Search results for "PRODUCTIVITY"
showing 10 items of 618 documents
Structural Source of the Trap of ICT Advancement - Lessons from World ICT Top Leaders
2014
In light of the significant consequence of the trap of dramatic advancement of information and communication technology (ICT) in the global economy, both nations and firms that have been compelling their productivity decline. This resulted in great stagnation of ICT advanced economies and therefore its structural sources were analyzed. Based on an empirical analysis tracing, the trend in marginal productivity of ICT and its subsequent prices among the top ICT leaders in the world over the last two decades correlating with the effects of ICT, two faces of ICT advancement were identified. On one side, advancement of ICT contributes to its prices increase by new functionality development, its …
Assessing the productivity change of water companies in England and Wales: A dynamic metafrontier approach
2017
The assessment of productivity change and its drivers across water companies and over time is a powerful tool for both regulators and companies when setting water tariffs. Water and sewerage companies (WaSCs) and water only companies (WoCs) provide different services. Hence, their productivity change cannot directly be evaluated jointly. In this paper and for the first time, we provide a pioneering approach to assess and compare the dynamics of productivity change of WaSCs and WoCs. To achieve this, both the traditional Malmquist productivity index and the metafrontier Malmquist productivity index and its components are computed to assess the productivity change for a sample of English and …
Productivity of wastewater treatment plants in the Valencia Region of Spain
2017
Abstract This study analyses the evolution of productivity over the 2008–2012 period for a homogenous set of 199 wastewater treatment plants that are located in the Valencia Region of Spain and utilize the same treatment technology, using the smoothed bootstrap Malmquist productivity index based on Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). The results reveal a negative trend in productivity that is mainly the result of resource management rather than an inappropriate level of innovation or use of new technologies. In addition, the effect of exogenous factors on productivity is analysed using the Kruskal-Wallis (KW) test, finding that productivity levels were affected by the quality of the influent w…
The Luenberger productivity indicator in the water industry: An empirical analysis for England and Wales
2014
Abstract We innovate in the field of water companies' performance with an application of the directional distance function and the Luenberger productivity indicator (LPI) to the assessment of water companies' productivity growth. The advantage of our approach is that it takes into account both input contractions and output expansions. The analysis covered 22 water companies from England and Wales using data over the period 2001–2008. To the best of our knowledge, there are no prior studies applying the Luenberger productivity indicator to the water industry in England and Wales or other countries. For the sake of comparison, the traditional Malmquist productivity index (MPI) was also estima…
A Review of Building Information Modelling for Construction in Developing Countries
2016
Building Information Modelling (BIM) is wide ly seen as a catalyst for innovation and productivity in the construction industry. BIM can assist a more sustainable construction process that in turn may contribute to eradicating poverty in developing c ountries (Un ited Nation Millennium Goals). While BIM is increasingly be ing adopted in developed coun tries, implementations in the developing country context are rare. Research has establishe d how construction firms struggle from several limitations having to do with the socio - economic and technological environment found in developing countries. Examples of issues preventing BIM adoption include a shortage of IT - literate personnel as wel…
Co-evolution between trust in teachers and higher education toward digitally-rich learning environments
2017
Based on a powerful notion that the quality of higher education is crucial for innovation in digital economy and that such quality is subject to a conception of trust in teachers to deliver good education and advancement of information and communication technology (ICT), the dynamism of co-evolution between them was analyzed. Using a unique dataset representing the above system consisting of the rate of trust in teachers providing good education in the context of quality of education and their social status, of the level of higher education and the state of ICT advancement toward digitally-rich learning environments, an empirical numerical analysis of 20 countries was attempted. These count…
Understanding lacking trust in global software teams: A multi-case study
2007
Many organizations have turned toward globally distributed software development in their quest for higher-quality software delivered cheaply and quickly. But this kind of development has often been reported as problematic and complex to manage. One of the fundamental factors in determining the success and failure of globally distributed software teams is trust. The aim of our work has therefore been to describe the key factors causing lack of trust, and the main effects of lacking trust in such teams. From studying 4 projects, all located in two different countries, with trust problems we found the key factors to be poor socialization and socio-cultural fit, lack of face-to-face meetings, m…
Brownfield management opportunities to reduce the back pressure effects on the gas wells
2017
Gas mature fields are associated with challenges to optimize the hydrocarbon flow from reservoir to the sales point in a cost effective manner due to declining well productivity. Laslau Mare field is a mature gas field in Transylvanian basin (Mures County) developed in 1970s and is producing∼99% methane with low water-gas ratio. As any brown field, the state of depleted reservoir will generate several constraints for gas flow from formation to surface facilities and further to delivery point. During the exploitation has been observed that the operation conditions are facing with unstable pressure in the system due to low demand. Therefore, the back pressure effect will affect the wells in t…
Designing meeting support systems in a user-centered manner
1995
Multilateral diplomacy faces pressures to improve the efficiency of its operations. Because meetings play a central role in diplomacy they form one promising target in productivity improvements. Diplomatic meetings are rife with political maneuvering and embedded with pervasive diplomatic rituals and protocols which all affect considerably the content and form of successful technology interventions. In this paper we describe a meeting support system called the Helsinki Prototype System. To our knowledge it was the first meeting support system (MSS) which was intended to support multilateral diplomatic meetings. It was designed for the fourth Follow-up meeting of the Conference on Security a…
Influence of raw data analysis for the use of neural networks for win farms productivity prediction
2011
In the last decade wind energy had a strong growth because of cost effectiveness of the technology and the high remunerative of investments.