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"Operations research Developing countries."
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Pneumonia severity scores in resource poor settings
Clinical prognostc scores are increasingly used to streamline care in well-resourced setngs. The potental benefts of identfying patents at risk of clinical deterioraton and poor outcome, delivering appropriate higher level clinical care, and increasing efciency are clear. In this focused review, we examine the use and applicability of severity scores applied to patents with community acquired pneumonia in resource poor setngs. We challenge clinical researchers working in such systems to consider the generalisability of existng severity scores in their populatons, and where performance of scores is suboptmal, to promote eforts to develop and validate new tools for the beneft of patents and healthcare systems.
Journal Article
Analyzing blockchain adoption barriers in manufacturing supply chains by the neutrosophic analytic hierarchy process
Tools established for managing information flow in supply chain management and logistics should match digital transformations. This issue is particularly salient for developing nations that hope to achieve sustainable development goals in a globalized era. Modern technologies are required to ensure a secure, transparent, and traceable path of information flow in global supply chains; however, it is not always straightforward for businesses in developing economies to adopt new digital technologies while sustaining productivity. One of the foundational technologies that can be used to create a basis for economic and social systems and to affect manufacturing supply chains in developing economies is blockchain. In this study, we analyze the barriers to blockchain technology adoption in manufacturing supply chains using the neutrosophic analytic hierarchy process (N-AHP). We propose an action plan framework for the validation of blockchain technology in a developing economy. The findings demonstrate that “transaction-level uncertainties” comprise the most critical barrier and have the highest weight in the final ranking followed by “usage in the underground economy”, “managerial commitment”, “challenges in scalability”, and “privacy risks”. This paper can assist industrial managers and experts in emerging economies to more clearly identify barriers to the implementation of blockchain technology and show them how to successfully employ blockchain technology in their supply chains.
Journal Article
A comparative survey of service facility location problems
Determining the best location to serve companies’ profitability and sustainability is becoming more crucial every day, since the rivalry between companies is getting more intense. The transformation of economies from manufacturing orientation towards service based activities has resulted in a growing contribution of the service based economy in gross domestic product and workforce of developing countries. These recent changes in the economy are indicators that service facility related location science has received greater interest. Service location problems has been studied since the 1900s and interest on these types of problems has started to grow especially after the aforementioned economic transformation in the 2000s. A large number of problems have been investigated for different service facilities. However, there is a need for a survey that systematically classifies these papers in order to comprehend them thoroughly due to their prominence and complexity. This paper examines 90 papers that have been published on service facility location problems since 2000. The paper presents a classification based on 19 main characteristics including key features and descriptive dimensions of location problems in order to develop a taxonomy from an operations research perspective to assist the location scientists and practitioners who work on service facility location problems. Furthermore, service facility location problems are categorized according to their application fields and investigated in detail relating to each characteristic. We also draw interesting comparisons of characteristics between facility location problems in different application fields and highlight directions for future research.
Journal Article
The world bank group and the global food crisis
The unanticipated spike in international food prices in 2007-08 hit many developing countries hard. International prices for food and other agricultural products increased by more than 100 percent between early 2007 and mid-2008. Prices for food cereals more than doubled; and those for rice doubled in the space of just a few months. The food price increases were particularly hard on the poor and near-poor in developing countries, many of whom spend a large share of their income on food and have limited means to cope with price shocks. An estimated 1.29 billion people in 2008 lived on less than {dollar}1.25 a day, equivalent to 22.4 percent of the developing world population. In addition, the Food and Agriculture Organization estimated that 923 million people were undernourished in 2007. Simulation models suggested that poverty rose by 100-200 million people and the undernourished increased by 63 million in 2008. The World Bank organized rapidly for short-term support in the crisis, launching a fast-track program of loans and grants, the Global Food Crisis Response Program (GFRP). The GFRP mainly targeted low-income countries, and provided detailed policy advice to governments and its own staff on how to respond to the crisis. The Bank also scaled up lending for agriculture and social protection to support the building of medium-term resilience to future food price shocks. The International Finance Corporation responded by sharply increasing access to liquidity for agribusinesses and agricultural traders in the short and medium term, as well as new programs to improve incentives for agricultural market participants. This evaluation assesses the effectiveness of the World Bank Group response in addressing the short-term impacts of the food price crisis and in enhancing the resilience of countries to future shocks.
eBook
FDI, technology spillovers and green innovation in China: analysis based on Data Envelopment Analysis
Over the years, foreign direct investment (FDI) has not only promoted rapid economic growth in China, but also affected the country’s environmental quality through technology spillover. This paper tests the variables that may affect the ability of green innovation by using the Granger causality test. It extracts the variables passed the test as input variables, selects the number of patents as output variable, and evaluates the efficiency of various provinces in mainland China by examining their yearly technological progress variables. At the same time, technological progress is defined and divided into capital and environmental factors, and then panel data using the variable coefficients model was used to fit influencing factors to obtain impact coefficients of capital and environment. On this basis, this paper makes the determination of membership to replace the general sense of ‘threshold’ value by using fuzzy theory and proposes the concept of the ‘comprehensive threshold’ of economic development and environmental protection. The results show that less than a quarter of China’s provinces have crossed the comprehensive threshold. Finally, based on the conclusions of quantitative analysis, some suggestions are proposed that the Chinese government ought to enact different strategies for the introduction of FDI according to different development situations of different provinces.
