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With the recognition that consistent quality of a firm′s products will help ensure repeat orders and help build a good reputation, one company′s route to acquire NATO Quality Assurance Standards AQAP 1 and 13 is described. The planning of the route, the development of a Quality Management System and an assessment of the benefits resulting from implementing such a system are detailed.

THERE IS NO LACK of pundits who are ready to tell the government how their plan will reduce the massive figure of people who cannot find work. Our own contributor, Angus Downie, elsewhere in this issue provides his own plan — to force job sharing and make up the sum then earned by each of the ‘partners’ by a contribution from oil revenues.

The purpose of this chapter is to analyse the possible causes of the Peruvian Amazon Company’s death.

This study uses secondary sources to document the trajectory of the Peruvian Amazon Company, the rubber export boom, and the different market forces affecting the wild rubber industry. By examining different sources that document the case of the Peruvian Amazon Company and the wild rubber extraction in the Amazon, this text aims to analyse the possible causes of the Peruvian Amazon Company extinction.

After analysing the existing literature on the Peruvian Amazon Company and the wild rubber industry, it was possible to find evidence about the problems related with land ownership, labour and international prices, along with the internationally known scandals, as the principal causes of the company’s death.

The case of the Peruvian Amazon Company, explores how an unsustainable business model could eventually lead a once successful company to its death. The contribution of the following chapter is based on the description of the causes of the Peruvian Amazon Company’s death. Previous studies had analysed the internationalization strategies implemented by the company. Although, an evaluation of causes of the company’s real extinction had not been presented.

Rising wool prices and technical advances in artificial fibres have provided Europe's man‐made textile producer's with booming business. But with prices yet to regain a healthy level after last year's production surplus, British manufacturers view with growing concern the Government's counter inflation measures. Roger Eglin reports.

The experience of the 1990s renewed economists’ interest in the role of credit in macroeconomic fluctuations. The locus classicus of the credit-boom view of economic cycles is the expansion of the 1920s and the Great Depression. In this paper we ask how well quantitative measures of the credit boom phenomenon can explain the uneven expansion of the 1920s and the slump of the 1930s. We complement this macroeconomic analysis with three sectoral studies that shed further light on the explanatory power of the credit boom interpretation: the property market, consumer durables industries, and high-tech sectors. We conclude that the credit boom view provides a useful perspective on both the boom of the 1920s and the subsequent slump. In particular, it directs attention to the role played by the structure of the financial sector and the interaction of finance and innovation. The credit boom and its ultimate impact were especially pronounced where the organization and history of the financial sector led intermediaries to compete aggressively in providing credit. And the impact on financial markets and the economy was particularly evident in countries that saw the development of new network technologies with commercial potential that in practice took considerable time to be realized. In addition, the structure and management of the monetary regime mattered importantly. The procyclical character of the foreign exchange component of global international reserves and the failure of domestic monetary authorities to use stable policy rules to guide the more discretionary approach to monetary management that replaced the more rigid rules-based gold standard of the earlier era are key for explaining the developments in credit markets that helped to set the stage for the Great Depression.

Optimism is running high over the long‐awaited resurgence of the machine‐tool industry. But one leading manufacturer has warned that the ‘boom’ is merely a return to semi‐normal conditions after the worst depression for 40 years. And in its present shrunken state is the industry capable of riding another recession? Roger Eglin reports.

The London Stock Exchange has hardly undergone such upheavals as those in recent months. From Australia, Roger Eglin, of the Observer, views the mining shares debacle. Anthony Thorncroft, of The Financial Times, looks at changes in broking itself — and the demise of the rich man's son.

After going through the worst of the periodic post‐war depressions, prospects for the British steel industry at last begin to gleam, with current output showing a marked improvement on last year's figures. But optimism is clouded by friction between the Government and BSC over price levels—regarded by the Corporation as still too low—and scale of future development. Report by Roger Eglin of the Observer.

The Austrian theory of the business cycle (henceforth ABC) frequently has been a target for critics of Austrian economics. In particular, a number of economists who are generally appreciative of other Austrian themes have singled out ABC as being, in one such critic's words, an “embarrassing excrescence” marring the otherwise generally sound body of modern Austrian thought.¹ Despite such criticisms, many Austrian economists persist in forwarding ABC as the best available, or perhaps even the only valid, explanation for the cycles of boom and bust regularly occurring in most modern, national economies.