This book revisits the economic relationship that ties the UK and Ireland to the United States in the aftermath of the greatest economic crisis of the past fifty years. When considering recent developments to these economic links, it appears that oppositional forces are at work. On one hand, globalization and the rise of new economic powers may undermine the ties. Besides, Ireland's and the UK's European Union membership could also loosen their economic ties with the US. Conversely, the future Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership agreement may well strengthen trade and investment links between the US and Europe. Are the economic bonds between the US, the UK and Ireland waning, as some pundits purport? Or are those claims overstated? Could their economic relationship simply be going through a process of change? Although there may not be a single and straightforward answer to these questions, the authors seek to address these issues and provide insight into the changing dynamics of this historic economic relationship.

Whether used as predictors or indicators of stock prices, financial risk, merger candidates, or bond yields, financial ratios have been, and continue to be, a popular tool for analyzing a firm and its performance. Practitioners and academics who employ financial ratios often compare and contrast across several industries, but such evaluations assume that the ratios of one industry measure the same underlying concepts as the ratios of another. This book provides evidence on the comparability of financial ratios across several industries, assessing the similarity or dissimilarity of ratios among industry taxonomies, or groups of ratios.

Extending previous studies that focused primarily on manufacturing firms, this work surveys a wide variety of both manufacturing and retail corporations, and determines the classification patterns of their respective financial ratios. The taxonomies of thirty two ratios, in seven representative industries, are examined for the ten-year period from 1978 through 1987. Two introductory chapters detail the nature of the research, the data utilized, variables employed, and statistical methodologies, as well as providing a brief summary of the results. A third chapter furnishes results for the entire economy by factors of return, cash flow, cash position, inventory, sales, liquidity, and debt; while seven separate chapters describe the study's conclusions for each of the primary industries: automobile and aerospace; chemical, rubber, and oil; electronics; food; retail; steel; and textile. The work concludes with a summary of the study and its conclusions, and an examination of the limitations of this type of research and possibilities for its extension. This book will be a valuable practical resource for accounting and finance professionals, as well as an important reference for courses in finance, accounting, and management. Public, academic, and business libraries will also find it a useful addition to their collections.

As media evolves with technological improvement, communication changes alongside it. In particular, storytelling and narrative structure have adapted to the new digital landscape, allowing creators to weave immersive and enticing experiences that captivate viewers. These experiences have great potential in marketing and advertising, but the medium's methods are so young that their potential and effectiveness is not yet fully understood. Handbook of Research on Transmedia Storytelling, Audience Engagement, and Business Strategies is a collection of innovative research that explores transmedia storytelling and digital marketing strategies in relation to audience engagement. Highlighting a wide range of topics including promotion strategies, business models, and prosumers and influencers, this book is ideally designed for digital creators, advertisers, marketers, consumer analysts, media professionals, entrepreneurs, managers, executives, researchers, academicians, and students.

Paco Underhill, the Margaret Mead of shopping and author of the huge international bestseller Why We Buy--praised by The New York Times as "a book that gives this underrated skill the respect it deserves"--now takes us to The Mall, a place every American has experienced and has an opinion about. The result is a bright, ironic, funny, and shrewd portrait of the mall--America's gift to personal consumption, its most powerful icon of global commercial muscle, the once new and now aging national town square, the place where we convene in our leisure time. It's about the shopping mall as an exemplar of our commercial and social culture, the place where our young people have their first taste of social freedom, and where the rest of us compare notes. Call of the Mall examines how we use the mall, what it means, why it works when it does, and why it sometimes doesn't.

Fashion is a business of smoke and mirrors, notorious for crushing the souls of most who dare to be part of the industry. Go on a global expedition with New York City-based fashion buyer, strategist, and consultant, Mercedes Gonzalez, as she learns that there is no glamour in fashion and that only cutthroat corporate espionage prevails. From politicking with blood diamond dealers and Russian kingpins to living in indigenous villages, she has relied on her street smarts and fear of her uncle in order to outwit the industry tyrants at their own game. The underdog becomes the overlord (at-large). You'll want to grab a notebook for all the business (and life) tips this read has to offer. Advance warning, this book will convince you to become a proponent of child labor, an advocate of GMO, and a cynic of organic cotton.

