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Examines the use of a precision robot for automatic testing of complex geometries with free‐form surfaces. Each of its three rotation and bending axes have directly driven DC motors and high accuracy optical angle sensors. The distance between the ultrasonic probes and the workpiece can be measured by means of an ultrasonic distance sensor and the data gathered is transmitted to a workstation a graphical representation is produced which is visualised in real time by means of a high‐speed graphics processor. Using menu‐driven software, components with almost any free‐form surface can rapidly be excoriated, modelled and tested with freely selectable paths of very high resolution.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a practical framework that health care organizations could use to decrease preventable healthcare-acquired harms.

An existing theory of how hospitals succeeded in reducing rates of central line-associated bloodstream infections was refined, drawing from the literature and experiences in facilitating improvement efforts in thousands of hospitals in and outside the USA.

The following common interventions were implemented by hospitals able to reduce and sustain low infection rates. Hospital and intensive care unit (ICU) leaders demonstrated and vocalized their commitment to the goal of zero preventable harm. Also, leaders created an enabling infrastructure in the way of a coordinating team to support the improvement work to prevent infections. The team of hospital quality improvement and infection prevention staff provided project management, analytics, improvement science support, and expertise on evidence-based infection prevention practices. A third intervention assembled Comprehensive Unit-based Safety Program teams in ICUs to foster local ownership of the improvement work. The coordinating team also linked unit-based safety teams in and across hospital organizations to form clinical communities to share information and disseminate effective solutions.

This framework is a feasible approach to drive local efforts to reduce bloodstream infections and other preventable healthcare-acquired harms.

Implementing this framework could decrease the significant morbidity, mortality, and costs associated with preventable harms.

Inhibitors v. nitric acid corrosion. The addition of certain surface‐active substances in fixed proportions to concentrated acids and in particular to nitric acid (S.G.I.50) practically inhibits any corrosion of steels and light alloys.

Health-care marketing typically entails a coordinated set of outreach and communications designed to attract consumers (patients in the health-care context) who require services for a better health outcome and guide them throughout their health-care journey to achieve a higher quality of life. The purpose of this study is to understand the progress and trends in healthcare marketing strategy (HMS) literature between 2018 and 2022, with a special emphasis on the pre- and post-Covid-19 periods.

The authors examine 885 HMS-related documents from the WOS database between 2018 and 2022 that were extracted using a keyword-based search strategy. After that, the authors present the descriptive statistics related to the corpus. Finally, the authors use author co-citation analysis (ACA) and bibliographic coupling (BC) techniques to examine the corpus.

The authors present the descriptive statistics as research themes, emerging sub-research areas, leading journals, organisations, funding agencies and nations. Further, the bibliometric analysis reveals the existence of five thematic clusters: Cluster 1: macroeconomic and demographic determinants of healthcare service delivery; Cluster 2: strategies in healthcare marketing; Cluster 3: socioeconomics in healthcare service delivery; Cluster 4: data analytics and healthcare service delivery; Cluster 5: healthcare product and process innovations.

This study provides an in-depth analysis of the advancements made in HMS-related research between 2018 and 2022. In addition, this study describes the evolution of research in this field from before to after the Covid-19 pandemic. The findings of this study have both research and practical significance.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study of its kind to use bibliometric analysis to identify advancements and trends in HMS-related research and to examine the pattern before and after Covid-19 pandemic.

The paper aims to examine the effects of outward foreign direct investment (O‐FDI) on home‐country productivity.

A panel data set for 15 Taiwanese manufacturing industries over the period between 1991 and 2007 is employed for a model in which productivity is regressed on a measure of O‐FDI.

The study finds no significant positive or negative effect of O‐FDI on productivity. Breaking down the data by location of the investment, however, we find that O‐FDI in other countries enhances productivity in Taiwan, while O‐FDI in China does not. We interpret the positive role of O‐FDI in other countries as relating to the outcome of strategic asset‐seeking nature of Taiwanese investments in these countries.

In order to analyse the productivity effect of O‐FDI more precisely, one would need to compare the firm outcomes in the presence of multinational production with the outcomes that would have prevailed in the absence of multinational production. Unfortunately, we cannot observe what would have happened to firms that did engage in multinational production had they not done so.

The findings suggest that the Taiwanese Government should distinguish the level of liberalization towards O‐FDI for different locations and in different types of industries. In particular, the government should channel more investment towards export‐oriented industries especially those in “other countries”.

The paper employs a contingency approach, examining the conditions under which O‐FDI impacts upon home productivity.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of different kinds of merger and acquisitions (M&As) on domestic industries’ productivity in the form of technological change (TC) and efficiency change (EC) in the Brazilian extracting and processing industries.

Panel data analysis is employed to test the impact of different kinds of M&As spillovers on each component of productivity growth. The database contains data collected from 2007 to 2011 referring to the Brazilian industries. The estimation procedure involves two stages. The first stage decomposes TFP growth into EC and TC using a input-based Malmquist Productivity Index. In the second step, EC and TC indexes are used interchangeably as a dependent variable in panel data regressions on the M&As-spillover variables.

