Most of Business Excellence – Total Quality models provide a static view and processing of Total Quality issues. This paper proposes a system of Business Excellence taking into consideration: current European practices of Total Quality and competitiveness, a modular, open architecture like...

This study measures the impact of changes in the income determinants on inequality in the 1990 to 2003 period, in order to answer the question of why income distribution as a whole has not changed. The methodology utilized are micro-simulations of income distribution, which is the most...

In the Latin American context, Chile has the highest level of per capita income and the human development index, though the distribution of income is quite unequal. Unlike Uruguay, Chile has one of the more unequal income distributions of the region. In 2003, Chile had Gini Coefficient of 8.5...

Of the world’s 6.7 billion people (as of 2008), 1.3 billion lived on less than $1.25 Purchasing Power Parity dollars per person per day and another 1.7 billion lived on between $1.25 and $2.50 PPP dollars (Chen and Ravallion, 2012). The scourge of absolute economic misery among billions of the...

We study work effort with its various determinants such as the educational level of the worker, the minimum or start-up salary as well as the initial endowment of the worker. By means of optimization we find that optimal work effort depends directly on the initial income available to the worker,...

In this work we analyse to what degree the efficiency of a publicly owned non-monopolistic enterprise improves as a result of the introduction of strategic organizational reforms consisting of adopting "private-firm-like" management practices, criteria, and governance structure; i.e....

This study is an exploration of the dynamics of the present Romanian SME’ landscape. I offer first an overview of the characteristics of Romanian entrepreneurship and of the general impact of the recent crisis on the Romanian SME. I outline further the main constraints faced by the SME in the...

Deriving a functional form for a series of prices over time is difficult. It is common to assume some linearly estimable form for prediction purposes. While this can produce accurate short run forecasts it fails to identify longer trends and patterns that may exist in financial data....

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the effects of economic integration among countries on firms investment decisions when such decisions are taken strategically. It is shown that, in this context, the traditional "tariff jumping" argument is not always applicable and that localisation...