scholarly journals No Permits, No Fabs: The Importance of Regulatory Reform for Semiconductor Manufacturing

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
John VerWey

Congress has advanced legislation to appropriate $52 billion in funding for the CHIPS for America Act, which aims to increase semiconductor manufacturing and supply chain resilience in the United States. But more can be done to improve the resiliency of U.S. access to microelectronics beyond manufacturing incentives. This report outlines infrastructure investments and regulatory reforms that could make the United States a more attractive place to build new chipmaking capacity and ensure continued U.S. access to key inputs for semiconductor manufacturing.

2019 ◽  
Vol 47 (5) ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Hanjing Huang ◽  
Pei-Luen Patrick Rau

Our aim was to investigate and compare the effects of cooperating with either a friend or a stranger in a business context on trust and trustworthiness in 2 different cultures. In China, guanxi is a special form of personal relationship in which the exchange partners bond through reciprocal obligations. We conducted cooperation experiments based on the supply chain task in which Chinese and U.S. participants cooperated with their friends and with strangers. The results indicated that both Chinese and U.S. participants had higher levels of trust and trustworthiness for their friends than for strangers. Moreover, Chinese participants made a stronger distinction between friends and strangers than did U.S. participants. In addition, Chinese participants had lower levels of trust and trustworthiness than did U.S. participants. The cooperation experiments enrich the theoretical field of investigating the effects of personal relationships on cooperative trust and trustworthiness, and provide practical value to the management of business cooperation in different cultures.


2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 382-411
Author(s):  
Chris Madsen

Henry Eccles, in classic studies on logistics, describes the dynamics of strategic procurement in the supply chain stretching from home countries to military theatres of operations. Naval authorities and industrialists concerned with Japanese aggression before and after Pearl Harbor looked towards developing shipbuilding capacity on North America’s Pacific Coast. The region turned into a volume producer of merchant vessels, warships and auxiliaries destined for service in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Shipbuilding involved four broad categories of companies in the United States and Canada that enabled the tremendous production effort.


Significance Follow-on action from Washington and responses from foreign actors will shape the US government’s adversarial policy towards China in semiconductors and other strategic technologies. Impacts The Biden administration will likely conclude that broad-based diversion of the semiconductor supply chain away from China is not feasible. The United States will rely on export controls and political pressure to prevent diffusion to China of cutting-edge chip technologies. The United States will focus on persuading foreign semiconductor leaders to help develop US capabilities, thereby staying ahead of China. Washington will focus on less direct approaches to strategic technology competition with China, notably technical standards-setting. Industry leaders in the semiconductor supply chain worldwide will continue expanding business in China in less politically sensitive areas.


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 205-221
Author(s):  
Attila Pohlmann

The demand for ever-accelerating fast fashion is unprecedented, while its supply chain burdens environmental systems. Hedonic fashion consumption is generally unfettered by sustainability concerns, but evidence suggests that island geographies–with dense boundaries between the built and the natural environment–have a heightening effect on eco-consciousness. A framework based on the contemporary condition of hyperconsumption is proposed: island geography heightens sustainability awareness; consequently, fashion consumers located on islands trade-off perceived hedonic benefits of fashion consumption against perceived moral benefits of connection with nature. The framework is supported by visual evidence collected on the Galápagos island Santa Cruz, indicating that male fashion consumers express connection with nature by means of tattoos, slogans on clothing and choice of eco-friendly materials. Quantitative tests with survey data from the United States and Ecuador show that residents in Hawaiʻi and the Galápagos have higher levels of connection with nature compared to residents on the associated continental areas. This effect is mediated by decreased perceived rewards of hedonic fashion consumption, but the effect is overall weaker in Ecuador compared to the United States due to differences in purchasing power and attitudes towards consumerism. Because of the stereotype that eco-friendly is unmanly, men are generally less likely to embrace environmentally friendly products and the findings of this research point to avenues to overcome this barrier.


2017 ◽  
Vol 114 (38) ◽  
pp. E7891-E7899 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy M. Smith ◽  
Andrew L. Goodkind ◽  
Taegon Kim ◽  
Rylie E. O. Pelton ◽  
Kyo Suh ◽  
...  

