In today's knowledge-based economy, an organization's ability to strategically leverage knowledge has become a crucial factor for global competitiveness. Knowledge is considered an important source of establishing and maintaining competitive advantage. Specifically, knowledge sharing and resultant knowledge creation are crucial for organizations to gain and sustain competitiveness. The aim of t...

The article presents a framework for measuring, illustrating and comparing industry export competitiveness that takes into account (a) industry specialization, (b) industry export growth rate, and (c) relative industry size. We apply the framework to a dataset of 97 different industries from China over a five year period (2001-2005). According to our results, over 70% of Chinese industries are ...

This paper explains why Indonesia’s competitiveness is falling, compared with other countries, while the economic growth seemed quite robust in recent years. After the commodity boom and quantitative easing policy was over, Indonesia is struggling to compete in the world market resulting a low rate of participation in the global production network. In addition, unclear industrial policy, downst...

The paper investigates price and quality competitiveness and comparative advantage in the new and old European Union Member States’ agri-food trade on the global market between 2000 and 2011. The empirical results show that the new and old Member States have become more similar in successful agri-food competitiveness and comparative advantages. The shares of successful price and successful qual...

The New Zealand dairy industry faces political and commercial pressure to improve its environmental performance while maintaining commercial competitiveness in a global marketplace. In response to such pressures, the industry has taken some steps to improve the environmental management practices of dairy farmers. Despite significant effort, however, the dairy sector remains highly influenced by...

At an analytical level, the international dimensions of environmental policies may be divided into three categories, viz. national (or competitiveness), psychological (non-physical) and transboundary pollution problems (global externalities). It is argued that only the third problem (viz. degradation of regional or global commons) ought appropriately to be seen as being truly international (or ...

The structural sustainability of the Brazilian health system refers to the country's pattern of development according to how this pattern is expressed and reproduced in the Brazilian population. This derives not only from its social dimension, but also from the economic one, as it accounts for a significant part of the gross domestic product and of job creation, and produces a great impact on t...

In this paper, we illustrate the particular use of a novel connectionist architecture, characterised for its ability to capture some type of topological ordering. It has been used to build a part of a Global and Integral Model of Business Management, which provides a global improvement in the firm, in terms of flexibility, value and competitiveness. In this paper we approach knowledge managemen...

We consider three related problems of robot movement in arbitrary dimensions: coverage, search, and navigation. For each problem, a spherical robot is asked to accomplish a motion-related task in an unknown environment whose geometry is learned by the robot during navigation. The robot is assumed to have tactile and global positioning sensors. We view these problems from the perspective of (non...

In this paper, we describe a framework for measuring costs and performance in new forms of business organization that are evolving to meet the competitive challenges of the 21st century. A literature review on cost management and performance measures in advanced manufacturing and service organizations provides the basis for our framework. The framework emphasizes measurement of costs and perfor...