Price of unsustainability. Economic impacts of climate change

Global problems, rapid and massive regional changes in the 21st century call for genuine long-term, awareness, planning and well focused actions from both national governments and international organizations. This book wishes to contribute to building an innovative path of strategic views in handling the diverse challenges, and more emphatically, the economic impacts of climate change. Although the contributors of this volume represent several approaches, they all rely on some common grounds such as the costbenefit analysis of mitigation and adaptation, and on the need to present an in-depth theoretical and practical dimension. The research accounted for in this book tried to integrate and confront various types of economics approaches and methods, as well as knowledge from game theory to country surveys, from agricultural adaptation to weather bonds, from green tax to historical experience of human adaptation. The various themes and points of views do deserve the attention of the serious academic reader interested in the economics of climate change. We hope to enhance the spread of good solutions resulting from world wide disputes and tested strategic decisions. WAKE UP! It is not just the polar bears' habitat that is endangered, but the entire human form of life.

An Exploratory Study on the Role of Familiarity in Product Evaluations

There is growing interest among researchers working in the areas of product-country image effects, and more generally international consumer behaviour, in the potential relationship between consumers’ familiarity with, and evaluation of, products from various countries. We use data from a consumer survey in Hungary to attempt an initial exploration of this relationship. The data support findings from earlier similar studies but also suggest that affective considerations may be playing a considerable role in the evaluations of domestic products, and that the relationship of familiarity with product evaluations may vary significantly from country to country and may not be as strong as previously thought.

Cross-country and inter-temporal analysis of Supply Chain Integration (SCI): China, Hungary and the Netherlands - changes in SCI from 1996 to 2008

Using plant level data from a global survey with multiple time frames, one begun in the late 1990s, this paper introduces measures of supply chain integration and discusses the dynamic relationship between the level of integration and a set of internal and external performance measurements. Specifically, data from Hungary, The Netherlands and The People’s Republic of China are used in the analyses. The time frames considered range from the late 1990s till 2009, encompassing major changes and transitions. Our results seem to indicate that SCI has an underlying structure of four sets of indicators, namely: (1) delivery frequency from the supplier or to the customer; (2) sharing internal processes with suppliers; (3) sharing internal processes with buyers and (4) joint facility location with partners. The differences between groups in terms of several performance measures proved to be small, being mostly statistically insignificant - but looking at the ANOVA table we can conclude that in this sample of companies those having joint location with their partners seem to outperform others.