This paper addresses an issue that has been overlooked in the literature on the effects of population ageing: Transmission onto small countries of the economic effects of population ageing, a natural, demographic outcome of the shock that many large industrial countries experienced in the form...

When more than one component or activity is needed to produce the final product, a firm may use proprietary standards or adopt a common standard to integrate these components. We call these closed and open firms respectively, and develop a model of industry evolution to study the process by...

A recently published model of the livestock-meat economy is used to illustrate modifications that permit us to obtain a reasonable and consistent set of projected values to 1980. Ecollomic theory and an understanding of the industry were used to introduce a set of assumptions about institutional...

There are a number of major prerequisites in the planning, design and operation of all manufacturing systems. These include resource planning, production flow analysis and reliability assessment. The application of these methods form an integral part of an overall feasibility study, the result...

This paper describes the development and early use of a test bed for Just‐In‐Time GIT) control of Flexible Assembly Systems (FAS). JIT has, up to now, been used in repetitive manufacturing systems. However, increasingly, companies involved in batch production who frequently use Materials...

The United States has been a dominant force in industrial and economic affairs worldwide. Recently, this dominance has eroded to a point which concerns most US manufacturers. What has happened to the US dominant position in manufacturing? Why has this competitiveness crisis emerged? This crisis...