Search results

This study examines the innovation-efficiency linkage for Indian and Chinese manufacturing and service firms.

We applied the stochastic production and cost frontier approach to determine the output and cost efficiency of the firms surveyed in World Bank enterprise surveys. We then used both unconditional and conditional propensity score matching (PSM) estimation techniques to examine the effects of innovation as well as R&D on output and cost efficiency of the firms surveyed.

The study results suggest that innovation-efficiency linkage varies between countries and sectors. Innovations significantly raise output and cost efficiency of Indian manufacturing firms, whereas innovations in Chinese manufacturing firms are cost-oriented and negatively affect output efficiency. For the service firms of both countries, innovations are significantly positively linked with output and cost efficiency. The study also suggests that R&D acts as a crucial moderator for innovation-efficiency linkage for Chinese manufacturing firms but not for Indian firms, and the interaction effects of innovations are not substantially higher in magnitude than their individual effects. Finally, conditional PSM results suggest knowledge spillover for effective innovations of Indian firms, whereas R&D is a must for substantial innovation-efficiency linkage in Chinese firms.

This study offers quite a few crucial policy decisions concerning the relationship between innovation and efficiency as well as the moderation effect of R&D on innovation-efficiency linkage. It concludes that the effects of innovation on firms' efficiency and the role of R&D as a moderator of the innovation-efficiency relationship differ between India and China across the manufacturing and service sectors.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate the pressures and drivers that have been experienced by Chinese manufacturing small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in terms of green supply chain management (GSCM).

The research framework and hypotheses are examined by a questionnaire survey through e-mails conducted in China in 2011. The empirical analysis is based on the data from 202 SME manufacturers in China. Validity and reliability of the items employed in the research is assessed through Cronbach’s α test. Hypotheses for the identification of GSCM pressures and drivers to SMEs as well as the differences that exist among different industrial sectors are tested by adopting descriptive statistics analysis and analysis of variance test.

This study finds that Chinese manufacturing SMEs have been under pressures from a variety of sources, including regulations, customers, suppliers and public awareness in terms of GSCM. Besides, internal drivers are also an important encouragement for SMEs to consider GSCM. Moreover, Chinese manufacturing SMEs from different industrial sectors show some differences in experiencing pressures or being motivated by drivers.

The main limitations to this paper are the relatively small sample of SMEs and the potentially overlooked variables.

Chinese manufacturing SMEs and their larger customers, as well as governments, are likely to obtain some implications from this study if they are willing to consider any GSCM initiatives throughout the supply chain.

The paper clearly explores the GSCM pressures and drivers faced by the Chinese manufacturing SMEs where the results may differ from the findings through the studies on large enterprises or SMEs in other national context.

To address the critical sustainability challenges currently faced by China, manufacturers in this country have committed to improve their environmental performance. To support this commitment, evidence suggests that Chinese manufacturers have mainly turned to the implementation of environmental management approaches such as ISO 14001, cleaner production, green supply chain management, circular economy and green lean. However, the adoption of other approaches such as total quality environmental management (TQEM) by Chinese manufacturers is less clear. The purpose of this paper is to fill this gap by providing light into fundamental issues regarding the implementation of TQEM in the manufacturing sector of China.

A survey-based exploratory study was conducted based on 119 Chinese manufacturing companies, and the data obtained were analysed using a combination of descriptive and inferential statistics.

The results revealed that in general, there is less awareness of TQEM in the Chinese manufacturing sector than other environmental and quality/operations improvement approaches such as green supply chain management, reverse logistics, ISO 9000, Six Sigma and lean Six Sigma. Thus, its degree of implementation is also lower than these approaches as well as ISO 14001. The results also indicate that although a company’s size is not associated with the implementation of TQEM, it is mainly large organisations and those that have adopted TQM those which will be mainly aware and have implemented TQEM. The study also reveals the drivers, results and challenges of TQEM implementation.

The paper extends the currently limited knowledge on TQEM, and its results are beneficial for managers who aim at effectively adopting TQEM to simultaneously improve the environmental, operational and financial performance of their organisations. The paper can also motivate organisations not currently embarked on the “green wagon” to contemplate the benefits that implementing TQEM, or any other environmental management approach, may bring to their operations and business.

