The concept of 'globalization' has nomlally been observed and researched in relation to hightechnology sectors, and little rigorous work has been done in the clothing context. This research attempts to fill the gap by replacing opinion and views with objective analysis, and to add to the existing knowledge base by providing answers to the identified problems in a measurable form. One of the major factors shaping the clothing industry's current position towards operations in different countries is the level of labour costs and the labour cost gap between developed and developing countries. The study has shown that despite technological development, labour costs as a percentage of total costs in the clothing industry are still very high as compared with the situation in the automobile industry and the electronics industry. Moreover, the considerable labour cost gap between developed and developing countries has not closed over the years. The statistical evidence has provided a new and objective perspective on the size of the above gap and highlighted the continued relevance of the issue of labour costs to the clothing sector today. The research has also illustrated how factors such as inflation rate and indirect charges can have their impact on the labour cost level. The 'globalness' of the UK based clothing sector was assessed at both the industry level and at the company level. At the industry level, an extensive re-working of secondary data was carried out. A study of various indicators of international involvement has shown that the UK clothing industry's exports and outward investment are far from spread across the world's major markets, instead, they are fairly concentrated in certain regions. In addition, previously unpublished data on the use of outward processing traffic were collected and analyzed. Evidence suggests that the UK clothing industry is only 'global' to a limited extent. In order to develop an infornled understanding of the competitive strategies at company level and to study whether companies with higher degrees of globalization achieve better performance, a postal survey of 152 UK based clothing fimlS, followed by telephone and face-to-face interviews, was conducted. The primary data collected by questionnaires and interviews were subjected to rigorous statistical analysis. Four case studies were subsequently established to put the analysis into a real-life context. The surveyed experience of the UK based clothing companies has revealed that larger companies tend to have higher levels of international involvement. However, based on the statistical evidence, the thesis argues that a wider geographical presence does not equal globalization and it does not lead to better performance. The interviews and case studies also highlighted important strategic issues. Based on the infornlation from both the primary and secondary sources, the thesis concludes that in the future UK clothing companies will further increase their overseas manufacturing activities at the expense of the home production base. Only those companies which restructure and invest in good time in preparation for further changes in industry settings, and which have a close relationship with their clients, are more likely to succeed or survive.

A competição no mercado internacional com os produtores mundiais, pode ser uma fonte de excelentes oportunidades ou de perigosas armadilhas, como o desafio de difícil solução, representado pelos produtores mundiais de calçados com baixos custos de mão-de-obra, por exemplo, os chineses. A grande maioria dos produtores brasileiros de calçados está estabelecida em clusters, como na Europa os produtores italianos de calçados estão estabelecidos nos \"distretti\". Essas concentrações geográficas de fabricantes são normalmente formadas por empresas de pequeno e médio porte, todas enfrentando o mesmo problema, pois o custo da mão-de-obra é um dos principais custos relativos às atividades das empresas em geral, e principalmente das que operam com a produção baseada na utilização intensiva de mão-de-obra. E mesmo possuindo bom nível de qualidade em seus produtos, estão enfrentando sérias dificuldades financeiras e operacionais, e assim podem permanecer até o encerramento de suas atividades; como tem acontecido, a menos que possam encontrar uma solução organizacional; uma estratégia competitiva que permita concorrerem nas oportunidades dos mercados mundiais sem sofrer as constantes derrotas comerciais impostas pelos produtores chineses. O principal objetivo do presente trabalho, foi propor estratégia competitiva para a indústria calçadista brasileira, por meio da investigação dos principais fatores que estão influenciando a competitividade dos produtores brasileiros no mercado internacional de calçados, principalmente as estratégias adotadas no cluster de Franca. A pesquisa foi realizada em uma indústria de mão-de-obra intensiva, no cluster produtivo de calçados de Franca - SP, completada com informações de pesquisa realizada em tipo de cluster similar na Itália, o cluster calçadista de Verona. (Distretto Calzaturiero di Verona). A proposta final sugere as ações gerenciais e ferramentas para os melhoramentos estratégicos mais adequadas para possibilitar às empresas e outros participantes do cluster, aperfeiçoarem seu preparo para participar da competição de âmbito mundial com maiores chances de sucesso. Estas ações e ferramentas são a base para a proposta de estratégia competitiva, um assunto original na forma como é abordada, pois na literatura especializada não foi encontrado nenhuma tese específica sobre o assunto. / The international market footwear competition against worldwide producers can be for instance, a source of good opportunities as well as a source of threats like the very hard challenge to solve, represented by the low labor costs producers, like the Chinese footwear producers. Almost all footwear Brazilian producers are established in clusters like in Europe, the Italian footwear producers are established in the \"distretti\". These geographic footwear producers concentrations\' are normally composed by small and medium firms, all facing the same problem, as a labor cost is one of the main costs regarding all enterprises activities and mainly in those productive processes based on intensive use of labor. And these firms, despite of produce excellent quality level products, are in serious financial and operational difficulties, and in this situation they could remain up to the end of their operations, fact occurring too much times, unless can be found an organizational solution, one corporative, and business strategy allowing them to compete in all the world business market opportunities without suffer from being continuously overcame by the Chinese producers. The main purpose of this thesis, was to prepare a competitive strategic proposal for Brazilian footwear Industry, by means investigation of the main factors influencing the Brazilian producers\' competitiveness in the international footwear market, mainly the strategies adopted in the cluster of Franca. The research was performed in the intensive labor industry, the footwear industry, in the productive footwear cluster of Franca, State of Sao Paulo, Brazil, completed with information from research in similar cluster\'s type in Italy, the footwear cluster of Verona (Distretto Calzaturiero di Verona). The final proposal, suggests the most suited managerial actions and tools, to strategic improvements, in order to make the firms and others actors in the clusters improve their skills to better play the game, and have much more chances to win. These actions and tools are the base for a strategic proposal , an original issue, since in the literature was not found any thesis specific about the subject.

