Regulating factory safety in the Bangladeshi garment industry

This paper examines how far the workplace inspection programme established under the 2013 Accord on Fire and Building Safety has served to improve safety in Bangladesh garment factories, and the extent to which its operation has been influenced by the factors that the literature suggests are important in shaping the outcomes of private regulatory initiatives. Its findings suggest that such regulation can generate positive outcomes, even in the absence of strong public regulatory support. They also caution against discounting the role of compliance-based enforcement strategies, while highlighting the importance of their adequate resourcing and transparency. Some support is also offered for the argument that such regulatory initiatives could directly influence the market dynamics that shape supplier working conditions

Can Brands Claim Ignorance? Unauthorized Subcontracting in Apparel Supply Chains

Unauthorized subcontracting—when suppliers outsource part of their production to a third party without the retailer’s consent—has been common practice in the apparel industry and is often tied to noncompliant working conditions. Because retailers are unaware of the third party, the production process becomes obscure and cannot be tracked. In this paper, we present an empirical study of the factors that can lead suppliers to engage in unauthorized subcontracting. We use data provided by a global supply chain manager with more than 30,000 orders, of which 36% were subcontracted without authorization. We find that the frequency of unauthorized subcontracting across factories has a pronounced bimodal distribution. Moreover, the degree of unauthorized subcontracting in the past is highly related to the probability of engaging in unauthorized subcontracting in the future, which suggests that factories behave as if they choose a strategic level of unauthorized subcontracting. At the order level, we find that state dependence (i.e., the status of an order carrying over to the next one) and price pressure are the key drivers of unauthorized subcontracting. Buyer reputation and lead time also play a role. Finally, we show that unauthorized subcontracting can be predicted correctly for more than 80% of the orders in out-of-sample tests and for about 70% of suppliers. This indicates that retailers can use business analytics to predict unauthorized subcontracting and help prevent it. This paper was accepted by Vishal Gaur, operations management

PvMSP8 as a Novel Plasmodium vivax Malaria Sero-Marker for the Peruvian Amazon

The measurement of recent malaria exposure can support malaria control efforts. This study evaluated serological responses to an in-house Plasmodium vivax Merozoite Surface Protein 8 (PvMSP8) expressed in a Baculovirus system as sero-marker of recent exposure to P. vivax (Pv) in the Peruvian Amazon. In a first evaluation, IgGs against PvMSP8 and PvMSP10 proteins were measured by Luminex in a cohort of 422 Amazonian individuals with known history of Pv exposure (monthly data of infection status by qPCR and/or microscopy over five months). Both serological responses were able to discriminate between exposed and non-exposed individuals in a good manner, with slightly higher performance of anti-PvMSP10 IgGs (area under the curve AUC = 0.78 [95% CI = 0.72–0.83]) than anti-PvMSP8 IgGs (AUC = 0.72 [95% CI = 0.67–0.78]) (p = 0.01). In a second evaluation, the analysis by ELISA of 1251 plasma samples, collected during a population-based cross-sectional survey, confirmed the good performance of anti-PvMSP8 IgGs for discriminating between individuals with Pv infection at the time of survey and/or with antecedent of Pv in the past month (AUC = 0.79 [95% CI = 0.74–0.83]). Anti-PvMSP8 IgG antibodies can be considered as a good biomarker of recent Pv exposure in low-moderate transmission settings of the Peruvian Amazon