Journal Article
Sustainable supply chain network design: a study of the Colombian dairy sector
The literature review shows research gaps into the food supply chain design. In that context, this paper deals with the design of a sustainable supply chain. A multi-objective mixed-integer linear programming model includes four decisions and three sustainable criteria (economic—total network costs—, environmental—carbon emissions—, and social—work conditions and societal development—). The model aims to determine the optimal location and capacity of processing and distribution facilities, to choose the suppliers from a set of potential candidates, to determine transportation modes between all the actors, and to define the quantity of product, in order to satisfy the demand of dairy products in a set of regions. The applicability of the model is tested in a realistic case in the dairy sector in the central region of Colombia. The results show the existent trade-offs between the three dimensions of sustainability. The unweighted balance results, giving more priority to the social dimension, which obtains the least deviation, affecting the environmental performance of the chain. The analysis carried out in this paper does help decision-makers that will have at hand a set of possible configurations to be chosen in order to comply with environmental and social regulations without neglecting economic performance.
Journal Article
Natural disasters and economic growth: a quantile on quantile approach
Natural disasters have caused over a million of deaths and $3 trillion in economic losses during the last 20 years. However, theoretical and empirical studies have not reached a conclusion as for their effect on economic growth, and the results can best be described as mixed. The present study proposes the use of a quantile on quantile (QQ) approach to shed more light on this complex relationship. This approach combines the standard quantile regression analysis with nonparametric estimations and allows us to examine how different quantiles of natural disasters affect different quantiles of GDP growth. Using data from over 100 countries over a 30-years period, we confirm that the results of the QQ approach differ from the ones obtained by standard approaches like fixed effects regressions. We document that the relationship between the intensity of natural disasters and economic growth is mostly negative. Nonetheless, there are some exceptions to this. Our findings reveal that the effect of natural disasters can be occasionally positive, depending on the quantiles that we examine. The magnitude of the effect also differs across different combinations of the quantile of economic growth and the quantile of natural disasters. Finally, we obtain somewhat different results when we estimate separate QQ regressions for groups of countries that differ in terms of climate, economic and democratic development, and across different year lags of the natural disaster index.
Journal Article
Measuring carbon performance for sustainable green supply chain practices: a developing country scenario
Carbon emissions due to economic activities are recognized to be global problem. Governments of all countries need to evolve environmental policies and practices for large-scale collective actions to regulate green house gas emission. Fuel quality standards for vehicles, stricter codes for construction, emission limits for industrial units and power plants are some of measures advocated to speed up emission control. This study investigates how far different sectors of a developing economy are able to manage green supply chain with respect to 4 aspects of environmental practices viz. Green procurement, green logistics, green products and process designs and regulatory framework. Globally, corporate social responsibility (CSR) assumes significance in recent years not only with respect to societal issues but also for environmental protection. Research suggests that CSR department creates culture for implementation of CSR activities. We investigate whether CSR departments in the sample organizations have made any difference in achieving emission control objectives. Data are from manufacturing organizations in a congested industrial region of India. We apply non-parametric Kruskal–Wallis and Mann–Whitney tests; then regression analysis is carried out to ascertain predictability of carbon reduction performance with respect to 4 environmental constructs. Results highlight positive roles of inclusion of green enablers—green procurement, green logistics, green product and process design as contributory factors for improvement in carbon performance and reveal that green logistics in the given scenario need major improvement in carbon performance. Our model also considers the impact of size of the organization on carbon performance in terms of workforce.
Journal Article
Human and Financial Capital for Microenterprise Development: Evidence from a Field and Lab Experiment
Microenterprises constitute an important source of employment, and developing such enterprises is a key policy concern in most countries. But what is the most efficient tool for microenterprise development? We study this question in a developing country context (Tanzania), where microenterprises are the source of employment for more than half of the labor force, and we report from a field experiment that jointly investigated the importance of a human capital intervention (business training) and a financial capital intervention (business grant). Using data from three survey rounds, a lab experiment, and administrative records of the microfinance institution, we present evidence on business performance, management practices, happiness, business knowledge, and noncognitive abilities. Our study demonstrates strong effects of the combination of the two interventions on male entrepreneurs, while the effects on female entrepreneurs are much more muted. The results suggest that long-term finance is an important constraint for microfinance entrepreneurs, but that business training is essential to transform financial capital into productive investments. Our study also points to the need for more comprehensive measures to promote the businesses of female entrepreneurs.
Data, as supplemental material, are available at
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2014.1933
.
This paper was accepted by John List, behavioral economics
.
Journal Article