This thesis is organized into two parts, one for my main area of research in the field of stochastic games, and the other for my contributions in the area of service systems. We first provide an abstract for my work in stochastic games. The field of stochastic games has been actively pursued over the last seven decades because of several of its important applications in oligopolistic economics. In the past, zero-sum stochastic games have been modelled and solved for Nash equilibria using the standard techniques of Markov decision processes. General-sum stochastic games on the contrary have posed difficulty as they cannot be reduced to Markov decision processes. Over the past few decades the quest for algorithms to compute Nash equilibria in general-sum stochastic games has intensified and several important algorithms such as stochastic tracing procedure [Herings and Peeters, 2004], NashQ [Hu and Wellman, 2003], FFQ [Littman, 2001], etc., and their generalised representations such as the optimization problem formulations for various reward structures [Filar and Vrieze, 1997] have been proposed. However, they suffer from either lack of generality or are intractable for even medium sized problems or both. In our venture towards algorithms for stochastic games, we start with a non-linear optimization problem and then design a simple gradient descent procedure for the same. Though this procedure gives the Nash equilibrium for a sample problem of terrain exploration, we observe that, in general, it need not be true. We characterize the necessary conditions and define KKT-N point. KKT-N points are those Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) points which corresponding to Nash equilibria. Thus, for a simple gradient based algorithm to guarantee convergence to Nash equilibrium, all KKT points of the optimization problem need to be KKT-N points, which restricts the applicability of such algorithms. We then take a step back and start looking at better characterization of those points of the optimization problem which correspond to Nash equilibria of the underlying game. As a result of this exploration, we derive two sets of necessary and sufficient conditions. The first set, KKT-SP conditions, is inspired from KKT conditions itself and is obtained by breaking down the main optimization problem into several sub-problems and then applying KKT conditions to each one of those sub-problems. The second set, SG-SP conditions, is a simplified set of conditions which characterize those Nash points more compactly. Using both KKT-SP and SG-SP conditions, we propose three algorithms, OFF-SGSP, ON-SGSP and DON-SGSP, respectively, which we show provide Nash equilibrium strategies for general-sum discounted stochastic games. Here OFF-SGSP is an off-line algorithm while ONSGSP and DON-SGSP are on-line algorithms. In particular, we believe that DON-SGSP is the first decentralized on-line algorithm for general-sum discounted stochastic games. We show that both our on-line algorithms are computationally efficient. In fact, we show that DON-SGSP is not only applicable for multi-agent scenarios but is also directly applicable for the single-agent case, i.e., MDPs (Markov Decision Processes). The second part of the thesis focuses on formulating and solving the problem of minimizing the labour-cost in service systems. We define the setting of service systems and then model the labour-cost problem as a constrained discrete parameter Markov-cost process. This Markov process is parametrized by the number of workers in various shifts and with various skill levels. With the number of workers as optimization variables, we provide a detailed formulation of a constrained optimization problem where the objective is the expected long-run averages of the single-stage labour-costs, and the main set of constraints are the expected long-run average of aggregate SLAs (Service Level Agreements). For this constrained optimization problem, we provide two stochastic optimization algorithms, SASOC-SF-N and SASOC-SF-C, which use smoothed functional approaches to estimate gradient and perform gradient descent in the aforementioned constrained optimization problem. SASOC-SF-N uses Gaussian distribution for smoothing while SASOC-SF-C uses Cauchy distribution for the same. SASOC-SF-C is the first Cauchy based smoothing algorithm which requires a fixed number (two) of simulations independent of the number of optimization variables. We show that these algorithms provide an order of magnitude better performance than existing industrial standard tool, OptQuest. We also show that SASOC-SF-C gives overall better performance.

