Measuring enterprises’ investments in social capital - a pilot study

Research on the impact of social capital on economic growth has mainly focused on civil society’s social capital. The social capital related to enterprises has received little attention. This paper aims at developing a method for measuring enterprises’ investments in social capital. We define enterprise-related social capital as social and economic networks in which enterprises intentionally and unintentionally invest and interact in. Certain components of these networks are open for ownership while others are not. Interaction in these networks generates network advantages and economic utility in individual firms as well as in the place/region in which they are located. Based on a division in internal and external social capital, we divide the latter in production-related, environment-related and market-related respectively. We differ between the networks’ links and the norms, values, etc that are distributed in the links by the nodes/enterprises. The study is delimited to measurement of the existence and structure of the links. The study shows that it is possible to measure enterprises’ investments (in money or time) in social capital. We also found some significant indications on connections between investments in social capital and the enterprises’ growth, however without being able to establish any casual relationship. Due to the limited number of participating enterprises these connections are merely indications.

Supply Chain Analysis at Swedish Match, South Africa - Complemented with an ISO 9000 evaluation

Swedish Match is a global Group of companies with a broad assortment of market-leading brands in smokeless tobacco products, cigars, pipe tobacco and lights products. The South African organization comprises of three individual companies that were acquired between 1999 and 2001. This thesis was focused on two of these three companies, Leonard Dingler and Best Blend with pipe tobacco as the most important product. Leonard Dingler is contributing with more than half of the total annual sales in South Africa. Leonard Dingler contains the main manufacturing unit and head offices at the premises. The purpose of this thesis was to create an overall measurement of Leonard Dingler’s and Best Blend’s Supply chain performance. Purchasing, production, distribution, and integration between each department were evaluated to create an overview of the organizational performance. It became evident during the progress of the study that some functions were intangible and an overall performance wasn’t measurable. The study was therefore complemented with an ISO-9000 approach and how such an approach would impact involved processes, functions, and departments. This thesis also contained two sub-objectives that needed to be accomplished: Problematic areas were to be found and future organizational recommendations were to be suggested. The study was performed and results were based on interviews with involved personnel and various affiliates, observations of day-to-day activities, and data collection. These empirical findings were analyzed through usage and comparison with the theoretical framework that was obtained from literature, articles, electronic sources, etc. Focus of the study was put on four areas of the supply chain: Purchasing, production, distribution, and integration between these departments. It became evident that several of the processes within these departments totally lacked a structured approach. Documentation, work procedures, and policies were non-existing within purchasing which impacted outcomes accordingly. Production was managed through a structured methodology and the results and improvements within this department were more than satisfying. Distribution was outsourced to a third-party logistical company which provided the core company with monthly reports. Integration was a process that wasn’t emphasized and focus should be put on this area to enhance interaction between involved personnel. The outcomes of the study were almost in line with the set objectives. An overall picture was created, problematic areas were found, and recommendations were proposed. But an overall performance analysis wasn’t accomplishable since several processes within the supply chain didn’t provide measurable or accurate data. Future recommendations were discussed with top management in order to design achievable suggestions that can be used for future improvements. These proposals can and should be used as guidelines to continuously improve the organizations activities and processes. These recommendations can hopefully enhance the overall performance of the organization

Revisiting the Role of Common Labeling in a Context of Asymmetric Information: Critique and Extensions

