Encouraging internationalization and sustainable competitiveness in construction. A preliminary approach in Portugal

The Civil Construction and Public Works sector in Portugal has undergone huge oscillations over the last years, reflected on the number of companies, turnover and number of direct employees assigned to the activity. This sector is an important sector for economic growth and companies must adopt strategic analysis and control tools in order to survive and remain competitive. Companies operate in a large, highly competitive and demanding market, with new players and new business models. Companies need to find new ways of competing worldwide and internationalization emerges as one of the business responses to the challenge of globalization. Sustainability is a commitment to the future, a route that organizations must travel to search the best solutions to humankind problems, whether they are economic, social or environmental.

A Comparative Study of Energy Big Data Analysis for Product Management in a Smart Factory

Energy has been obtained as one of the key inputs for a country's economic growth and social development. Analysis and modeling of industrial energy are currently a time-insertion process because more and more energy is consumed for economic growth in a smart factory. This study aims to present and analyse the predictive models of the data-driven system to be used by appliances and find out the most significant product item. With repeated cross-validation, three statistical models were trained and tested in a test set: 1) General Linear Regression Model (GLM), 2) Support Vector Machine (SVM), and 3) boosting Tree (BT). The performance of prediction models measured by R2 error, Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE), Mean Absolute Error (MAE), and Coefficient of Variation (CV). The best model from the study is the Support Vector Machine (SVM) that has been able to provide R2 of 0.86 for the training data set and 0.85 for the testing data set with a low coefficient of variation, and the most significant product of this smart factory is Skelp.

Economic growth without welfare. The case of the impact of commodities on the Colombian economy

ABSTRACT Economic growth is not always related to social welfare. Therefore, this paper takes the case of the Colombian economy that has a strong dependence on commodity exploitation to identify the impacts of different commodities such as oil, coffee, coal, and nickel over economic variables. The results show that the increase in prices of commodities generates significant impacts on economic activity in variables such as GDP and investment. Also, there are no significant impacts on variables that provide welfare to individuals as total consumption or the unemployment rate.

Will Environmental Regulation Narrow the Gap in Regional Economic Growth?

Empirical studies have shown that China's Air Pollution Prevention and Control Law (APPCL2000), as an environmental regulation, has significantly alleviated the air pollution problem and improved the TFP of air polluting enterprises. However, few scholars have studied the regional heterogeneity of this policy. To study this issue, this manuscript introduces the "Hu Line" from the perspective of regional resource endowment differences and divides China into a resource advantage area (A area) and a resource disadvantage area (B area). Subsequently, this manuscript uses the triple difference model and big data of Chinese industrial enterprises to verify. The results show that under environmental regulations, the TFP of air polluting enterprises in B area has increased more than in A area, and the rapid decline in the proportion of low-efficiency air polluting enterprises in B area is the main mechanism. It shows that environmental regulation is beneficial to narrow the gap of regional economic growth and realize economic catch-up in resource-disadvantaged areas.