The linkages between WTO rules governing trade and energy security with a certain degree of focus on India are the main subject of this book. The edited volume brings together the views of academics, policymakers and experts with extensive experience covering WTO and international trade issues. The issues examined include mapping the linkages between trade and energy security in the WTO agreements, case law, accession and Doha negotiations; assessing the issues that could be raised by energy deficit or energy surplus countries at the WTO; analyzing the provisions of the ECT and NAFTA vis-a-vis the Indian policy framework and examining the trade regimes of selected OPEC members and other major suppliers of fossil fuels to India. While the Indian perspective is evident in the contributions, this book will also be of interest to an international audience, as trade, the WTO and energy security are global concerns and of relevance to all practitioners and academics working on these issues."

In The third volume of The Digital Hand, James W. Cortada completes his sweeping survey of the effect of computers on American industry, turning finally to the public sector, and examining how computers have fundamentally changed the nature of work in government and education. This book goes far beyond generalizations about the Information Age to the specifics of how industries have functioned, now function, and will function in the years to come. Cortada combines detailed analysis with narrative history to provide a broad overview of computings and telecommunications role in the entire public sector, including federal, state, and local governments, and in K-12 and higher education. Beginning in 1950, when commercial applications of digital technology began to appear, Cortada examines the unique ways different public sector industries adopted new technologies, showcasing the manner in which their innovative applications influenced other industries, as well as the U.S. economy as a whole.
He builds on the surveys presented in the first volume of the series, which examined sixteen manufacturing, process, transportation, wholesale and retail industries, and the second volume, which examined over a dozen financial, telecommunications, media, and entertainment industries. With this third volume, The Digital Hand trilogy is complete, and forms the most comprehensive and rigorously researched history of computing in business since 1950, providing a detailed picture of what the infrastructure of the Information Age really looks like and how we got there. Managers, historians, economists, and those working in the public sector will appreciate Cortada's analysis of digital technology's manyroles and future possibilities.

Imagine planning an event like the Olympics. Now imagine planning the same event but not knowing when or where it will take place, or how many will attend. This is what humanitarian logisticians are up against. Oversights result in serious consequences for the victims of disasters. So they have to get it right, fast. This book comprehensively covers the problems of humanitarian logistics.

While e-commerce has experienced meteoric growth recently, security risks have similarly grown in scope and magnitude. Three major factors have driven the security risks in e-commerce: the growing reliance on the electronic medium for a company's core business, the growing complexity of the software systems needed to support e-commerce, and the value of the digital assets brought online to an inherently insecure medium - the Internet. While security has long been a primary concern in e-commerce, more recently privacy has also grown in importance to consumers. Many of the same Internet technologies that make e-commerce possible also make it possible to create detailed profiles of an individual's purchases, to spy on individual Web usage habits, and even to peer into confidential files that reside on an individual's machine. E-Commerce Security and Privacy is the first volume to pull together leading researchers and practitioners in diverse areas of computer science and software engineering to explore their technical innovations to problems in security and privacy in e-commerce. The information is drawn from selected papers presented at the first Workshop on Security and Privacy in E-Commerce (WSPEC'00) held in Athens, Greece, November 4, 2000. As such, E-Commerce Security and Privacy introduces both practitioners and researchers to innovations in secure and private e-commerce. Practitioners will gain great insight from the case studies, and researchers will learn about state-of-the-art protocols in secure and private e-commerce that will serve as the basis for future innovations in applied e-commerce technologies. E-Commerce Security and Privacy is suitable as a secondary text for agraduate level course, and as a reference for researchers and practitioners in industry.

Concentration tendencies, globalization, increasing cost pressure and well-informed customers all make up the hard competition faced by today's businesses. The "right" products, a successful market image, a strong positioning between suppliers and customers, efficient logistics and optimum organization structures contribute to a company's survival. Achieving this goal requires flexible information and communication systems that are fully adaptable to the specific situation. Modern retail information systems are not bound by organization borders but support both business partner cooperation and electronic commerce. This book presents the architecture of retail information systems, as well as the functions of SAP Retail, and in so doing links modern retail management with the implementation strategies based on innovative software systems.