Households in the Western Hemisphere are no longer self sufficient in food production. Viewing the product from the shelves in the grocery store makes it difficult for the consumer to gain insight in the production practices and the quality attributes to the product. Formally, we can describe this as the food products purchased from a grocery store contain less search characteristic. Thus, the consumer cannot determine the quality of the product before the purchase. Instead the food products are characterized to be more of experience (quality is revealed after purchase) or credence characteristic (quality is not revealed even after purchase). Although it is not possible to determine the quality of the packaged food product on the shelves, the issues concerning food product quality are not trivial issues in society. The consumers may boycott not only food that can contain food-borne diseases, but also products that may be considered processed or produced in an unethical or hazardous method for the environment. For example, the linkage between the BSE (Bovin Spongiform Encephalopati) in beef and CJD (Creutzfeld-Jakobs Disease) in humans changed the consumption pattern rapidly in Europe, although not all countries reported occurrence of BSE. Consequently, these issues create incentives for the agribusiness firm to design programs for differentiating food products on basis of the perceived quality aspects. Producers supplying products that appeal to consumers? tastes have incitement to differentiate their products by other means than the pricing mechanism. The differentiation process is carried out through implementation of quality-, or certification programs. Certification programs and organizations like ISO, USDA, FAIRTRADE, CROP-WATCH, PDO, PGI, and Organic Europe, distinguish the product quality in terms of in production process, origin, and other tangible or intangible characteristics. When one or several stages in the food chain join to establish specific quality standards, both producers and consumers might reap economic gains through lowered uncertainty and increased efficiency. On the contrary, there is also a probability that the development of quality programs may further enhance market power, thus offset the potential social gains of the program. In essence, a certification program used by individual stages in the agribusiness chain may lead to vertical or horizontal cooperation (collusion), thus potentially moving away from perfect competition. Marette, Crespi, and Schiavina (1999) observe that agricultural markets are working imperfectly due to asymmetric information, where the consumers lack perfect information about the product quality. The suppliers, on the other hand, have incentives to produce both high and low quality products, although the consumers always prefer the higher quality products. The authors hypothesize that the societal welfare increases if consumers can distinguish between high quality and low quality products. Marette et al test this hypothesis by developing a partial equilibrium model under imperfect information in two elaborate scenarios. The model derived by Marette et al treats labeling in agricultural markets in a delicate way. With the certification scheme in place the consumer are able to distinguish between high and low quality products. However, the certification implies that the high quality producers gain market power. The low quality producers are no longer producing, and the high quality producers can exercise market power by either colluding on quantities, e.g. act as a joint monopolist, or play a quantity setting Nash-Cournot game. Essentially, they show that the societal welfare increases when high quality producers come together in a certification scheme and eliminate asymmetric information. Nevertheless, it is crucial to note that the assumptions build in the partial equilibrium framework drives the results. First, the authors choose to use a demand function, which strictly discriminates high quality from low quality products. Second, the authors? assumes that all firms have access to the same technology and have identical marginal cost of production. Third, the certification scheme does not alter the high quality firms? marginal cost. The objective of this study is to analyze certification programs and its impact on the market structure using a programmable mixed complementarity model. This study continues developing the model from Marette et al. Specifically, this study attempts to relief some of the rather restrictive assumptions on consumer and producer behavior that Marette et al have in their paper. First, the results are not stable for perturbations of the quality parameters, and the cost of certification. The results are not invariant to the cost of certification, and for high cost of certification, both producers and consumers are worse off. Second, constructing a utility function that permits demand for low quality products yield rather interesting results as both low quality and high quality producers can coexist under certification. The (aggregate) output level increases with certification. Nevertheless, the prices charged are vastly different between the certified and non-certified product: the high quality products are seven times expensive than the low quality (uncertified) product. Essentially, with certification the consumers? surplus and low quality producers profit decreases, whereas the high quality producers profit increases. The producer profit for high quality producers increases from .02 to .145 units since they produce more units of output to higher price. The low quality producers on the other hand serve the fringe market with relatively small prices, and their profit decreases to .006 units. When there are no high quality producers on the market, the low quality producers supply the whole market. As the high quality producers increase in number, the Nash-Cournot equilibrium approaches the competitive market outcome, i.e. the market price approaches the firm?s marginal cost. Hence, as the market price approaches zero, each producer supplies an infinite small unit of output, and the total welfare approaches unity. Nevertheless, with certification, there is a clear trend towards the low quality producers becoming fringe suppliers. The qualitative difference between varying the number of high and low quality firms is that the welfare is increasing in the number of high quality producer, whereas the total welfare impact is ambiguous when varying the number of low quality producer. Hence, there are two aggregate types of consumers: one inelastic and another elastic segment of consumers. The inelastic high quality type has a strictly higher willingness to pay for high quality products. The second type, on the other hand, also likes high quality, but is more sensitive to price changes than the high quality type. The study proposes by in large three major revisions to the model developed by Marette et al. First, instead of using a linear utility function that serves as a linear approximation to any utility function it is deemed appropriate to first a concrete representation of consumer behavior using a second order Taylor-series approximation to consumer demand where consumers? decision parameters include prices for both certified and uncertified products. Second, rather than assuming a zero unit of production, it is deemed appropriate to extend the framework by developing an underlying production technology with associate marginal cost. Third and lastly, the current model setup does not allow low quality producers to supply high quality goods. This is a rather abstract assumption, however, and should be extended to allow producers to interchangeably supply both high and low quality products, based on profit maximizing principles rather than subjectively chosen rules.