The results indicate a positive relationship between TC and M&As made by Brazilian majority capital acquiring foreign-held capital from a company established abroad, which is consistent with reverse spillover theory. They also suggest an inverse relationship between TC and M&A operations made by companies with foreign majority capital acquiring both Brazilian-held capital and foreign-held capital from a company established in Brazil. Only the sectors that are capable of increasing their productivity via TC are able to benefit from technology transfer.

This study is limited by the extent of data aggregation applied, which did not identify M&A transaction effects at the firm level. The available data do not allow isolating the effects of M&A processes on industry performance, given the co-occurrence of several factors that affect the performance of the industry. The study results imply that public managers must remain cognizant of the critical need to preserve and maximize competition between foreign and domestic firms while promoting a competitive environment that encourages the development of domestic technological capacities and skilled human capital.

M&A processes raise important issues with respect to organizational decisions and industrial policy. Studies of M&A transactions may be of fundamental importance to the expansion of healthy companies as they evolve through successive stages of growth and development. Liberalizing regulations to promote M&A transactions, and corporate market control is only justified if it promotes social welfare and economic development. Understanding the complexity and dynamics of this phenomenon and appreciating the heterogeneity of possible outcomes can lead to more relevant discussion regarding their contributions.

Results found in this study indicate the need for greater efforts to understand how M&A operations, especially those associated to foreign-held capital, interact with local owned enterprises in developing economies and what benefits can be achieved through public policy. M&A operations need to be well evaluated by considering the kinds and intensities of externalities they might generate, whether and how local firms can potentially internalize those gains, building up absorptive capacities in order to achieve productivity spillover gains.

This study not only offers a more accurate understanding of the diverse nature and effects of M&A operations, but also stimulates a more relevant public policy discussion related to both foreign direct investment and OFDI incentives in Brazil. The growing economic importance of the activities of developing emerging countries’ multinational enterprises is making governments more inclined to re-evaluate their political strategies. Indeed, governments are beginning to recognize that markets need to be created, monitored and nurtured.

Issues related to economic development and growth are oft discussed to illustrate the health of a nation. However, such development is constrained by the inequality parameter of the representative society. Again, economic fluctuations arising from several crises may hinder the representative nation from getting on a smooth path to development. Now, augmentation of crises along with the presence of inequality may trigger economic vulnerabilities, leading to unsustainable economic development. Against this backdrop, we initially frame a theoretical model to capture the above-mentioned issues and try to derive plausible economic interpretations for the same. To verify the same in a more robust manner, we consider a panel of 30 developing countries from Africa, spanning the time period 1980–2020. Both the health status and the education status of our panel of countries are used to explore the sustainability issue in the presence of income inequality. All data have been collected from the World Development Indicators (WDI) and Standardized World Income Inequality Database (SWIID) (Table 21.1

Variables Description.

This study aims to examine whether diversified economies enhance the growth benefits from foreign direct investment (FDI). Diversified economies benefit from stable export earnings, stable investment composition and greater factor endowments through forward and backward linkages that can leverage superior foreign technology embedded in FDI. This is crucial as many African economies suffer from dependency while FDI is concentrated in the primary sector.

The authors use a dataset of 15 Economic Community of West African States from 1995 to 2020 and compile variables from various sources, including an export diversification index measured using the Herfindahl–Hirschman index of product concentration. The authors use a growth regression model estimated using dynamic panel estimators to control for endogeneity and simultaneity issues.

The results show that the effects of direct FDI are insignificant to growth considering diversification and controlling for other confounding factors. Meanwhile, diversification is associated with growth, which highlights the importance of industrial policy. More importantly, the authors find that the marginal effects of FDI are positively and significantly associated with growth when diversification levels are low, implying that production structure matters for the FDI–growth nexus in developing economies.

Previous studies have overlooked the role of export production structure on the FDI–growth nexus. Many developing economies are dependent on primary exports and suffer from dependency, which implies lower levels of factor endowments. As such, this reduces the growth gains from FDI. The authors provide new empirical evidence on the importance of export production structure on the FDI–growth nexus.

Export product concentration is common in developing nations, where raw materials and semi-manufactured commodities face rigid demand in international markets. This leads to the monopolisation of exports, particularly when targeting the developed world. Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) nations have prioritised diversification to boost exports and per capita income, globalising their economies. The normalised Hirschman index is employed to analyse the determinants influencing the diversification of exports in ASEAN and SAARC countries from 2018 to 2021. Except for the fuel intensity variable, the results show that structural transformation, competitive advantages, industrial sector expansion, institutional capability, local investment development, financial stability and overall economic performance positively promote export diversification intensity. The key result is that institutional strength helps nations rapidly diversify their exports, highlighting the importance of structural transformation in boosting exports and globalising economies.