This study aims to explore the importance and impact of supply and manufacturing risk management upon business performance within the context of Chinese manufacturing supply chains.

A two-phased multi-method approach was adopted, which included a survey questionnaire to practitioners in Chinese manufacturing supply chains followed by semi-structured interviews. The findings included 103 valid survey responses complemented by six semi-structured interviews.

The results indicate that in Chinese manufacturing context supply risk and manufacturing risk management are both vital for business performance. A high correlation between business and manufacturing risk management performance exists; however, no significant impact of supplier dependency, systematic purchasing, maturity of production and supply chain and human resources was found despite previously these elements being regarded as key influencers for supply and manufacturing risk management performance. The Chinese manufacturing supply chain indicated that elements such as the supplier and customer orientation, flexibility, manufacturing and supply risk highly connotes with business performance.

In the current unpredictable and volatile business environment, the competitiveness of manufacturing supply chains to a large extent depend on their ability to identify, assess and manage the manufacturing and supply risks. The findings of this study will assist supply chain managers in taking decision on manufacturing and supply risk management and reducing the uncertainty upon their business performance.

The supply chain risk has been widely explored within the context of individual case studies, or standalone models focusing on either supply or manufacturing risk in supply chains; however, to what extent this has been applicable to a wider context and its impact upon business process has not been explored. Hence, this study simultaneously has analysed manufacturing risk and supply risk and its impact upon Chinese manufacturing supply chains business performance. Moreover, this study uses a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, which is often limited in this area. Finally, the institutional theory lens offers novel insights in better understanding the factors that can affect the impact of supply and manufacturing risk management upon business performance in those contexts, such as China, where the institutional aspect presents specific features.

This paper argues that multinational firms can benefit from indigenous knowledge diffusion in a host developing country so that there can be two‐way productivity spillovers between foreign and local firms even in the developing world. This new argument is confirmed by a very large firm‐level data set from the Chinese manufacturing sector. After grouping firms based on their trade orientation, we find that foreign firms have a positive impact on local‐market‐oriented Chinese firms. When the degree of foreign presence is sufficiently high, there will be negative productivity effects on export‐oriented Chinese firms. On the other hand, local Chinese firms have a positive impact on export‐oriented foreign invested firms. After dividing foreign firms according to their sources, we find that the beneficial spillovers between OECD and local Chinese firms are much greater than those between Hong Kong/Macao/Taiwan and local Chinese firms.

Given advances in digitalization and automation, manufacturing employees are facing the increasing threat of being substituted by smart machines and robots. The purpose of this paper is to propose a framework that explains as well as can be used to study career sustainability of workers in the fast-paced, continuously changing manufacturing landscape.

After tracing the evolution of manufacturing sector in China, the authors review existing literature on career sustainability and then propose a new framework. The authors then describe two fictive cases and illustrate the applicability of the four-dimensional framework in helping understand the lived experience of objects in these fictive cases.

The proposed dynamic framework of career sustainability constituted by four intricately interconnected dimensions (i.e. resourceful, flexible, renewable and integrative) is useful in understanding the fictive cases and hopefully will guide future research on career sustainability in manufacturing or similarly fast-past, dynamically changing environments.

The framework of career sustainability facilitates manufacturing employees to accurately evaluate the sustainability of their careers, whereby they can choose to continue, shift or re-orient their career paths during the transitional period toward digitalized manufacturing; it also enlightens employers to think about how to enhance the job security and engagement of workers by helping prolong their careers and re-design their career plans.

This paper proposes a novel yet context-specific framework to understand and study sustainability of careers. In addition to helping us understand how careers evolve during transformational periods, it also offers fruitful avenues for further research.

The purpose of this research is to identify the competitive priorities of the manufacturing firms in their internationalization efforts.

A structured questionnaire survey is conducted involving 569 manufacturing firms in China. The competitive priority in internationalization efforts is gauged by combining the degree of emphasis of manufacturing firms on a certain factor over the past three years and the level of improvement of the factor into an index.