The implications of introducing shift work and flexible working hours into the UK clothing industry were examined, with special reference to the effects on personnel, plant utilisation and garment costs. A total of 37 garment manufacturing establishments, within 17 companies, were visited; 91 managers (for production and economic data)and 1018 supervisors and operatives, 87% female and 13% male, (for social data) were consulted. The main points arising from the survey are:- 1 . Social (i) The average age and length of service of respondents were respectively 30.4 and 7.1 for women and 40 and 13.9 for men. Nearly three fifths were married and over half of the women had children, most of them at school or pre-school stage. (ii) Over four fifths were committed to some kind of housework; 3 to 5 hours between 17.00 and 24.00 hours were usually spent on this task but about 9% spent more than 5 hours on it. (iii) Over half would be very much bothered by the inability to carry on their individual and/or group social activities. About two thirds would also be concerned by a change in the period of and time for sleep and meal times. Nearly two fifths used public transport for the journey to work. (iv) Only 15% had worked on multiple shifts previous to their present employment and 16% left their previous job because of being on shifts or unsuitable hours. About one fifth worked currently part-time and only 13% wanted to change their existing working system so that they might gain extra convenience and leisure in their working life. (v) The unsolicited personal choice of working systems were mainly shifts (13%), flexible working hours (14%) and part-time day work (30%); working only in school hours appeared to attract the choice of about 40% of the women. (vi) From the points above, it seemed that a high proportion of married female workers, mostly with dependent children and committed to housework, would probably react against shift work. The availability of part-time work together with the normal day work habit acquired would also affect the employees' attitudes towards the acceptance of even flexible working hours. 2. Production (i) The main problems involved with introducing shift work were considered to be sharing of equipment, bonus and piece rate payment and responsibility for quality failures. Dislike of sharing machines by operatives was considered to be a severe problem in sewing section and the extent of this dislike seemed higher in traditional rather than non traditional clothing areas; the operatives' age and length of service appeared to affect their attitudes. The smaller the period of time for each job then the less the problem of sharing payment and responsibility could become. (ii) Introduction of flexible working hours could create the difficulties of shortage and/or excess of supply of work within the production flow with interdependent operations; the extent of the problem could vary with the amount of work in progress and the period of time spent by each operative on the garment and/or its parts. Economic (i) Garment cost elements are material, labour, variable and fixed overheads (survey averages 50.6%, 24.9%, 8% and 16.5%), of which labour and variable overheads would be affected by introducing multiple shifts and only fixed overheads by flexible working hours. There should be a decrease in variable overheads per garment because of sharing a fixed amount of cost between shifts, an increase in labour cost due to shift premium and an increase in fixed overheads because of longer opening hours of the plant on flexible working hours. (ii) The capital employed on plant and machinery, C, could often be divided by the number of shifts so that this could help to increase profitability by a factor of 2 or 3. (iii) General formulae were established, using the most relevant variables, for calculating the profitability and profitability ratios of different working schemes. Generally, if the number of shifts are increased then the profitability of the plant could be very greatly increased. This was well illustrated from the calculated profitability ratios of about 2 and 3 respectively, when industrial survey values were used, for 2 and 3 shift systems replacing a single shift system. Profitability of flexible working hours would, theoretically, be less than that of single shift, but there might be some economic gains, such as reduced rates of labour turnover and absenteeism (which are currently high in the garment industry), arising from the introduction of flexible working hours.

This thesis focuses on the windscreen mounting options on the assembly line at Škoda Auto in Mladá Boleslav. The aim is to describe the possible assembly options and to determine the optimal variant. In the first part the key theoretical information is described, followed by an analysis of the current state. After the introduction of two new proposals the variatiants are compared to each other in terms of finance and overall suitability using multicriteria method.

