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Consumerism is fast emerging as an environmental force affecting major business decisions as consumers become more aware about their rights. Even though comprehensive staturory measures have been provided in India for curbing unfair business practices, for protecting consumer interest, and for promoting consumerism; companies have yet to do a lot. This paper seeks to assess the impact of consumerism marketing practices in India. It examines how businessmen react, respond and adapt to consumerism and the problems posed and opportunities provided by consumerism. It seeks to ascertain whether the firms are capable of handling consumerism pressures and to identify appropriate measures for minimising consumer dissatisfaction and complaints. Based on a survey of 65 companies, located in the National Capital Region of Delhi, and engaged in the production of consumer durables, they study has reevealed that a broad recognition and growing acceptance of consumerism tends to make the firms more consumer‐oriented rather than product‐oriented. It is noted that consumerism tends to serve as an opportunity for those corporate managers who are able to identify and anticipate the consumer’s problems.

While firms in developing countries are increasingly adopting lean practices of inventory management, there is limited evidence showing the impact of lean practices on firm performance in countries such as India. Lean practices improve the financial performance of the firms through superior cost-reduction measures and operational efficiencies. This paper examines the impact of inventory leanness in Indian manufacturing firms on their financial performance.

The authors measure inventory leanness based on stochastic frontier analysis (SLA), apart from using conventional measures available in the literature. The authors analyze the impact of inventory leanness on the financial performance of firms by examining data for 12,334 unique Indian manufacturing firms for the period 2009–2018. The authors present a comparative analysis using different methods of inventory leanness and study the effects on firm performance.

First, the authors find that only 68 industries out of 411 industries follow lean practices, i.e. most industries do not follow lean practices. Second, the estimation results show that there exists a positive relationship between inventory leanness and firm performance. The results suggest that an inverted U-shaped relationship exists between inventory leanness and firm performance for the entire sample. In particular, 17% of the industries in the sample exhibit such a relationship, and it is sufficiently strong to show up in the average regression results for the entire sample.

The authors introduce a novel measure of inventory leanness named stochastic frontier leanness based on the SFA method used in production economics. It measures leanness by benchmarking the inventory levels against the industry “frontier”. Furthermore, the authors conduct an empirical study of the lean-financial performance relationship with a large panel dataset of Indian firms instead of the survey-based methods that were previously used in the literature.

This study aims to examine the relationship between corporate environmental responsibility (CER) practices and different types of innovation carried out by small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Vietnam.

The authors employ the bivariate probit model and the two-stage least squares regression model to estimate the effects of CER on process innovation and product innovation of SMEs.

The findings show that while CER is not significantly related to product innovation, it has a positive and significant effect on process innovation. Further analysis indicates that CER engagement increases labor productivity and financial performance of SMEs.

Corporate managers should view implementation of environmental responsibility practices as a strategy to foster process innovation and boost labor productivity and financial performance. For policy makers, government support for firms proactively engaging in CER practices could encourage firms to pursue innovative activities, which are vital to their long-term success as well as to the society's prosperity.

This study makes several important contributions. First, the authors provide new empirical evidence regarding the different effects of engaging in environmentally friendly practices on firm innovation in an under-examined emerging market setting. Second, the authors enrich our understanding of potential benefits of CER implementation. Third, the findings suggest that firm innovation may play a mediating role in the CER–firm performance association.