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Skill shortages have been a recurring problem and are likely to re‐emerge as the UK economy recovers from recession. Presents evidence from the Skill Needs survey 1990, close to the peak of the last cycle. It shows that different measures of shortage can give different results with quite different policy implications. In particular, it demonstrates that occupations associated with the most intensive skill shortages within establishments are generally quite different from occupations where the shortages are the most widespread across industry.

Medicine shortages have a detrimental impact on stakeholders in the pharmaceutical supply chain (PSC). Existing studies suggest that building resilience strategies can mitigate the effects of these shortages. As such, this research aims to examine whether resilience strategies can reduce the impact of medicine shortages in the United Kingdom's (UK) PSC.

A sequential mixed-methods approach that involved qualitative and quantitative research enquiry was employed in this study. The data were collected using semi-structured interviews with 23 key UK PSC actors at the qualitative stage. During the quantitative phase, 106 respondents completed the survey questionnaires. The data were analysed using partial least square-structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM).

The results revealed that reactive and proactive elements of resilience strategies helped tackle medicine shortages. Reactive strategies increased relational issues such as behavioural uncertainty, whilst proactive strategies mitigated them.

The findings suggest that PSC managers and decision-makers can benefit from adopting structural flexibility and proactive strategies, which are cost-effective measures to tackle medicine shortages. Also engaging in strategic alliances as a proactive strategy mitigates relational issues that may arise in a complex supply chain (SC).

This study is the first to provide empirical evidence of the impact of resilience strategies in mitigating medicine shortages in the UK's PSC.

Antibiotics shortages have become an increasingly common problem in Europe because of several reasons, including the offshoring of the production of active pharmaceutical ingredients for many of these products to low production cost countries, such as China and India. The problem has deteriorated because of the Covid-19 crisis that has put most global value chains (GVCs) under great stress. This situation has boosted extensive discussions among academics, practitioners and policymakers on possible changes to the configuration of GVCs. This paper aims to focus specifically on antibiotics supply chains from the perspective of a small country (Sweden), and analyse the pros and cons of backshoring and nearshoring alternatives, as a means to reduce drug shortages.

This work adopts a systemic perspective to capture the implications of reshoring for the different stakeholders involved in the antibiotics field. The present meso-analysis, focusing at the industry level, is based on multiple sources of primary data collected between 2014 and 2021, including participation in policy-related projects and interviews with over 100 representatives of key stakeholders in the antibiotics field.

This paper shows how reshoring can address the problems of drug shortages and reduce availability risk in antibiotics’ GVCs. However, the authors show that no simple and best solution exists because both alternatives of reshoring, i.e. backshoring and nearshoring, entail pros and cons for different stakeholders. The authors conclude with implications for policymakers and managers.

The analysis of pros and cons of both backshoring and nearshoring for various stakeholders offers relevant implications for research on operations and supply management, international business and economics/political science.

This paper looks at reshoring as a policy-driven decision and provides an innovative systemic perspective to analyse the implications for different stakeholders of two reshoring options concerning the antibiotics supply chain.

Disruptions and shortages of drugs have become severe problems in recent years, which has triggered strong media and public interest in the topic. However, little is known about the factors that can be associated with the increased frequency of shortages. In this paper, the authors analyze the drivers of drug shortages using empirical data for Germany, the fourth largest pharmaceutical market.

The authors use a dataset provided by the German Federal Institute for Drugs and Medical Devices (Bundesinstitut für Arzneimittel und Medizinprodukte [BfArM]) with 425 reported shortages for drug substances (DSs) in the 24-month period between May 2017 and April 2019 and enrich the data with information from additional sources. Using logistic and negative binomial regression models, the authors analyze the impact of (1) market characteristics, (2) drug substance characteristics and (3) regulatory characteristics on the likelihood of a shortage.

The authors find that factors like market concentration, patent situation, manufacturing processes or dosage form are significantly associated with the odds of a shortage. The authors discuss the implications of these findings to reduce the frequency and severity of shortages.

The authors contribute to the empirical research on drug shortages by analyzing the impact of market characteristics, DS characteristics and regulatory characteristics on the reported shortages. The authors’ analysis provides a starting point for better prioritizing efforts to strengthen drug supply as it is currently intensely discussed healthcare authorities.

The objective of this study is to mitigate the risks of a blood shortage. The authors designed two simulation studies to identify the superior methodology that can decrease the impact of a massive national donor shortage.