The implications of introducing shift work and flexible working hours into the UK clothing industry were examined, with special reference to the effects on personnel, plant utilisation and garment costs. A total of 37 garment manufacturing establishments, within 17 companies, were visited; 91 managers (for production and economic data)and 1018 supervisors and operatives, 87% female and 13% male, (for social data) were consulted. The main points arising from the survey are:- 1 . Social (i) The average age and length of service of respondents were respectively 30.4 and 7.1 for women and 40 and 13.9 for men. Nearly three fifths were married and over half of the women had children, most of them at school or pre-school stage. (ii) Over four fifths were committed to some kind of housework; 3 to 5 hours between 17.00 and 24.00 hours were usually spent on this task but about 9% spent more than 5 hours on it. (iii) Over half would be very much bothered by the inability to carry on their individual and/or group social activities. About two thirds would also be concerned by a change in the period of and time for sleep and meal times. Nearly two fifths used public transport for the journey to work. (iv) Only 15% had worked on multiple shifts previous to their present employment and 16% left their previous job because of being on shifts or unsuitable hours. About one fifth worked currently part-time and only 13% wanted to change their existing working system so that they might gain extra convenience and leisure in their working life. (v) The unsolicited personal choice of working systems were mainly shifts (13%), flexible working hours (14%) and part-time day work (30%); working only in school hours appeared to attract the choice of about 40% of the women. (vi) From the points above, it seemed that a high proportion of married female workers, mostly with dependent children and committed to housework, would probably react against shift work. The availability of part-time work together with the normal day work habit acquired would also affect the employees' attitudes towards the acceptance of even flexible working hours. 2. Production (i) The main problems involved with introducing shift work were considered to be sharing of equipment, bonus and piece rate payment and responsibility for quality failures. Dislike of sharing machines by operatives was considered to be a severe problem in sewing section and the extent of this dislike seemed higher in traditional rather than non traditional clothing areas; the operatives' age and length of service appeared to affect their attitudes. The smaller the period of time for each job then the less the problem of sharing payment and responsibility could become. (ii) Introduction of flexible working hours could create the difficulties of shortage and/or excess of supply of work within the production flow with interdependent operations; the extent of the problem could vary with the amount of work in progress and the period of time spent by each operative on the garment and/or its parts. Economic (i) Garment cost elements are material, labour, variable and fixed overheads (survey averages 50.6%, 24.9%, 8% and 16.5%), of which labour and variable overheads would be affected by introducing multiple shifts and only fixed overheads by flexible working hours. There should be a decrease in variable overheads per garment because of sharing a fixed amount of cost between shifts, an increase in labour cost due to shift premium and an increase in fixed overheads because of longer opening hours of the plant on flexible working hours. (ii) The capital employed on plant and machinery, C, could often be divided by the number of shifts so that this could help to increase profitability by a factor of 2 or 3. (iii) General formulae were established, using the most relevant variables, for calculating the profitability and profitability ratios of different working schemes. Generally, if the number of shifts are increased then the profitability of the plant could be very greatly increased. This was well illustrated from the calculated profitability ratios of about 2 and 3 respectively, when industrial survey values were used, for 2 and 3 shift systems replacing a single shift system. Profitability of flexible working hours would, theoretically, be less than that of single shift, but there might be some economic gains, such as reduced rates of labour turnover and absenteeism (which are currently high in the garment industry), arising from the introduction of flexible working hours. / Iranian Ministry of Science and Higher Education and Teheran Polytechnic

The object of the thesis with the title Human Capital Expenses from Corporation Perspectives was to assess the importance of human capital expenses in the business organization dm drogerie markt Ltd., to evaluate their efficiency and consequently propose possible steps leading to make the resources spent on the human capital more effective. The practical part of the thesis deals with areas, which are associated with human capital expenses the closest: the system of remuneration and employee perks, the labour productivity and the structure and the amount of the labour costs, the organization and range of personnel controlling and briefly fundamentals of corporal culture, which illustrates the perception of the value of human capital for the investigated company.

