maritime and logistics advanced producer services within the mediterranean the liner shipping companies positioning strategies in new market areas

Abstract The new global economy framework is characterised by strategic economic centres formed around networks of goods, financial and information flows that constitute the today's social morphology of our societies. In this scenario almost every international company or firm develops its own structure and positioning plan by evaluating the business opportunities linked to each possible future branch office. Of course, the way to do business differs a lot considering that can be affected by customs, language, culture, laws, geography, infrastructures and business mind-set for instance and this is why developing a strong relation between the main headquarters and the world spread company's offices has become needful for a company to be successful. The shipping sector is not an exception, on the contrary all the shipping companies, especially the liner ones, due to the nature of their business are forced to establish regional offices to cover the global market. In particular, this analysis has been conducted with a focus on the Mediterranean and on the different positioning strategies adopted by one of the biggest liner carrier in the world, the German company Hapag-Lloyd. The present research tries to answer to following questions: • How do World City Networks and AMPS (Advanced Maritime Producer Services) affect a liner shipping company's positioning plan and how does it work in the Mediterranean? • Which variables does a big carrier take into consideration planning its network? • Which steps have to be followed entering a new market

Reconstructing the mixed mechanisms of health: the role of bio- and socio-markers

It is widely agreed that social factors are related to health outcomes: much research served to establish correlations between classes of social factors on the one hand and classes of disease on the other hand. However, why and how social factors are an active part in the aetiology of disease development is something that is gaining attention only recently in the health sciences and in the medical humanities. In this paper, we advance the view that, just as bio-markers help trace the causal continuum from exposure to disease development at the biological level, socio-markers ought to be introduced and studied in order to trace the social continuum from exposure to disease development. We explain how socio-markers differ from social indicators and how they can be used in combination with bio-markers in order to reconstruct the mixed mechanisms of health and disease, namely mechanisms in which both biological and social factors have an active causal role

Time to care: why the humanities and the social sciences belong in the science of health

Health is more than the absence of disease. It is also more than a biological phenomenon. It is inherently social, psychological, cultural and historical. While this has been recognised by major health actors for decades, open questions remain as to how to build systems that reflect the complexity of health, disease and sickness, and in a context that is increasingly technologised. We argue that an urgent change of approach is necessary. Methods and concepts from the humanities and social science must be embedded in the concepts and methods of the health sciences if we are to promote sustainable interventions capable of engaging with the recognised complexity of health, disease and sickness. Our vision is one of radical interdisciplinarity, integrating aspects of biological, psychological, social and humanities approaches across areas of urgent health need. Radical interdisciplinarity, we argue, entails the practical, methodological and conceptual integration of these approaches to health

Logistics global network connectivity and its determinants. A European City network analysis

The Globalization and World City Research Network classifies global cities according to their connectivity through advanced producer service activities. Recent studies have suggested there is scope to develop a new classification of cities based on advanced logistics services. Within this framework, the aim of this paper is twofold: (i) to develop an interlocking Logistics Global Network for advanced logistics in Europe and measure the Logistics Global Network Connectivity (LGNC) of the host cities; (ii) to explore the variables explaining each the cities' score on the LGNC. The aim is achieved by means of a mixed methodological approach based on Taylor's Interlocking Network Model and via econometric analysis through Ordinary Least Square regression (OLS)