Corn production, and its associated inputs, is a relatively large source of greenhouse gas emissions and uses significant amounts of water and land, thus contributing to climate change, fossil fuel depletion, local air pollutants, and local water scarcity. As large consumers of this corn, corporations in the ethanol and animal protein industries are increasingly assessing and reporting sustainability impacts across their supply chains to identify, prioritize, and communicate sustainability risks and opportunities material to their operations. In doing so, many have discovered that the direct impacts of their owned operations are dwarfed by those upstream in the supply chain, requiring transparency and knowledge about environmental impacts along the supply chains. Life cycle assessments (LCAs) have been used to identify hotspots of environmental impacts at national levels, yet these provide little subnational information necessary for guiding firms’ specific supply networks. In this paper, our Food System Supply-Chain Sustainability (FoodS3) model connects spatial, firm-specific demand of corn purchasers with upstream corn production in the United States through a cost minimization transport model. This provides a means to link county-level corn production in the United States to firm-specific demand locations associated with downstream processing facilities. Our model substantially improves current LCA assessment efforts that are confined to broad national or state level impacts. In drilling down to subnational levels of environmental impacts that occur over heterogeneous areas and aggregating these landscape impacts by specific supply networks, targeted opportunities for improvements to the sustainability performance of supply chains are identified.


2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 84
Author(s):  
Juan José Uchuya Lopéz ◽  
Raad Yahya Qassim

Brazil and the United States are the leading soybean grain producing and exporting countries in the world. Although crop production cost is significantly lower in Brazil than in the United States due to more advanced crop production technology, this competitive advantage vanishes in view of the higher logistics costs in Brazil than in the United States, in view of the dominance of road transportation in Brazil, whilst river and rail transportation are prevalent in the United States. In order to regain its competitive advantage, there is a clear need for a redesign of the inland supply chain in Brazil through the use and expansion of existent inland waterways and rail networks. In this paper, an optimal supply chain redesign methodology is presented to achieve the aforesaid objective, with a focus on Mato Grosso which is the largest producer and exporting state in Brazil. This methodology is in fact applicable to multiply echelon global supply chains in general.


Energies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (18) ◽  
pp. 5634
Author(s):  
Anna Zielińska-Chmielewska ◽  
Dobrosława Mruk-Tomczak ◽  
Anna Wielicka-Regulska

Although the pandemic phenomenon is not the first of its kind in human history, the common feature of COVID-19 is its rapid impact on the global economy. The challenge for the national economy on the world stage is to maintain a continuous food supply. The scientific purpose of the study is to report, analyze and evaluate backgrounds, causes of instabilities and their effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on supply and demand side of the meat market in the United States of America, China and Russia. The practical purpose of the study is to present implemented measures and recommendations on how to return to meat market equilibrium. In the theoretical part of the study, the revised public source of information coming from well-known organizations such as: EC, FAO, OECD, and WB, are used. In the practical part of the manuscript, qualitative research on the People’s Republic of China, Russian Federation, and the United States of America, along with semi-structured in-depth interviews with experts and Ishikawa diagram are presented. The primary data come from authors’ own research and collection of multiple sources. The article indicates the use of qualitative systematic review, supported by a creation of a prototype of the issues of maintaining continuity of the food supply chain during the COVID-19 pandemic in the secondary sources, intensified by a keyword search. The results of the research are diverse and oriented toward the needs of the analyzed meat markets. In the case of the People’s Republic of China, the solution is to develop a system of subsidies and preferential rates for the use of rail transport in exports. In the case of Russia, the solution is to provide support to the meat and poultry farmers for cold storage of slaughtered animals. In the case of the USA, the solution is to develop technical and technological facilities in order to speed up the supply chain between local livestock with meat and poultry farmers. Moreover, the outcomes indicate that sustainability of the food supply chain needs well-thought-out support on agri-food supply production.


Significance The US-led diplomatic boycott of the Winter Olympics in February will increase the pressure on US companies to decide whether China or the United States is their more valuable market. Some of that pressure to decide is coming from employees and customers in both countries. Impacts More frequent and sharper confrontations between US companies and China could accelerate the decoupling of the two economies. Renewed emphasis on human rights concerns will encourage the further shifting of some supply chain elements out of China. Consumer brands are particularly vulnerable to human rights concerns, as are their suppliers.


2012 ◽  
pp. 1626-1636
Author(s):  
Seyed-Mahmoud Aghazadeh

As the domestic businesses expand, many are making the choice to use foreign products, labor, and services to aid in their production. Global supply chains are minimizing the costs of the production process but are also creating vulnerabilities to home countries. As the global economy changes, the competitiveness between countries grows. Competitiveness can affect everything from a country’s economy to how a firm conducts international business. Addressing the need to find a method to increase the United States competitiveness in the world economy by improving the use of global supply chains would help to make domestic firms more successful in the global economy. Studying how companies position themselves abroad is important to providing insight into how to become more competitive. Worldwide companies are diversifying by moving more of their supply chain to international locations. This is providing them with many benefits such as better markets for products, lower costs, and more advanced technologies. As a result, the competitive strategy of companies is to increase production and decrease costs through the most efficient global supply chain. Maximizing the potential of domestic firms’ global supply chains is one of the most effective ways to increase U.S. competitiveness. If more big businesses in the United States are willing to participate on the global level, then the US will be able to improve their competitiveness.


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