A competição no mercado internacional com os produtores mundiais, pode ser uma fonte de excelentes oportunidades ou de perigosas armadilhas, como o desafio de difícil solução, representado pelos produtores mundiais de calçados com baixos custos de mão-de-obra, por exemplo, os chineses. A grande maioria dos produtores brasileiros de calçados está estabelecida em clusters, como na Europa os produtores italianos de calçados estão estabelecidos nos \"distretti\". Essas concentrações geográficas de fabricantes são normalmente formadas por empresas de pequeno e médio porte, todas enfrentando o mesmo problema, pois o custo da mão-de-obra é um dos principais custos relativos às atividades das empresas em geral, e principalmente das que operam com a produção baseada na utilização intensiva de mão-de-obra. E mesmo possuindo bom nível de qualidade em seus produtos, estão enfrentando sérias dificuldades financeiras e operacionais, e assim podem permanecer até o encerramento de suas atividades; como tem acontecido, a menos que possam encontrar uma solução organizacional; uma estratégia competitiva que permita concorrerem nas oportunidades dos mercados mundiais sem sofrer as constantes derrotas comerciais impostas pelos produtores chineses. O principal objetivo do presente trabalho, foi propor estratégia competitiva para a indústria calçadista brasileira, por meio da investigação dos principais fatores que estão influenciando a competitividade dos produtores brasileiros no mercado internacional de calçados, principalmente as estratégias adotadas no cluster de Franca. A pesquisa foi realizada em uma indústria de mão-de-obra intensiva, no cluster produtivo de calçados de Franca - SP, completada com informações de pesquisa realizada em tipo de cluster similar na Itália, o cluster calçadista de Verona. (Distretto Calzaturiero di Verona). A proposta final sugere as ações gerenciais e ferramentas para os melhoramentos estratégicos mais adequadas para possibilitar às empresas e outros participantes do cluster, aperfeiçoarem seu preparo para participar da competição de âmbito mundial com maiores chances de sucesso. Estas ações e ferramentas são a base para a proposta de estratégia competitiva, um assunto original na forma como é abordada, pois na literatura especializada não foi encontrado nenhuma tese específica sobre o assunto. / The international market footwear competition against worldwide producers can be for instance, a source of good opportunities as well as a source of threats like the very hard challenge to solve, represented by the low labor costs producers, like the Chinese footwear producers. Almost all footwear Brazilian producers are established in clusters like in Europe, the Italian footwear producers are established in the \"distretti\". These geographic footwear producers concentrations\' are normally composed by small and medium firms, all facing the same problem, as a labor cost is one of the main costs regarding all enterprises activities and mainly in those productive processes based on intensive use of labor. And these firms, despite of produce excellent quality level products, are in serious financial and operational difficulties, and in this situation they could remain up to the end of their operations, fact occurring too much times, unless can be found an organizational solution, one corporative, and business strategy allowing them to compete in all the world business market opportunities without suffer from being continuously overcame by the Chinese producers. The main purpose of this thesis, was to prepare a competitive strategic proposal for Brazilian footwear Industry, by means investigation of the main factors influencing the Brazilian producers\' competitiveness in the international footwear market, mainly the strategies adopted in the cluster of Franca. The research was performed in the intensive labor industry, the footwear industry, in the productive footwear cluster of Franca, State of Sao Paulo, Brazil, completed with information from research in similar cluster\'s type in Italy, the footwear cluster of Verona (Distretto Calzaturiero di Verona). The final proposal, suggests the most suited managerial actions and tools, to strategic improvements, in order to make the firms and others actors in the clusters improve their skills to better play the game, and have much more chances to win. These actions and tools are the base for a strategic proposal , an original issue, since in the literature was not found any thesis specific about the subject.

This thesis is focused on the description of the purchasing power parity theory and the theory of the interest rate as the fundamental aspects of exchange rate movements. A large part is devoted to the problems of equilibrium exchange rates and associated anomalies that these equilibrium rates are largely affected. The aim is to highlight the pros and cons of these theories and their practical use in nowadays world. Incomplete validity of purchasing power parity is analyzed by using available data which also leads to examine the presence of deviation from the equilibirum value. These anomalies are divided into economic origin anomalies and anomalies arising from non-market intervention. Despite the frequent critism the theory of purchasing power parity is still the most popular and frequently published theory.

Many countries would like to use foreign direct investment to increase the growth of GDP and promote stable development. The Czech Republic is one of the countries having the largest FDI within Central and Eastern Europe. Meanwhile, Chinese investments have increased significantly and already became an important feature of the China-Europe relationships during recent years. The closer cooperation between China and Europe could encourage FDI. Within the kinds of FDI, the real estate industries experienced a rapid increase in many developed and emerging regions. Therefore, the aim of this study is aiming to analyse the investment environment of Chinese commercial properties in the Czech Republic. Two basic research designs will be employed for this research. The first design is focusing on collected recent available data to present the investment climate of the Czech Republic. In this part, we also make comparisons of the Czech Republic with serval economies. We found that the relatively low cost of labour, low inflation rate, easier to set-up a business (in terms of both times consuming and cash consuming) make the Czech Republic becomes more attractive. And this is consistent with the empirical analysis. Secondly, the questionnaire method was used for the study and we get back 108 questionnaires....