Lean implementation to improve scheduling for a multi-cell manufacturing facility

Includes bibliographical references

Growth, Income Distribution, and Poverty: A Review

This paper reviews the recent literature dealing with the relationships between economic growth, income distribution, and poverty. This generally fails to find any systematic pattern of change in income distribution during recent decades. Neither does it find any systematic link from fast growth to increasing inequality. Some recent empirical evidence has tended to confirm the negative impact of inequality on growth, on the other hand. Others have found that the level of initial income inequality is not a robust explanatory factor of growth, though high inequality in the distribution of assets, such as land, has a significantly negative effect on growth. Possible channels are credit rationing, reduced possibilities for participation in the political process, and social conflicts. Among the strategic elements that contributed to reduced poverty are: an outward-oriented strategy of export-led growth, based on labour-intensive manufacturing; agricultural and rural development, with encouragement of new technologies; investment in physical infrastructure and human capital; efficient institutions that provide the right set of incentives to farmers and entrepreneurs; and social policies to promote health, education, and social capital, as well as safety nets to protect the poor. Countries that have been successful in terms of economic growth are also very likely to be successful in reducing poverty. Poverty can be reduced if there is sufficient economic growth. Growth can be substantial if the policy and institutional environment is right.Growth; income distribution; poverty; economic policy

Designing a Capitalist Economy for Fast Growth and High Employment in Today's Globalized World Economy

The paper begins with a consideration of the hypothesis that public sector employment is a means to reduce the general unemployment rate. It then takes up the proposition that subsidizing domestic investment is an effective way to reduce unemployment. The rest of the paper addresses some of the questions arising about employment subsidies as a means to reduce unemployment. A crucial question is the best way to finance an employment subsidy. Is it a payroll tax? a Value Added Tax? if enforceable, some sort of tax on wealth or non-wage income? Or is the best answer a cutback in welfare entitlements - in "social wealth" - which would permit the introduction of employment subsidies without widening the budgetary deficit. The paper goes on to consider the hypothesis that, in the medium term and beyond, the best remedy is a cut of tax rates (on labor, possibly on domestic capital) financed by the same cutback in welfare entitlements.

Ergonomic guidelines for manual material handling

"This booklet is written for managers and supervisors in industries that involve the manual handling of containers. It offers suggestions to improve the handling of rectangular, square, and cylindrical containers, sacks, and bags. "Improving Manual Material Handling in Your Workplace" lists the benefits of improving your work tasks. It also contains information on risk factors, types of ergonomic improvements, and effective training and sets out a four-step proactive action plan. The plan helps you identify problems, set priorities, make changes, and follow up. Sections 1 and 2 of "Improvement Options" provide ways to improve lifting, lowering, filling, emptying, or carrying tasks by changing work practices and/or the use of equipment. Guidelines for safer work practices are also included. Section 3 of "Improvement Options" provides ideas for using equipment instead of manually handling individual containers. Guidelines for safer equipment use are also included. For more help the "Resources" section contains additional information on administrative improvements, work assessment tools and comprehensive analysis methods. This section also includes an improvement evaluation tool and a list of professional and trade organizations related to material handling." - NIOSHTIC-2"April 2007.""Prepared for publication by the Cal/OSHA Consultation Service, Research and Education Unit, Division of Occupational Safety and Health, California Department of Industrial Relations. It was distributed under the provisions of the Library Distribution Act and Government Code Section 11096." - t.p. versoAlso available via the World Wide Web

Toward a Switchover of Locomotives in the Global Economy

The recovery in advanced economies is now exhibiting several signs of fragility and the medium-term growth prospects for these economies also look difficult. Could developing economies “switch over” to become locomotives in the global economy, providing a countervailing force against downward trends? The view taken here says, yes, as long as appropriate domestic policies and reforms are pursued in developing countries.financial cirsis, developing countries, growth, recovery, global economy, GDP, domestic policies, reforms, "switch over", decoupling

Growth, Income Distribution, and Poverty: A Review

Pro-poor growth, Income distribution, Poverty, Survey

Revisiting the Old Industrial Region: Adaptation and Adjustment in an Integrating Europe

The position of old industrial regions (OIRs) has been neglected in recent regional development research, partly as a result of dominant discourses concerned with concepts such as the knowledge economy, learning regions and the new regionalism. One outcome of this conceptual overload is that empirical research has typically been confined to all too familiar case studies of regional success that tell a rather partial story. Yet the extension of the European integration project eastwards alongside growing competition from the urban and regional ‘hotspots’ of the global south prompts a series of largely unconsidered questions about the ability of OIRs to achieve sustainable economic development and social cohesion in the years ahead. Lacking the capital, technological and labour assets of more dynamic cities and regions, and with the historic legacy of deindustrialisation and the decline of traditional sectors, OIRs face some important dilemmas of adjustment and adaptation. In this paper our purpose is to engage with these issues through some preliminary empirical research into the recent fortunes of OIRs in Western Europe’s largest economies: France, Germany, Spain and the UK. Drawing upon material from the Eurostat database, our results hint at interesting patterns of divergence in the performance of OIRs in terms of processes of economic restructuring, employment change and social cohesion. In particular some important variations emerge in the trajectory of regions within different national contexts. Drawing upon recent thinking relating to commodity chains and global production networks, our results lead us to pose a series of questions that relate to the way regions are being repositioned within broader political and economic networks as part of unfolding processes of uneven development and changing spatial divisions of labour