This book is the first book that provides comprehensive economic analysis of cross-border outsourcing by Japanese manufacturing firms based on microdata. Previous literature on many other countries has often been constrained by limited data availability about outsourcing, but research contained in this book exploits unique firm-level data and directly tests theoretical hypotheses derived from new firm heterogeneity trade models. Productivity, capital-labor ratio and R&D intensity are examined at the firm level. While rich empirical results in this book convince us how powerful the orthodox economic theory is in understanding Japanese firms, detailed firm-level findings, combined with accessible and concise overviews of Japanese international trade, are widely informative for international economists, experts of Japanese society, business strategists for offshoring, and policy makers in both developed and developing economies. This book further discusses how boundaries of Japanese firms, traditionally sheltered by language and cultural barriers, are affected by outsourcing decisions simultaneously crossing national borders and firm boundaries. The interpretations of Japanese characteristics in outsourcing have deep implications for understanding drastically changing Japanese business amid globalization.

This book investigates the industrial agglomeration and dispersion within a country under trade liberalization and interregional integration by considering both economic forces and geographical elements. Chapter 1 gives a brief introduction about the background, research topics and organizations in this book. Chapter 2 provides a detailed explanation of Krugman's new economic geography (NEG) model and reviews the subsequent refinements of the original model from mainly geographical viewpoints. Chapter 3 extends Krugman's original model to a two-country and three-region case where the domestic regions are fully asymmetrical in terms of their sizes and accessibilities to global markets. To better explain the reality of developing countries, chapter 4 presents an analytical model which assumes that unskilled workers are employed in both traditional and manufacturing sectors. Chapter 5 empirically investigates the home market effect (HME) in terms of wages in the case of China by using panel data for the period 1980-2012. Chapter 6 gives a summary and implication about the findings and conclusions in this book.

Shopping and Crimedraws on criminology, behavioural economics and marketing to help understand retail crime as a cultural phenomenon. Shopping is now the largest consumer leisure activity, and this has led to an exponential rise in the levels of retail crime. In this topical volume Professor Bamfield analyses important new datasets on employee theft and shoplifting to show the nature of the problem, its origins and possible solutions. Crime prevention is explored as a management issue, using criminomics, a new concept based on commercial realities rather than maximizing arrests. This emphasises communications and persuasion within organisations, supported by a web of collaborative projects between retailers, police and other crime agencies.

Since the introduction of the One Belt, One Road initiative (OBOR), first proposed in late 2013, international scholars have begun to study this new policy and its implications in the global age. While OBOR provides new opportunities for China in terms of regional cooperation and global development, many also raise concerns about China's intentions of using economic means to achieve strategic and foreign policy objectives. Hailing from the West and the East, the authors reflect on the wide-ranging impacts of OBOR on specific countries, regions, economic policies, and geopolitical considerations. Including both theoretical research and empirical studies that explore opportunities and challenges related to OBOR, this edited volume will allow readers to gain a more comprehensive understanding of this ambitious undertaking and its long-term impact on the rest of the world.

This study of the brandy trade explores the origins, production and marketing of brandy from the Cognac region in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Professor Cullen shows that the brandy trade was based on a sophisticated regional economy, which, by 1720, had become a key component of French involvement in the modern international trading system. Notwithstanding competition from a surplus in other cereals and from foreign markets, regional specialization in the Charente was an indispensable element in ensuring the quality of stable output, and was recognized in the region's success in attracting foreign houses, such as Martell and Hennessy.

This book, by one of China's leading economists, explores the past and present of the RMB-the people's currency-as it is poised to compete with the dollar as the international reserve currency. Exchange rate movement and its pass-through to changes in domestic prices have been topics of wide concern among economists. However, relatively few studies have empirically investigated the relationship between exchange rate movements and China's international trade.This book fills this gap, using the general equilibrium theory of the western economic science norm systems, integrating the leading heterogeneous firm theory of international trade, attempting to set up a theoretical structural model for further prediction, and applying the data from sample cases to examine the structural model. This book will be of interest to economists, financiers, and China watchers.