Price Pooling and the Gains from Hedging: Application to a Swedish Grain Cooperative

Optimal hedging strategies are analyzed for a cooperative operating a price pooling system in the presence of price and quantity risk. A three-period model, accounting for default risk and storage, is developed. Hedging allows the cooperative to increase the pool price offered to farmers by 2.8 - 4% for moderate risk parameters.Agribusiness, Marketing,

Using Semantic Features Derived from Word-Space Models for Swedish Coreference Resolution

Proceedings of the 17th Nordic Conference of Computational Linguistics NODALIDA 2009. Editors: Kristiina Jokinen and Eckhard Bick. NEALT Proceedings Series, Vol. 4 (2009), 134-141. © 2009 The editors and contributors. Published by Northern European Association for Language Technology (NEALT) http://omilia.uio.no/nealt . Electronically published at Tartu University Library (Estonia) http://hdl.handle.net/10062/9206

Gait analysis of unprovoked pig gait on clean and fouled concrete surfaces

Inadequate floor properties are considered the primary cause of the majority of claw disorders in pigs but to date no clear relationship has been found between claw disorders and floor properties such as friction and surface abrasiveness. To determine this relationship, the factors controlling pig gait must be characterised. This study examined unprovoked pig gait on a concrete floor in clean conditions and compared it with gait in fouled floor conditions. Kinematics were used to record gait parameters such as walking speed, stride length, swing and stance time, stride elevation together with limb support phases, gait symmetry, diagonality and duty factor. On clean floors, pigs had an unprovoked symmetrical gait with alternating two- and three-beat support phases and a high rate of diagonality. Stride length, swing and stance time and stride elevation showed little variation. Pigs altered their gait in accordance with floor conditions to maintain gait control by reducing walking speed, lowering diagonality and employing more three-limb support phases. Pigs also shortened their stride length and prolonged their stance time

The SPISE Advice for functional inspection of seed treatment equipment

The new SPISE Advice for the inspection of seed treatment equipment (STE) which deals with requirements for mobile and stationary equipment will be presented. As there are no European or international standards for these types of devices available up to now, the requirements had to be developed first. For mobile seed treatment equipment such as equipment on potato planters the requirements are strongly based on comparable requirements for sprayers in use, EN ISO 16122-series. For stationary systems special requirements apply. Seed treatment equipment is relative to field spraying used in minor scale. According to Directive 128/2009/EU Article 8, 3.a, it could be possible for Member States to apply a different timetables and inspection intervals for such equipment. E.g. equipment for laboratory use or industrial use already engaged in quality assurance systems could be situations where such exemptions could be regarded. For Germany it is planned, to exempt STE with a batch weight of less than 5 kg from the inspection.The new SPISE Advice for the inspection of seed treatment equipment (STE) which deals with requirements for mobile and stationary equipment will be presented. As there are no European or international standards for these types of devices available up to now, the requirements had to be developed first. For mobile seed treatment equipment such as equipment on potato planters the requirements are strongly based on comparable requirements for sprayers in use, EN ISO 16122-series. For stationary systems special requirements apply. Seed treatment equipment is relative to field spraying used in minor scale. According to Directive 128/2009/EU Article 8, 3.a, it could be possible for Member States to apply a different timetables and inspection intervals for such equipment. E.g. equipment for laboratory use or industrial use already engaged in quality assurance systems could be situations where such exemptions could be regarded. For Germany it is planned, to exempt STE with a batch weight of less than 5 kg from the inspection

RFID Antennas – Possibilities and Limitations

Non

Long term effects on human plasma lipoproteins of a formulation enriched in butter milk polar lipid

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Sphingolipids (SL), in particular sphingomyelin (SM) are important components of milk fat polar lipids. Dietary SM inhibits cholesterol absorption in rats (Nyberg et al. <it>J Nutr Biochem</it>. 2000) and SLs decrease both cholesterol and TG concentrations in lipid- and cholesterol fed <it>APOE*3</it>Leiden mice (Duivenvoorden et al. <it>Am J Clin Nutr</it>. 2006). This human study examines effects of a butter milk formulation enriched in milk fat globule membrane material, and thereby in SLs, on blood lipids in healthy volunteers. In a four week parallel group study with 33 men and 15 women we examined the effects of an SL-enriched butter milk formulation (A) and an equivalent control formulation (B) on plasma lipid levels. Plasma concentrations of HDL and LDL cholesterol, triacylglycerols (TG), apolipoproteins AI and B, and lipoprotein (a) were measured. The daily dose of SL in A was 975 mg of which 700 mg was SM. The participants registered food and drink intake four days before introducing the test formula and the last four days of the test period.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>A daily increase of SL intake did not significantly influence fasting plasma lipids or lipoproteins. In group B TG, cholesterol, LDL, HDL and apolipoprotein B concentrations increased, however, but not in group A after four weeks. The difference in LDL cholesterol was seen primarily in women and difference in TG primarily in men. No significant side effects were observed.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The study did not show any significant decrease on plasma lipids or lipoprotein levels of an SL-enriched formulation containing 2-3 times more SL than the normal dietary intake on cholesterol, other plasma lipids or on energy intake. The formulation A may, however, have counteracted the trend towards increased blood lipid concentrations caused by increased energy intake that was seen with the B formulation.</p