Reverse Logistics: Its Concept and Drivers in New Zealand: Case Studies

<p>Companies have achieved cost-reduction, marketing advantage and attention for the natural environment as some of the benefits from their reverse logistics (RL) activities. Many companies have considered RL as a strategic goal because it is part of the supply chain that offers value. Such value relates to the ability to efficiently and effectively manage 'returns'. Returns in this thesis refer to used products, materials and packaging as well as waste. The RL concept has gained increased attention by companies and government. Consumers are starting to be aware of this as an indispensable service after sales where they can have their used products retrieved and properly disposed. Only a few companies in New Zealand have been leaders in the RL area since they implemented it in the 2000's without being any regulation. It was found in the study that more and more companies are looking at implementing RL, no matter which industry they are in or their position in the supply chain. However, little is known about what factors promote RL practices for companies in New Zealand. The broad objective of the study was to explore factors driving the implementation of RL for companies in New Zealand from an environmental perspective. There were seven main factors found in New Zealand: stakeholders, green sustainability, leadership, marketing, economic, regulations and information. Moreover it was aimed to achieve a clear understanding of the RL meaning as it was not commonly heard in New Zealand. Many companies in New Zealand refer to RL backward flow as a product stewardship scheme, extended producer responsibility (EPR) and resource efficiency. Ten companies from different industries and a Ministry participated in this research, including manufacturing and retailers. For some companies, RL implementation was highly mature than others who where in the initial stages of implementation. The method used to collect data was semi structured interviews. All interviews were transcribed by the researcher and analysed accordingly. Relevant themes were assigned along the transcripts to organise the study's content. Those themes included RL concept, main factors, resources, problems, benefits, strategies and greening perspective. Quotations from the interviewees were used in the findings to support information. The findings from the research suggest that companies in New Zealand and Europe have similar factors influencing RL implementation. Alvarez-Gil et al., (2007) found that in Spain, stakeholders, environmental issues, regulations and change in strategic focus (also known as leadership) have encouraged activities such as returns, refurbish and recycle. The only factor that was not found in other studies was information. Furthermore findings show that New Zealand as a whole is leader in pro environmental practices but still there is room to improve on it. Managerial implications are presented in the conclusions chapter. Those implications were deducted from the information obtained from findings based on the researcher's judgment. They are practical and logical so that any company or person wanting to implement RL can benefit by having some advice.</p>

Reverse Logistics: Its Concept and Drivers in New Zealand: Case Studies

<p>Companies have achieved cost-reduction, marketing advantage and attention for the natural environment as some of the benefits from their reverse logistics (RL) activities. Many companies have considered RL as a strategic goal because it is part of the supply chain that offers value. Such value relates to the ability to efficiently and effectively manage 'returns'. Returns in this thesis refer to used products, materials and packaging as well as waste. The RL concept has gained increased attention by companies and government. Consumers are starting to be aware of this as an indispensable service after sales where they can have their used products retrieved and properly disposed. Only a few companies in New Zealand have been leaders in the RL area since they implemented it in the 2000's without being any regulation. It was found in the study that more and more companies are looking at implementing RL, no matter which industry they are in or their position in the supply chain. However, little is known about what factors promote RL practices for companies in New Zealand. The broad objective of the study was to explore factors driving the implementation of RL for companies in New Zealand from an environmental perspective. There were seven main factors found in New Zealand: stakeholders, green sustainability, leadership, marketing, economic, regulations and information. Moreover it was aimed to achieve a clear understanding of the RL meaning as it was not commonly heard in New Zealand. Many companies in New Zealand refer to RL backward flow as a product stewardship scheme, extended producer responsibility (EPR) and resource efficiency. Ten companies from different industries and a Ministry participated in this research, including manufacturing and retailers. For some companies, RL implementation was highly mature than others who where in the initial stages of implementation. The method used to collect data was semi structured interviews. All interviews were transcribed by the researcher and analysed accordingly. Relevant themes were assigned along the transcripts to organise the study's content. Those themes included RL concept, main factors, resources, problems, benefits, strategies and greening perspective. Quotations from the interviewees were used in the findings to support information. The findings from the research suggest that companies in New Zealand and Europe have similar factors influencing RL implementation. Alvarez-Gil et al., (2007) found that in Spain, stakeholders, environmental issues, regulations and change in strategic focus (also known as leadership) have encouraged activities such as returns, refurbish and recycle. The only factor that was not found in other studies was information. Furthermore findings show that New Zealand as a whole is leader in pro environmental practices but still there is room to improve on it. Managerial implications are presented in the conclusions chapter. Those implications were deducted from the information obtained from findings based on the researcher's judgment. They are practical and logical so that any company or person wanting to implement RL can benefit by having some advice.</p>