It is found that “technology level”, “cost control”, and “brand consciousness” are the top three most important factors affecting the competitiveness of internationalization of manufacturing in China. The three bottlenecked factors that impede internationalization include “Internationalization business experience”, “Financing capacity” and “Senior managers with management know‐how”.

With the rapid development of economy globalization, firms in the Chinese manufacturing sector have begun the process of internationalization. As these young firms venture into the foreign markets, they may face some uncertainty and risks which entail a process of learning and adaptation. It is hoped that the empirical findings can shed some insight for improving the process of internationalization of the manufacturing sector.

There is a paucity of internationalization efforts from manufacturing firms in developing countries. By examining the competitive priority of the Chinese manufacturing firms, this study can enrich the body of knowledge on internationalization of manufacturing firms in developing countries.

This study aims to analyze the effect of inward foreign direct investment (FDI) on new job creation. This study pays attention to factors interrelated to China’s FDI by using the case of Thailand.

Using time series data from 2001 to 2014, this paper explores the driving forces and reduction potentials of employment in Thailand’s industrial sector with consideration for dynamic changes within the vector autoregression model.

The results show that government expenditure plays a dominant role in increasing employment in Thailand’s industrial sector and exports plays a dominant role in decreasing employment in Thailand’s industrial sector. All variables are co-integrated and the analysis of the impulse–response function also turns out to be synchronous. Furthermore, in the short term, exports are more critical than China’s FDI in industrial sectors in reduction potentials of employment in Thailand’s industrial.

Policies should be devised to increase skilled labour and improve the equality of infrastructure in the country to attract more FDI into the economy and for quick adjustment purposes in case of shock to the system.

The paper uncovers some important factors influencing employment in Thailand’s industrial sector under study and provides a guide-map for policymakers.

China’s experience of industrial growth is noteworthy for several reasons, not least because it has made a massive use of selective industrial policies. The industrial development guidelines set by the Five-Year Plans are extensively based on the choice of “strategic” or “pillar” industries to be promoted and supported. What remains unclear is the way in which such industries are identified among many. The purpose of this paper is to propose a debate on how to improve the government choice of strategic sectors and suggests a methodology to make this choice more transparent and rigorous.

The methodology allows ranking the different industries according to their strategic importance in the Chinese economy. The authors employ an uncertainty analysis methodology to verify the robustness of the ranking.

The results point to a list of strategic sectors for China. Comparing the ranking of the strategic sectors to the list of strategic priorities described in the Twelfth Five-Year Plan, we find that, by and large, the ranking coincides with the list of strategic sectors of the Chinese government.

The authors argue that improving the transparency and the rigor of the choice of pillar industries can be crucial for the Chinese government to maintain social legitimization in the transition to a “market” economy.

Very little is known about the choice of strategic sectors in China in the international literature. By addressing the debate on the choice of pillar industries in China, the paper discusses a topic scarcely studied offering a unique and original contribute.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of lean operations practice and design on the Chinese manufacturing performance, using lean assessment data from 65 plants in various industries.

Exploratory factor and regression analyses are used to examine the associations among operations practice, production design, and operations performance. Three constructs are developed, two for operations practice (human resources and supply chains) and one for production design.

Factor analysis shows that three factors are sufficient to represent the lean performance dimensions of flow, flexibility, and quality. Regression analysis shows that the lean performance factors are strongly related to operations practice and production system design. Using lean factors and operations practice/design, our results indicate significant gaps in lean manufacturing practices among different industries, with the petroleum and hi‐tech industries performing relatively best. In addition, the garment industry performs very well in flexibility, indicating it does not compete just on price, but also on rapid response. Finally, all industries perform well in quality, underlining the emerging economy character of China. These results support other recent findings of the positive impact of lean operations on the performance of the Chinese manufacturing sector.

The paper's findings, which are based on the experience of selected manufacturing plants in China, should not be interpreted as indicative of the characteristics of the Chinese manufacturing plants in general.

This paper advances the evidence on the role of lean manufacturing in two ways. First, to derive more robust statistical results, the paper relies on primary lean assessment data, as opposed to secondary opinion survey data common to most other studies. Second, to obtain more general findings, the paper makes use of a wider set of relevant variables, both for assessing manufacturing practice and performance, than is usual in the literature.