Quality Regulation

2019 ◽  
pp. 307-353
Author(s):  
Sheilagh Ogilvie

This chapter examines one major market failure that guilds might have helped solve: the potential for information asymmetries between producers and consumers about the quality of goods and services. Many guilds erected market regulations. To address such concerns, guilds required producers and products to be guild-certified, inspected workshops or wares, and penalized quality violations. Guilds also engaged in many unrelated activities which affected quality unintentionally. The chapter then assesses the evidence on information asymmetries about quality, the institutional mechanisms available to solve them, and the outcomes in different sectors of the European economy. It argues that guilds shed light on the balance between market failures, state failures, and the failure of particularized institutions in intermediating between producers and consumers.

Author(s):  
José Antonio Ocampo ◽  
Paola Arias

The major feature of Colombia’s national development banks is that they constitute a system of multiple, specialized institutions, created at different times to promote sectors that were considered strategic for the country’s development. This chapter analyses the characteristics of the system of national development banks in Colombia currently composed of four specialized institutions: FDN (for infrastructure), FINDETER (local development), BANCOLDEX (industry and foreign trade), and FINAGRO (agriculture). The chapter explores the history, current structure, and main features of the system. It also looks at how the system is managing three major market failures: infrastructure financing (the major case of market failure in long-term financing), financial inclusion, and the promotion of entrepreneurial growth.


Author(s):  
Ariel Ezrachi

‘Introduction’ provides an overview of the competitive process, which has generated much of the prosperity of the Western world. It is this process that delivers the abundance of choice, the lower prices, the increased innovation, and the better quality of goods and services. The antitrust and competition laws are designed to address risks, remedy possible market failures, and safeguard consumer welfare. Competition agencies and courts are tasked with enforcing the law. As they do so, they face the challenge of correctly identifying what amounts to an anti-competitive activity and curtailing it to ensure dynamic and competitive markets.


2010 ◽  
Vol 4 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 7-15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Randall

The historical role of agriculture in economic geography and recent conceptual developments – including multifunctional agriculture (MFA), the new economic geography, amenity-driven growth, and the “world is flat” and “creative class” hypotheses – are examined, and recent empirical research in NorthAmerica and Europe is reviewed, in order to assess the potential for MFA as an engine of regional economic growth. Ideal MFA policy corrects market failures and is mostly amenity-augmenting. It has the capacity to enhance opportunities for farmers on urban fringe; stimulate growth in high-amenity rural regions accessible to cities that offer opportunities for high-value work; and generate growth in relatively remote high-amenity regions. The scope for market-failure-correcting MFA policy to propel economic growth in lessfavored regions is limited – remoteness is non-responsive to policy in the short to medium term, and amenities that attract in-migration (e.g. proximity to sea, lakes, mountains, pleasant climate) are givens for favored locations but can at best be complemented by pro-active policy – but not trivial. While this paper focuses on regional economic growth, it well to rememberthat growth is not everything. Regions unlikely to experience growth need to create satisfying futures. Market-failure-correcting MFA policy has the potential to improve quality of life, well-being, and perhaps incomes in many if not all rural places regardless of location. This accomplishment would not be trivial – economic growth for all regions regardless of resources, amenities, and remoteness is not a serious prospect, and regions in decline face daunting problems maintaining essential services and quality of life.


2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 35
Author(s):  
Catharine Hill

<p>Neoclassical economists make the case for profit seeking firms in the private sector because they supply goods and services efficiently, meeting consumer demand at the least possible price and the highest quality. The government also supplies some goods and services directly, and also has made provisions for non-profit firms to do so, recognizing that in some cases for-profit firms will not supply them efficiently, because of a variety of market failures. In the United States, higher education has been one of those services that has traditionally been supplied to a large extent by non-profits and the government sector, and not by the for-profit sector. Over the last few decades, that has been changing radically, with much of the growth in enrollments in higher education taking place in the for-profit sector. Understanding the evolving roles of for-profits, non-profits and the public sector in the provision of higher education over the past several decades is important because they can have public policy implications. The government’s response to market failure, in particular, has welfare implications for both individuals and society.</p>


2004 ◽  
pp. 94-110 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Shastitko

Various ways of state participation in the mechanisms of transaction management are considered in the article. Differences between compensation and elimination of the market failures are identified. Opportunities and risks of non-regulatory alternatives usage as a mean of market failure compensation are described. Based on classification of goods correlated to relative cost of their useful characteristics evaluation (search, experience, merit) questions of institutional alternatives in three areas (political, financial and commodity) are examined.