Internet and web technology penetrates many aspects of our daily life. Its importance as a medium for business transactions will grow exponentially during the next few years. In terms of the involved market volume, the B2B area will hereby be the most interesting area. Also, it will be the place, where the new technology will lead to drastic changes in established customer relationships and business models. In an era where open and flexible electronic commerce provides new types of services to its users, simple 1-1 connections will be replaced by n-m relationships between customers and vendors.
This new flexibility in electronic trading will generate serious challenges. The main problem stems from the heterogeneity of information descriptions used by vendors and customers, creating problems in both manual trading and in direct 1-1 electronic trading. In the case of B2B market places, it becomes too serious to be neglected. Product descriptions, catalog formats and business documents are often unstructured and non-standardized. Intelligent solutions that mechanize the structuring, standardizing, aligning, and personalizing process are a key requisite for successfully overcoming the current bottlenecks of B2B electronic commerce while enabling its further growth. Intelligent Information Integration in B2B Electronic Commerce discusses the main problems of information integration in this area and sketches several technological solution paths.
Intelligent Information Integration in B2B Electronic Commerce is designed to meet the needs of a professional audience composed of researchers and practitioners in industry and graduate level students in Computer Science.

CAO is one of the most misunderstood and underutilized weapons available to retailers today. International consultant Barbara Anderson makes clear that in only a limited sense does CAO replace manual ordering. In its full sense it is much more--the optimization of manufacturer, supplier, and retailer distribution to the retail store-- based on consumer and store data and corporate policy. Anderson thus provides a framework and checklist for implementing CAO, and understanding of key terminology, solutions to likely problems, and ways to make CAO implementation successful, and in doing so she covers the full spectrum of retailing. A readable, easily grasped, comprehensive, unique book for retailing management and for their colleagues teaching it in colleges and universities.

Anderson points out that CAO is not an off-the-shelf system but an ongoing project, each phase with its own unique set of benefits and cost justification. Retail systems must support a vision where a product may bypass the store on the way to the consumer, or even the distribution center on the way to the stores. Consumers have a wide range of choices, not only of where to shop, but how to shop, and this demands ever greater levels of service. CAO systems help assure that the correct product is available at the store, that it can be located throughout the supply chain, and that it can be moved easily from any location. In CAO, all levels of operation work with real-time information, using decision-making tools that react and learn from new information. Her book thus shows there is no one right system, product, or approach for successful CAO. It's too big a leap to make in one step but consists of modules and functions that can grow in sophistication over time, and that not all retailers nor all categories within one retailer will use the same methods for forecasting and ordering. She also shows that the distinct separation of replenishment product from planning product is artifically imposed and that the separation of head-quarters from stores is also artificial. Indeed, integration does not mean the integration of separate systems; rather, of business functions themselves. Readers will thus get not only a knowledgeable discussion of what CAO should be, what it is and how it works, but an immediately useful understanding of how to make it work in their own companies.

Examining the implications of recent important developments, the primary aim of this book is to bridge the gaps in existing literature on India-Pakistan economic engagement and to examine various aspects of the trade normalization process.

The book includes familiar themes of India-Pakistan bilateral trade in goods and services, providing new insights into the potential for trade and the challenges involved in realizing it. The respective chapters examine the current trade trends and identify the possible sectors for bilateral FDI flows between the two countries, which could help forge deeper economic ties between them. In light of India s changed investment policy, this analysis is pertinent for investors and policy-makers alike.

The book also includes chapters on a variety of unconventional subjects, such as estimating the levels of informal trade, an analysis of a trade perception survey and identifying trade potential using a CGE modeling approach. Further, a number of sectors have been identified for in-depth analysis, including sports goods, healthcare and energy. These sector-based analyses reflect the gap between current levels of trade in the selected industries and the possible trade potential. The studies identify key tradable commodities in the health and sports industries, as well as opportunities for trading in energy. The book thus provides readers with a deep understanding of the process of normalizing economic relations and enhancing bilateral trade at the micro and macro levels, on the basis of which the authors subsequently provide recommendations for policymakers."

"Great retailers are great at service. No exceptions. This book offers a wealth of insight into delivering excellent retail service."