QuoVadis Regulation of Islamic Economics in Post-Reform Indonesia

This paper describes the regulation of Islamic economics and the urgency of its development, the post-reform Islamic economic, regulatory system, and analyzes the orientation of Indonesian Islamic economic regulation from a political economy perspective. This article's method is a descriptive analysis by analyzing political phenomena that occur in the formulation of Islamic economic regulations in post-reform Indonesia. This qualitative research uses literature studies. The development of Islamic financial regulation in Indonesia is relatively late when referring to Islamic finance development in other countries. This is related to the national political conditions, which are generally less responsive to institutions labeled Islamic. The dramatic changes in Indonesian politics since the fall of the Soeharto regime have made room for real democracy. Islamic banking regulation responds to the Islamic banking industry's development, which requires assurance of legal certainty and legal justice in a clear regulation. The increase in the role of the government in dealing with Islamic economic problems has a big role. According to Islam, economic policies must be supported by social responsibility, limited economic freedom by sharia, multi-ownership recognition, namely private ownership, state ownership, and a high work ethic. The interpretation and development of Islamic economic regulations can be richer and more important if it is based on concrete experiences of development in implementing Islamic economic regulations in Indonesia. In seeking economic laws in line with the rububiyah principle, practical experiences are material for validating Islamic economic laws.

The Future of Israel - Palestinian Conflict: Either One State or Two?

Sebagai salah satu konflik yang cukup banyak menarik perhatian dari dunia internasional, konflik antara Israel dan Palestina sudah banyak melewati proses diplomasi untuk diperolehnya perdamaian diantara keduanya. Konflik ini sudah memakan waktu cukup lama, sekitar 71 tahun sejak permulaanya, dan kini sedang menghadapi tantangan dan kenyataan bahwa usaha untuk mencapai perdamaian di antara keduanya mengalami perkembangan yang stagnan. Usaha untuk mencapai resolusi konflik dalam peace talk yang dilakukan pada rentang tahun 2013-2014 mengalami penangguhan. Hal ini menimbulkan beberapa pandangan terhadap keefektifan resolusi konflik yang ada saat ini, bagi kedua negara yang bertikai, yaitu resolusi satu negara dan dua negara. Dalam tulisan ini, penulis menemukan bahwa liberalisme ideasional menempatkan solusi dua negara sebagai solusi terlayak, mengesampingkan solusi satu negara. Solusi satu negara tidak dapat memenuhi kerangka hidup koeksistensi dalam liberalisme ideasional. Kerangka hidup koeksistensi terdiri dari kesepahaman dalam batas wilayah, institusi politik, serta regulasi sosio-ekonomik. Tulisan ini menemukan bahwa solusi dua negara memenuhi hal tersebut yang akan dijelaskan dalam artikel ini melalui pendekatan analisis historis kualitatif, metode kepustakaan dan dilandasi teori liberalisme ideasional.Kata-kata kunci: Israel, Liberalisme, Palestina, resolusi konflik.A lot of diplomatic processes to obtain peace had done several times for Israel and Palestine. It happened as the conflict itself attracted much intention from the international world. The conflict has taken a long time, about 71 years since its inception, and is now facing challenges and the fact that efforts to achieve peace between the two have experienced stagnant development. Efforts to achieve conflict resolution in peace talks conducted in 2013-2014 experienced a delay. The event raised several views on the effectiveness of the current conflict resolution for the two warring countries, namely the resolution of one country and two countries. In this paper, the authors find that ideational liberalism places the two-state solution as a feasible solution, leaving aside the one-state solution. A one-state solution cannot fulfill the coexistence framework in ideational liberalism. The coexistence framework consists of understanding within boundaries, political institutions, and socio-economic regulations. This paper finds that the two-state solution satisfies this point, which will be explained in this article through the approach of qualitative historical analysis, the method of literature and the theory of ideational liberalismKeywords: Israel, Liberalism, Palestine, conflict resolution.