Inferring causation from big data in the social sciences

The emergence of big data has become a central theme in scientific and philosophical discussions. A main tenor in the literature is that big data can drastically change the way in which causal studies are conducted. My thesis aims to explore how big data can be used to establish causal relationships in the social sciences. The beginning of the thesis will focus on data-driven studies and will investigate some of the limitations that characterise this type of study. This analysis will lead me to identify three key challenges of big data for causal studies in the social sciences. The first challenge is how to overcome the limitations of data-driven causal studies. This challenge is motivated by the observation that, regardless of how sophisticated they are, causal data-driven methods can suffer from bias. The second challenge is how to understand the role of ethnographic, qualitative data in causal studies based on big data. This challenge appears vital in the social sciences, where some researchers remain hesitant about the use of data-driven methods and try to defend the importance of qualitative, 'thick' data. The third challenge is how to use big data, in the social sciences, to obtain evidence of causality that goes beyond correlations. This challenge is strongly associated with the idea that, in order to establish causation, both the presence of a correlation between the cause and the effect, and the presence of a mechanism linking the cause and the effect need to be established. This idea, originally proposed by Russo and Williamson (2007) and known by the name of the Russo-Williamson thesis, will be discussed in detail to provide a solution to the first challenge. I will argue that researchers should comply with such a thesis to overcome the limitations of data-driven causal studies in the social sciences. Next, I shall examine the discussions on mixed methods research to claim that qualitative ethnographic data can be used both to collect evidence of social mechanisms, and to help researchers to obtain a comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon under study. Finally, I shall argue that big data can be used, in specific circumstances, to collect evidence of entities and activities constituting causal mechanisms, and that big data might be used to identify sociomarkers, the social version of biomarkers, to trace causal processes that evolve over time

Taking the Russo-Williamson thesis seriously in the social sciences

The Russo Williamson thesis (RWT) states that a causal claim can be established only if it can be established that there is a difference-making relationship between the cause and the effect, and that there is a mechanism linking the cause and the effect that is responsible for such a difference-making relationship (Russo & Williamson, 2007). The applicability of Russo and Williamson’s idea was hugely debated in relation to biomedical research, and recently it has been applied to the social sciences (Shan & Williamson, 2021). While many philosophers and social scientists have advocated the use of different kinds of evidence for causal discoveries, others have criticised this approach. With this paper, I aim to defend RWT from criticisms and to show its importance in the social sciences. The paper is structured as follows. After a brief introduction, in Sect. 2, I will summarise RWT, and in Sect. 3 I will describe how this approach can be applied to the social sciences. In Sect. 4, I will reconstruct two main criticisms of this thesis proposed in the philosophy of the social sciences literature: namely (i) RWT is not used in the social sciences, (ii) RWT does not work. For each criticism I will provide a defence of RWT. My defence will be based on two general considerations: (i) RWT appears perfectly in line with the research methods used in the social sciences and (ii) RWT can be applied successfully to establish causal claims. In Sect. 5, moreover, I will examine the causal accounts that have motivated such criticisms and I will argue that they should be rejected to endorse RWT and a causal account able to accommodate the current use of mechanistic and difference-making evidence in the social sciences. Section 6 will conclude with a note on the relevance of RWT in both its descriptive and normative form

La vinificación mediante el exclusivo empleo de la asepsia industrial

Copia digital : Diputación de Málaga. Biblioteca Cánovas del Castillo, 201

Proyecto de inversión para la instalación de una planta procesadora de café orgánico en San Ignacio, Cajamarca para su exportación a los Ángeles, EE-UU 2022

Este estudio está enfocado en un proyecto de inversión privada para la construcción de una planta procesadora de café orgánico en la provincia de Cajamarca, distrito de San Ignacio, quien tiene un fin de exportación a Los Ángeles de los EE. UU. Este proyecto está desarrollado para las empresas privadas dedicadas a la comercialización y distribución de café de alta calidad, ya que, por las variaciones que existen en el mercado, este tipo de producto está desarrollando una demanda considerable a nivel mundial. En el análisis de evaluación se ha determinado que la inversión total del proyecto es de S/. 2,474,389.75 de lo cual S/. 618,597.44 representado por un 25% será financiado por un préstamo bancario. Por último, mediante los indicadores financieros se ha logrado obtener que el VAN económico es de S/. 2,153,404.23 y un VAN financiero de S/. 2,481,971.67, indicando que el proyecto es totalmente rentable