Enhancing Economic Efficiency through Cost Audits: A Comprehensive Analysis

Purpose – This study aims to analyze the effect of Korea's Services Trade Restrictiveness Index (STRI) and STRI Heterogeneity Index (HG) on Korea’s services trade.
 Design/Methodology/Approach – Using the Poisson Pseudo Maximum Likelihood (PPML) model, this study analyzes the impact of STRI and STRI HG provided by the OECD for 26 countries on Korea’s services trade (imports). The reason for using PPML is that first, a consistent estimator can be obtained regardless of the error term’s distribution. Second, if there is net-zero services trade in the data, sample selection bias can occur as the zero-trade data is excluded from the analysis when using ordinary least squares (OLS).
 Findings – After converting the STRI and the STRI HG into a single index through principal component analysis (PCA), results show that the STRI is not statistically significant, but the STRI HG shows a statistically significant negative (-) sign in all analysis models. This means that the greater the STRI HG with Korea's trading partners, the more negative the impact on services trade, which implies that even if the level of services restrictiveness is low, services trade volume will reduce as regulatory coherence with trading partners decreases.
 Research Implications – Whereas previous studies primarily focused on major advanced countries such as OECD nations or specific service industries, this study analyzes the impact of the services trade restrictiveness on services trade for Korea and each services sector. In addition, existing studies perform cross-sectional analyses due to data availability, whereas this study reflects changes in services restrictiveness levels over time by constructing panel data for 2014–2019.

Aquaculture sustainability: Global challenges need local actions

The recent economic crisis was a test case for many advanced countries to determine the capacity of their socio-economic model to cope with the challenges of globalisation and financial crash. From this perspective, the aim of this article is to explore whether the expansion of the welfare state should be seen as a barrier to economic growth and competitiveness, as ‘neoliberal’ economists often argue, or whether increasing public social provision might contribute to enhancing real income. After a comparative discussion of the evolution of different welfare models in developed countries, we advance our argument that public social spending is not a drain on competitiveness or an obstacle to economic efficiency. On the contrary, we explore the possibility that increasing welfare expenditure can stimulate economic growth along with lowering inequality, while the so-called ‘efficiency thesis’ (according to which globalisation needs to be accompanied by the retrenchment of welfare states in order to promote external competitiveness) produces worse economic performance and higher inequality. As a test of this hypothesis, we analyse empirical data on 34 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries from 1990 to 2013. We use econometric analysis to indicate that the so-called ‘compensation thesis’ (a process whereby globalisation is regulated through expansion of welfare states) may contribute to real income dynamics, while greater income inequality may inhibit per capita gross domestic product growth.

Concerns about public enterprise management, especially since the 1980s, have been closely associated with more generalized concerns about the role of the state in processes of production. Whether in specific enterprises or industries in the context of a mixed market economy, or across the entire economy, in a system of centralized planning, state owned and operated production units have been associated with economic inefficiencies leading to lower relative levels of output, a diversion of resources from their most productive uses and internal economic inefficiencies in management and motivation within the productive unit.1 A major cause of the economic inefficiencies of public enterprises is the difficulty of reconciling the multiple political, social and ideological aims of governments and government-appointed managers guiding the operations of these enterprises, with the achievement of economic efficiency. These concerns have led to the adoption of a wide spectrum of mechanisms to modify or alter the controls and obligations between governments and state owned enterprises to better achieve these multiple and sometimes conflicting objectives.

The article examines the variety of applications of data mining techniques in the process of working oil and gas industry. It describes specific industry technological problems whose solution is simplified and optimized with the use of modern methods of data analysis. Examples of the use of neural networks and fuzzy logic to improve the economic efficiency of oil and gas companies are considered.