The Other Side of Public Relations

After 1980, as PR was advocating the neo-liberal policies such as deregulation, privatization, and free global trade which were largely implemented, it played an instrumental role. These practices aimed at reducing state control, preventing state intervention in the market and changing existing economic regulations have played an important role in abandoning the Keynesian Welfare economy. These neoliberal policies put into practice were not only for the interest of big business against the common good but also led to a further gap increase between the countries. In the case of global reactions against these policies, public relations were used for consent engineering or manipulation. Perceptions and beliefs are managed with common persuasion methods so that the public cannot understand this. This requires considering public relations in a more complex, national and global framework through economic policy studies which analyze the political economy, politics and social dimensions in a holistic way.

Updating Infrastructure Regulation for The 21st Century in Latin America and the Caribbean

This paper argues that, while most countries in Latin America and the Caribbean have managed to significantly improve the short-term efficiency of their infrastructure services since the widespread liberalization of the 1990s, they have been slow to ensure a fair distribution of the gains. They have also been slow in making the investments needed to ensure the prospects of future generations, including by protecting the environment for the long term. The paper places at least part of the blame on regulatory failures. It also shows how past mistakes can be corrected by the significant sectoral transformations, driven by new technologies, now underway. Digitalization is altering the economic characteristics of infrastructure services. Resulting changes in governance and financing options demand adjustments to economic regulations, including by broadening the regulatory toolkit to integrate new insights offered by developments in behavioral economics.

Modern aspects of law-economic regulations of service classification and identification for unshadowing the economy of Ukraine

The article deals with the modern aspects of “shadowing” economy as socio-economic fact. The definition of “shadowing economy” is revealed not to be regulated by the legislative acts of Ukraine. Retrospective analysis of the legal regulation of the term “service” proves a diversity of modern interpretation of this category in the legal documents of Ukraine. Currently, the essence of the term “commerce service” is not regulated by any document. The results of the official integrated estimation of the size of the shadow economy do not show its real state and development tendencies by the types of economic activity differentiated according to the specific areas and types of services. The absence of a clear definition of the object of procurement, primarily the service sector, which leads to manipulation and inefficient use of funds is established to be one of the main factors determining the corruption risks in the system of public and sub-procurement. Nowadays, the State Classifier of Products and Services DK 016:2010 (SCPS) defined as the potential basis for industrial classification of products/services is a systematized summary of product names and services with their coding according to the hierarchical system of classification. The peculiarities and problems of implementing SCPS and the other classifications in the service sector are analyzed. The article proves that the State Statistics Service of Ukraine ignores methodologically SCPS as the ground for statistical classifications named “base for classifier conflicts” under stagnation of the national classification system, which preserves the risks of increased ‘shadowing’ in accounting and procurement and blocks the potentially transparent commercialization of services and their cumulative impact on socio-economic growth by different types of economic activity. The paper suggests the range of elements to be defined as integral elements of the legislative mechanism for the economy unshadowing in the service sector.

Sustainable Finance at the time of Institutions : Performativity through the lens of Responsible Management in Morocco

The aim of this study is to evaluate the level of Sustainable Finance disclosure in Institutions and to analyze the relationship between Performativity of Responsible Management and Sustainable Finance. A Performativity of Sustainable Finance through the lens of Responsible Management is constructed. To verify the link between the impact of responsible strategies and structures on the implementation and deployment of Sustainable Finance for reducing CO2 emissions at the time of Institutions, the structural relationships in our model are run. Although several studies have investigated the Sustainable finance, the issue of adoption and performance through the prism Responsible Management remains open. This allowed us to conduct empirical research through a questionnaire involving key axes of our study. We targeted primarily a sample of 40 companies ELEC EXPO International Forum in Casablanca, Morocco, held from 04th to 07th October 2018. We review the carbon finance strategies, analyze its relationship with the structure of the compliance New Economic Regulations and ISO 26 000. Subsequently, we assess the validity of its performance and its adoption prism Responsible Management through a reflexive model. To achieve this, we tested the structural relationships in our model, as the reflective nature of our built and predictive vocation of our model led us to retain the method Partial Least Squares as part of the validation of our research model. Our choice of using the Partial Least Squares approach is justified by the fact that it can treat analyzes on samples of reduced size (<100 observations). Ultimately, some of the literature says that strategies of Sustainable Finance include three dimensions. Indeed, the results indicate two important pillars for the performance of the adoption of the Sustainable Finance for the Moroccan plan; Clean Development Mechanism strategy and structure of the compliance New Economic Regulations and ISO 26 000. We then discuss the theoretical and practical implications of this managerial discovery. Keywords: Sustainable Finance, Joint Implementation (JI), Clean Development mechanism (CDM), Emissions Permits Negotiable (PEN), Responsible Management.