Author(s):  
S.U. Lyapina ◽  
◽  
V.N. Tarasova ◽  
V.B. Ruchkin ◽  
E.O. Koscheeva ◽  
...  

The quality issues of new services directly affect the competitiveness of service organizations. However, the introduction of new services to the market is often limited only to the construction of the logistics of business processes, and the design applies only to technological equipment and infrastructure, the quality of which ultimately does not always ensure the quality of the services provided. At the same time, quality management affects mainly operational aspects, that is, it covers the later stages of the service life cycle. In resource-intensive service industries (for example, transport, communications, etc.), the high cost of equipment and infrastructure reduces the possibility of changes in service delivery technologies to improve their quality, which leads to inefficiency and market failures due to the fact that the new service does not match the real needs of customers. Despite this, forecasting and planning the quality of a service at the stage «making a decision» to launch a new service on the market remains largely without sufficient attention. The authors prove the need to design the quality of services at the stage «making a decision» to bring new services to the market. The purpose of the article is to describe the approach developed by the authors to assessing the quality of projected services at the early stages of their life cycle, which makes it possible to integrate qualitative and quantitative indicators of the future service and take into account the forecast requests of customers. The proposed approach has two features: (1) forecasting customer requirements for the quality of services is based on the results of machine learning based on data on existing and potential customers, as well as on the basis of the accumulated knowledge base of customer experience and expert opinions; (2) multi-criteria optimization is used, while some of the optimized parameters are discrete and high-quality. In conclusion, the authors demonstrated the advantages of the developed model on the examples of transport and logistics business in the field of passenger and freight transportation in Russia.


2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 689-693
Author(s):  
Nikola Sabev

Providing a specific level of healthcare quality is an important and a complex issue, determined by the extent of influence of number of interrelated and predetermined factors that act at different stages throughout the continuum of healthcare activities. A final healthcare product is a complex conglomerate of goods and services being heterogeneous with a time-varying result and a pronounced individuality. Thus, healthcare managers are required to put its supporting and continuous upgrading at the core of their efforts, which in turn will result in cost reduction, good collaboration between individual professionals, improved financial performance and, ultimately, patients will be optimally serviced and their needs and expectations will be satisfied.Indicators to measure quality of medical services give an idea of their characteristics, conditions and requirements for implementation. In this respect, quality assurance in clinical laboratories is an important process involving a complex system of planned actions at all stages of laboratory analysis in order to achieve the most accurate results with the aim of achieving the most accurate result, of monitoring the effect of the treatment and prognosis of the disease in question. The high quality of laboratory medical services helps modern clinicians in their practical activities and is a guarantor of achieving an adequate healthcare outcome. The ‘Quality in Laboratory Medicine’ concept evolves over time, focusing not only on analytical accuracy but also on a broader and more comprehensive basis that takes into account all the steps of clinical and laboratory analysis, providing valuable information in the process of making clinical decisions that are subordinated entirely to the cares of the patient.All healthcare professionals under the administrative authority of the medical institution, that should guarantee the necessary resources for this process, should participate in providing and improving the quality of services. It is necessary to cover the entire organizational structure, by paying attention to the optimization of the relations between staff and patients. Healthcare managers should provide permanent monitoring and a process evaluation system at each stage, allowing options for choosing alternatives for a solution and precise selectivity, aimed at improving the quality of healthcare, in particular, clinical and laboratory activities and services.


