This project study was initiated by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) as part of the Central Asia Regional Economic Cooperation (CAREC) Transport and Trade Facilitation Strategy. Its objective is to identify areas for improvement in the administration and application of sanitary and phytosanitary...

In today’s international scenario, the issue of the food supply emerges as a central point to be discussed. The rising of prices, the population growth, the problem of hunger and the controversy about the bio-fuels, among other topics, make of great importance that agro-exporter countries such...

Already for a long time retailers take back products. In this paper we explore the factors contributing to the decision of combining vs. separating inbound and outbound flows during the return handling process. We do so through a comparative analysis of the operations in nine retailer...

In most western countries, grocery retailers are faced with maturing domestic markets with a year-to-year sales growth close to zero. Moreover, most Western-European markets are characterized by a high concentration rate, with a combined market share of the top five players easily exceeding 70%....

We develop two models to test hypotheses on the specific impact of brand and category characteristics on consumer stock-out responses. Our empirical results show that both characteristics are important determinants. Consumers are more product loyal in hedonic product groups than in utilitarian...

Blue ocean strategy seeks to turn strategic management on its head by replacing ‘competitive advantage’ with ‘value innovation’ as the primary goal where firms must create consumer demand and exploit untapped markets. Empirical analysis has been focused on case study...

Recently, retailers have begun considering which brands they can delist without reducing customer satisfaction, losing category sales, or increasing store switching behavior. Although several studies have considered assortment reductions, none has explicitly investigated the impact of total...

Depending on the shopping context, consumers may develop different mental representations of complex shopping trip decision problems to help them interpret the decision situation that they face and evaluate alternative courses of action. To investigate these mental representations and how they...

How different are retailers' inventory levels around the world? Specifically, are retailers' inventories constant across countries, converging, or at least co-integrating? These might be viewed as various forms of global determinism. To see which of these forms hold, I use a novel dataset...

This paper discusses the impact of foreign-ownership presence on the productivity performance of domestically-owned British retailers. In specific, we investigate the existence of productivity spillovers in the form of knowledge transfer. To guide our estimations, we develop a simple Hotelling...