The simulation designs are triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. The first simulation examines the company’s choice of strategic partners (regionally and nationally), and the second inspects creating a national coordinated effort to organize a pooled blood inventory that would require blood centers to contribute a small percentage of their monthly donations to become a member.

The results indicate that both methods can significantly manage the risk of stockouts regardless of the availability of safety inventory in a blood center; however, although more effective in reducing the number of shortages per month, creating a national blood pool causes the shortages to be recognized earlier than desired.

The authors contribute to the literature by focusing on the potential risk of blood shortage because it directly impacts healthcare, hospitals’ costs and their ability to provide care. Though a handful of researchers have targeted the study of the blood supply chain, there is not any article that is similar to this study.

Hospitals procure high volumes of medical supplies through large distributors in order to leverage economies of scale. However, when shortages hit, hospitals incur high penalty costs by purchasing from secondary markets. In this paper, the authors counter the hospital's typical purchasing strategy that a collaborative relationship with a large, Tier I medical supply distributor is beneficial under all conditions. The paper finds that during shortages the more beneficial strategy is for the hospital to add a medium-sized, Tier II distributor who offers a transactional relationship and is willing to provide a “preferred allocation” in return for a pre-committed annual purchase contract. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The authors assume availability of order volume to be a stochastic process and formulate the problem as a two-stage stochastic programming model, with optimal allocation in the second stage. The authors analyze the first-stage objective function using full-factorial numerical experimentation and perform a complete search for optimal volume mix. In addition, the model accounts for purchasing relationship, shortage cost, and varying price discount schedules.

Under no shortage situation, hospitals purchase its entire order volume from Tier I distributor. However, during shortages, for any increase in preferred allocation from the Tier II distributor, hospitals purchase high volumes from the Tier II distributor except when preferred allocation and availability is high. The paper finds that the average cost savings for the use of preferred allocation is 16.14 percent.

Existing purchasing literature focusses on the benefit of using single/multiple homogenous distributors under all conditions. In this paper, the authors examine the benefit of using non-homogenous distributors under conditions of shortage when one of them is willing to provide preferred allocation under varying price discount schedules.

A simulated price war between two competing gas stations provided the context to assess the effects on de‐escalation of the subject's financial shortage, the competitor's financial shortage, and a message from the competitor conveying a non‐exploitative intent. Subject shortages encouraged gasoline price increases (de‐escalation) and competitor shortages encouraged price decreases (escalation). Subjects who were suffering a financial shortage rated their competitor as less likely to cooperate and more likely to exploit them than those who were not. Results were discussed in terms of a simplification of Pruitt and Kimmel's (1977) goal‐expectation hypothesis. One possible explanation for our results is that subjects make a comparison of relative strength before choosing either to de‐escalate or escalate.

While unemployment is reaching new post‐war record levels, concern is being expressed about apparent skill shortages in established occupations in many local labour market areas. In Coventry, for example, employment in the engineering industry fell by 9,500 between 1971 and 1976 whilst simultaneously personnel managers were expressing concern about problems in filling vacancies. A number of indicators have been examined to determine whether a shortage situation does exist in the Coventry area and proposals to remedy the situation found are suggested. Attention is also drawn to the implications for general employment prospects in the local economy if action is not taken.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze employer responses to vacancies and skill shortages by adopting certain workplace practices.

Making use of the longitudinal nature of the Workplace and Employee Survey, a nationally representative sample of Canadian organizations, the paper applies both linear and probit models to examine incidence of positive vacancies and vacancy rates and subsequent adoptions of various workplace practices in response to such vacancies and skill shortages.

Employers respond to labour and skill shortages in a number of ways, focusing more on short‐term and less costly solutions, such as adoption of flexible working hours and increases in overtime hours, greater reliance on flexible job design and part‐time workers, and implementation of self‐directed work groups and problem‐solving teams. There is no evidence that workplaces would raise employee wages or fringe benefits to alleviate shortages.

In the absence of a well‐developed internal market, firms are likely to continue using short‐term and less costly solutions. Governments should work with firms, workers and their representatives and act strategically to resolve issues of timely identification of skill shortages in order to make informed decisions and put mechanisms in place to address such shortages.

The results are based on a national longitudinal survey and a number of important practical and policy implications are discussed in the paper