Author(s):  
Stéphane A. Dudoignon

Since 2002, Sunni jihadi groups have been active in Iranian Baluchistan without managing to plunge the region into chaos. This book suggests that a reason for this, besides Tehran’s military responses, has been the quality of Khomeini and Khamenei’s relationship with a network of South-Asia-educated Sunni ulama (mawlawis) originating from the Sarbaz oasis area, in the south of Baluchistan. Educated in the religiously reformist, socially conservative South Asian Deoband School, which puts the madrasa at the centre of social life, the Sarbazi ulama had taken advantage, in Iranian territory, of the eclipse of Baluch tribal might under the Pahlavi monarchy (1925-79). They emerged then as a bulwark against Soviet influence and progressive ideologies, before rallying to Khomeini in 1979. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, they have been playing the role of a rampart against Salafi propaganda and Saudi intrigues. The book shows that, through their alliance with an Iranian Kurdish-born Muslim-Brother movement and through the promotion of a distinct ‘Sunni vote’, they have since the early 2000s contributed towards – and benefitted from – the defence by the Reformist presidents Khatami (1997-2005) and Ruhani (since 2013) of local democracy and of the minorities’ rights. They endeavoured to help, at the same time, preventing the propagation of jihadism and Sunni radicalisation to Iran – at least until the ISIS/Daesh-claimed attacks of June 2017, in Tehran, shed light on the limits of the Islamic Republic’s strategy of reliance on Deobandi ulama and Muslim-Brother preachers in the country’s Sunni-peopled peripheries.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (17) ◽  
pp. 4716 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Kozicka ◽  
Sebastian Kot ◽  
I Gede Riana

Managing a tourism supply chain is predominantly focused on managing a tourism-specific product that can be perceived as all kinds of goods and services utilized by tourists during their trips. The predominant goal of this article is to empirically identify the level of engagement of entities operating in the tourism-oriented branch of industry concerning the satisfaction of end-customers with the offered tourism-related services and products. Within the scope of this study, the statistical relevance of elements of active cooperation within a tourism-specific supply chain was analyzed. Empirical examinations covered the assessment of the cooperation within the framework of the tourism-oriented supply chain and its impact on consumer satisfaction. A research questionnaire was utilized to meet examination-specific goals. Theoretical considerations and the analysis of branches of industry in relation to the available statistical data showed that tourist-oriented supply chain covers various entities, the engagement of which may have a factual impact on the efficiency of managing the entire chain, as well as on the overall client satisfaction, improving tourism sustainability. The obtained results clearly showed that the examined entities considered the analyzed cooperation aspects to be very important with regard to the supply chain management. Said aspects included the total length of cooperation within the framework of a particular supply chain, which, according to the examined entities, directly translated into the quality of cooperation—to either significant or very significant extent, as well as making it much easier to solve certain problems that were strictly connected with the provision of tourism-oriented services. Yet another aspect of cooperation that was touched upon was the transfer of the so-called know-how between the entities engaged in a given supply chain. As proven by the examination, 70% of the surveyed entities claimed that it was of significant or very significant importance. The last analyzed aspect of cooperation were relations between the supply chain-specific partners and their impact on the satisfaction of end customers. According to over half of the sample (61.54%), decent relations between supply chain participants affected the satisfaction of end customers to a notable extent.


Author(s):  
Juan P. Martínez ◽  
Inmaculada Méndez ◽  
Esther Secanilla ◽  
Ana Benavente ◽  
Julia García Sevilla

Starting from previous studies in professional caregivers of people with dementia and other diseases in institutionalized centers of different regions, the aim of this study was to compare burnout levels that workers present depending on the center, to create a caregiver profile with high professional accomplishment and to describe the quality of life that residents perceive Murcia and Barcelona. The instruments used were the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI), the Professional Caregiver Survey developed ad hoc and the Brief Questionnaire of Quality of Life (CUBRECAVI in Spanish) on residents. The results show, on the one hand, that levels of professional accomplishment may be paradoxically higher in the case of catastrophe and, on the other hand, the 98.2% of users are satisfied with the residence in which is located and 81.8% with the manner in which occupy the time. The conclusions that are extrapolated from the study shed light on the current situation of workers and residents and the influence that an earthquake can have on them.


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