated with economic shrinking frequency. Inequality, while still an important element to explain countries’ growth potential as an initial condition, does not seem to make the sample more resilient to shrinking. The authors conclude that the mechanisms in which poverty and inequality are correlated with the catch-up process must run through different channels. Ultimately, processes that explain growth may intersect but not always overlap with the ones that explain resilience to shrinking.

The need for inclusive growth in long-term development has been championed for decades, yet inclusion has seldom been explored from the shrinking perspective. Though poverty reduction is already an important mainstream political objective, this paper differentiates itself by providing an alternate viewpoint of why this is important. Income inequality could have more of an economic growth limiting effect, while poverty reduction could be required to build resilience to economic shrinking. Developing countries will need both growth and resilience to shrinking, to catch-up with higher-income economies, which policymakers might need to balance carefully.

The purpose of this paper is to explore local residents' perceptions of sustainability of different festivals making festival portfolio in Zanzibar.

The study used multiqualitative methods and comparative case analysis that made use of in-depth interviews, observation and focus group discussion as the data collection techniques. Thematic content analysis was used to describe festivals from residents' point of views.

The results indicate residents to perceive two broader types of festivals: Ours and Theirs that have different impacts on sustainability of the festivals.

The ours and theirs dichotomy of festivals from residents' perspectives extends the conceptualization of festivals. In line with the event portfolio framework, the emerged types of festival aid event planners with understanding and managing the events with the aim of making the festival and the destinations sustainable.

The bifurcated perception of festival ownership provides a complimentary theoretical lens that can be applied to explain the festival workings and management that emphasize the need for places to have festival portfolio catering for different segments.

This chapter tests theoretically and empirically the existence of a stable relationship between energy consumption and CO2 emissions. Based on microeconomics and physics, a model has been specified and applied to annual data for twenty countries, which representing 61 percent of the world’s population in 2018, over the period 1995–2015. The data are from the International Energy Agency (2019) and econometric techniques including panel data and causality tests have been used. The results indicate that there is a causal relationship between energy consumption and CO2 emissions. In general, consumers cannot directly change emissions caused by production processes, but they can act on emissions caused by their own domestic energy consumption. Approximately three quarters of domestic energy consumption is due to heating and domestic hot water consumption. Taking into account the lower emissions and the lower economic cost of the initial investment, four potential energy systems have been selected for use in heating and domestic hot water. Their social returns have been assessed across nine of the twenty countries in the sample over a lifecycle of 25 years from 2018: France, Portugal, Ireland, Spain, Iceland, Germany, United Kingdom, Morocco and the United States. Cost-benefit analysis techniques have been used for this purpose and the results indicate that the use of thermal water, where applicable, is the most socially profitable system among the proposed systems, followed by natural gas. The least socially profitable systems are those using electricity.

The aim of this study is to understand how board structure, size of audit committee (AC), gender diversity and ownership structure influence banks’ performance in Pakistan. This study also aims to examine how various dimensions of governance differently affect the different measures of bank performance.

This study used panel estimation techniques to quantify the impact of various elements of corporate governance on bank performance by taking annual data of 19 Pakistani banks for the period 2013–2020. The corporate governance is measured by board size, CEO duality, AC size, ownership structure and gender diversity. To get the robust results, this study measures bank performance by considering different indicators, namely, return on assets, earning per share, technical efficiency (TE) and total factor productivity. The empirical investigation is based on several well-known and well-accepted governance theories such as the agency theory, the stewardship theory, the tokenism/critical mass theory and the information asymmetry theory.

The findings of the study reveal that the size of board and ACs both significantly improve profitability and productivity, whereas they decrease TE. Further, the findings suggest that most of the indicators of gender diversity significantly deteriorate the performance of banks. However, ownership structure significantly improves banks’ earnings per share and TE. This study further illustrates that CEO’s duality does not have any significant impact on bank performance. This finding holds true for all the performance measures considered for this study.

The findings are of great importance to various stakeholders, especially to policymakers to know about the factors influencing different measures of performance. Specifically, based on these findings, they can devise the result-oriented strategies to enhance the financial and real performance of banks. The findings also suggest that both investors and owners should take into consideration the governance indicators while evaluating banks’ performance by using accounting, market-based, efficiency and productivity measures.

This research adds to the vast body of existing knowledge about the effectiveness of corporate governance by investigating how the different dimensions of corporate governance and gender diversity influence bank performance in a developing country, namely, Pakistan. Further, this study elaborates the domestic rules/regulations, governance theories and governance framework and practices and tries to link the empirical findings with them for better understanding the role of governance in determining the performance of the banking sector of Pakistan.

This study primarily aims to develop and solve an enhanced optimisation model for an assembly product multi-period inbound inventory routing problem (IRP). The many-to-one (inbound) model considers the bill of materials (BOM), supply failure risks (SFR) and customer demand uncertainty. The secondary objective is to study the influence of potential time-dependent model variables on the overall supply network costs based on a full factorial design of experiments (DOE).

A five-step solution approach is proposed to derive the optimal inventory levels, best sourcing strategy and vehicle route plans for a multi-period discrete manufacturing product assembly IRP. The proposed approach considers an optimal risk mitigation strategy by considering less risk-prone suppliers to deliver the required components in a specific period. A mixed-integer linear programming formulation was solved to derive the optimal supply network costs.

The simulation results indicate that lower demand variation, lower component price and higher supply capacity can provide superior cost performance for an inbound supply network. The results also demonstrate that increasing supply capacity does not necessarily decrease product shortages. However, when demand variation is high, product shortages are reduced at the expense of the supply network cost.

A two-echelon supply network for a single assembled discrete product with homogeneous vehicle fleet availability was considered in this study.

The proposed multi-period inbound IRP model considers realistic SFR, customer demand uncertainties and product assembly requirements based on a specific BOM. The mathematical model includes various practical aspects, such as supply capacity constraints, supplier management costs and target service-level requirements. A sensitivity analysis based on a full factorial DOE provides new insights that can aid practitioners in real-life decision-making.