More than half of Peruvian exportations are made by mining companies, which also are a traditional employment source that attracts thousands of Peruvian workers because of their high economic benefits. This paper aims to find whether there is a relationship between personnel expenses change and productivity change in Peruvian stock mining companies from 2011 to 2018. Malmquist index and multiple regression were used to analyze data of 17 Peruvian mining companies both metallic and nonmetallic ones. It was found that there was a negative relationship between personnel expenses change and productivity change in metallic mining companies while there was a positive one for nonmetallic companies.

The theory of constraints is an approach for production planning and control, which emphasizes on the constraints in the system to increase throughput. The theory of constraints is often referred to as Drum-Buffer-Rope developed originally by Goldratt. Drum-Buffer-Rope uses the drum or constraint to create a schedule based on the finite capacity of the first bottleneck. Because of complexity of the job shop environment, Drum-Buffer-Rope material flow management has very little attention to job shop environment. The objective of this paper is to apply the Drum-Buffer-Rope technique in the job shop environment using a Markov chain analysis to compare traditional method with Drum-Buffer-Rope. Four measurement parameters were considered and the result showed the advantage of Drum-Buffer-Rope approach compared with traditional one.

The main aim for the current paper is to shed some light on some macroeconomic variables that affect the portfolio investment in one of the Middle East countries (Bahrain) for the period 1989-2018. Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) test was employed. The findings revealed that there was a long run relationship between portfolio and macroeconomic factors. The variable can cause portfolio investment only for consumer price index and gross domestic product in long run. Meanwhile, it found only consumer price index has statistically significant effect with portfolio investment in short-run.

The powder coating is an economic, technologically superior and environment friendly painting technique compared with other conventional painting methods. However large variation in coating thickness can reduce the attractiveness of powder coated products. The coating thickness variation can also adversely affect the surface appearance and corrosion resistivity of the product. This can eventually lead to customer dissatisfaction and loss of market share. In this paper, the author discusses a dual response surface optimization methodology to minimize the thickness variation around the target value of powder coated industrial enclosures. The industrial enclosures are cabinets used for mounting the electrical and electronic equipment. The proposed methodology consists of establishing the relationship between the coating thickness & the powder coating process parameters and developing models for the mean and variance of coating thickness. Then the powder coating process is optimized by minimizing the standard deviation of coating thickness subject to the constraint that the thickness mean would be very close to the target. The study resulted in achieving a coating thickness mean of 80.0199 microns for industrial enclosures, which is very close to the target value of 80 microns. A comparison of the results of the proposed approach with that of existing methodologies showed that the suggested method is equally good or even better than the existing methodologies. The result of the study is also validated with a new batch of industrial enclosures.

This study considers 77 Vietnam industry listed enterprises from 2012 to 2018 as research samples to establish indicators for evaluating the relationship between Enterprise risk management (ERM) and firm value among industry enterprises in Vietnam. International economic integration not only opens up many business opportunities for businesses but also brings many challenges for Vietnamese businesses. One of the challenges is that the financial risks to businesses are increasingly diverse in type and sophistication. Our results show that the implementation of ERM in the previous year has strong positive relationship with firm value. These findings support the recent pressure on businesses to adopt more comprehensive risk management systems.

Based on longitudinal data from biennial surveys of small- and medium- sized enterprises (SMEs) in Vietnam conducted from 2007 to 2013, we find supports to the self-selection and learning-by-exporting hypotheses. We find that the SMEs having higher sunk costs and capital size are more likely to become exporters. Applying the propensity score matching method in combination with the Difference-in-Difference estimation, the study finds that export has raised SMEs’ productivity measured by either TFP or labor productivity, sales revenue, and value added of the SMEs. Furthermore, the gains from learning-by-exporting and specializing in core-competence products were stronger in the early years of entry into the export markets. These findings suggest policies to promote export of SMEs in an appropriate timing.

In the existing literature of inventory modeling under the conditions of permissible delay in payments, researchers have assumed that the retailers have to settle their accounts at the end of credit period i.e. supplier accept only full amount at the end of the credit period. However in reality, supplier may either accept the partial amount at the end of the credit period and unpaid balance subsequently or the full amount at a fix point of time after the expiry of the credit period, if the retailer finances the inventory from the supplier itself. Further, in the classical deteriorating inventory models, the common unrealistic assumption is that all the items start to deteriorate as soon as they arrive in the system. However, in realistic environment, it is observed that there are several non-instantaneous deteriorating items that have a shelf life and start to deteriorate after a time lag, like dry fruits, potatoes, yams and even some fruits and vegetables etc. Considering the importance of above mentioned facts, the present study formulates a fuzzy inventory model for non-instantaneous deteriorating items under conditions of permissible delay in payments. The paper discusses all the possible cases which may arise and yet not considered in the previous inventory models under permissible delay in payments. Further, this paper also considers price-dependent demand and the possibility of higher interest earn rate than interest payable rate. The objective of this study is to determine the optimal decision policies for the retailer which maximizes the total profit. Finally, the numerical examples are solved by using the proposed algorithm to show the validity of the model followed by the sensitivity analysis.

The coconut palm or scientific name Cocos nucifera L. has been called as ‘Tree of Life’ because of its multiuse. Malaysia remains as one of top ten coconut producing countries in the world and coconut is one of important industrial crops after oil palm, paddy and rubber. As coconut plays a significant source of income and employment for majority of smallholders, this study has therefore been undertaken in order to recommend strategies for policy decisions and formulate suitable schemes and programs to ameliorate socio-economic conditions of the coconut smallholders. The present study has brought into focus and issues relating to socio economic status, profitability and production of coconut in Batu Pahat district, Johor. A sample of 152 farmers was selected through a random sampling technique. In addition, the study uses Cost Benefit Analysis and multiple regression model to estimate the factors affecting the profitability of coconut production in Malaysia. The results reveal that the profitability was influenced by different factors including land, labor, fungicides, experience, education and extension visit. While the result for cost benefit analysis showed that in the study area, a cultivation of coconut was a profitable enterprise as indicated by benefit cost ratio, ranging from 5.0- 8.4. On that basis, the article proposes some recommendations to improve profitability of coconut smallholders in the future.

Trading is the most sensitive sector of the economy, directly and indirectly responding to innovative challenges. High competition, political risks and planetary scales have made it susceptible to any globalization fluctuations. Effective management is seen as the most important opportunity to gain competitive advantage. This explains the increased interest in the system of indicators of management system evaluation in the business processes in the supply chains. The aim of this paper is to develop and substantiate analytical approaches to the study of the status of transnational trade economic relationships with the identification of significant impact indicators and vulnerability indicators. The globalization aspect of the existing trend of world trade (export-import) among differentiated groups of countries is justified, distinguishing the forecast component. A two-tier model of business process “reliability management” has been constructed, taking into account the results of linear regression models based on the profiles of Australia and New Zealand.

Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling Problem (RCPSP) is considered as an important project scheduling problem. However, increasing dimensions of a project, whether in number of activities or resource availability, cause unused resources through the planning horizon. Such phenomena may increase makespan of a project and also decline resource-usage efficiency. To solve this problem, many methods have been proposed before. In this article, an effective backward-forward search method (BFSM) is proposed using Greedy algorithm that is employed as a part of a hybrid with a two-stage genetic algorithm (BFSM-GA). The proposed method is explained using some related examples from literature and the results are then compared with a forward serial programming method. In addition, the performance of the proposed method is measured using a mathematical metric. Our findings show that the proposed approach can provide schedules with good quality for both small and large scale problems.