---Leonard L. Berry, Distinguished Professor of Marketing, N.B Zale Chair in Retailing and Market Leadership, Mays Business School, Texas A&M University

"With a growing understanding of service as a phenomenon and perspective of business and marketing, retailers are increasingly seeing the need to transform from distribution of products to service providers. This book includes considerable insight regarding the importance of the service perspective and how it can be implemented in retailing."
--Christian Gronroos, Professor of Service and Relationship Marketing, CERS Centre for Relationship Marketing and Service Management, Hanken School of Economics, Finland

"Consisting of chapters written by leading scholars in service management and retailing from around the world, this comprehensive book offers rich insights for how retailers can excel and achieve sustainable competitive advantage by invoking and implementing service management principles. This enlightening book is a valuable resource for students, researchers and practitioners with an interest in retailing."

--A. "Parsu" Parasuraman, Professor of Marketing & The James W. McLamore Chair, School of Business Administration, University of Miami Coral Gables, Florida

"Service excellence and service innovation are critical for success in today's competitive retail marketplace. "Service Management: The New Paradigm in Retailing" provides a contemporary and transformative lens for accomplishing these essential goals."

--Mary Jo Bitner, Professor, Director Center for Services Leadership, W.P. Carey School of Business, Arizona State University

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This book comprehensively investigates the challenges to Myanmar's access to the global market. Myanmar is a late entrant in the global trade and investment scenario after years of isolation. However, it has large untapped potentials for trade and investment in minerals, agro and forest based industries, other labour intensive industries, services like tourism, IT, etc. Different chapters of the book explore the implication of democratic transition of Myanmar, the progress of Myanmar's industry and infrastructure, its international linkages and feasible options for integrating more in regional economic groups and also analyses how far Myanmar could exploit the global value chain. Although a number of reports have discussed sector specific prospects of Myanmar, this book is an authoritative work on these aspects for policy planners, academicians, researchers as well as potential investors.

Japanese distribution was long seen as archaic and difficult to understand, but today that has changed. Domestic firms stretching across all retail formats and categories have taken control of channels and now lead the consumer market from the front. They are now so advanced that the very best are bursting out of the Japanese market and operating across Asia and even as far as Western Europe. Through case studies and concrete examples, this book provides the most detailed analysis of retailing in Japan ever written; it is the definitive guide to how Japan has changed and what to expect in the future.

The TPP was negotiated among 12 economically diverse countries, including some most highly developed and rich countries (i.e., the United States, Japan, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and Singapore), some newly industrialized countries (i.e., Mexico and Malaysia), and some less-developed countries (i.e., Peru, Chile, and Vietnam). A new paradigm created in this context is that countries with vastly different economic developments can actually agree on a set of very high standards to regulate their economic activities, to liberalize their trade, and to protect intellectual property and foreign investment. The contents of the TPP also reflect its status of being a "new paradigm" as the "21st-Century Trade Agreement" and being a pioneer in rule making in many key regulatory areas. These include not only the improved and enhanced rules on traditional issues already covered by the WTO , such as goods, services, and IP rights, but also the carefully designed rules in areas that have never been addressed in the WTO or comprehensively covered in other FTAs , such as state-owned enterprises, electronic commerce, and labor and environmental issues. Although the United States has withdrawn from the TPP, the remaining countries are still putting efforts into establishing a TPP without the United States or a TPP with China. Economically speaking, the current 11 parties account for about 20 % of the global economy. If such agreement is put into force, there will be significant implications for the region, for the multilateral system, and even for other FTAs. The book addresses the potential of the TPP to change the ways trade and investments are conducted and argues for its potential to be the start of an international trade/economic law revolution. The book elaborates the relationship between the TPP and other existing trade agreements such as the WTO and other FTAs and explains how the TPP is to deal with traditional and new issues. Taken together, the authors argue that the implications of the TPP go beyond its current membership. It is hoped that the book will make an important contribution to the field of international economic law.

This book investigates the transfer of parent country organizational practices by the retailers to their Chinese subsidiaries, providing insights into employment relations in multinational retail firms and changing labour-management systems in China, as well as their impact on consumer culture.