As sustainable development is a concept more and more popular, the need to provide its practical application has emerged. The way to help companies improve their economical, environmental and social performance is by minimizing waste. It means less waste generated and increase waste re-usage or recycling; using resources such as materials, water and energy at the highest possible efficiency; avoiding or at least improving management of metalworking fluids, lubricating oils and hydraulics oils. Other goals are improved environmental, health and safety performance, adopting lean manufacturing and other sustainable engineering techniques, as well as improved working conditions. The achieve reduction of waste at production site best practice in manufacturing and maintenance processes are needed. The aim of this chapter is to present how well performed maintenance management can help to achieve sustainable development of a company.

Maintenance Management Initiatives Towards Achieving Sustainable Development

This paper studies the macroeconomic implications of firms' investment composition choices in the presence of credit constraints. Following a negative and persistent aggregate productivity shock, firms shift into short-term investments because they produce more pledgeable output and because they help alleviate future borrowing constraints. This produces a short-run dampening of the effects of the shock, at the expense of lower long-term investment and future output, relative to an economy with no credit market imperfections. The effects are exacerbated by a steepening of the term structure of interest rates that further encourages a shift towards short-term investments in the short-run. Small temporary shocks to the severity of financing frictions generate large and long-lasting effects on output through their impact on the composition of investment. A positive financial shock produces much stronger effects than an identical negative shock, while the responses to positive and negative shocks to aggregate productivity are roughly symmetric. Finally, the paper introduces a novel explanation for the countercyclicality of financing constraints of firms.

Credit Constraints, Firms' Precautionary Investment, and the Business Cycle

Developing a capital investment and finance decision tree for alternative energy resources at a vegetable farm

Organizations require the means to navigate Society 5.0. This is a knowledge-intensive society where a sustainable balance must be created for social good through a system that integrates cyberspace and physical space. With significant data, information and insight exchange based on knowledge in people and machines, organizations need to make sense of the notion that knowledge assets are the central structuring elements for sustainable development. By considering the key aspects of knowledge management (KM) in Society 5.0 as they relate to sustainable development, organizations may leverage their KM capability and learning agility to successfully address the unique requirements of the new society, environment and goals for sustainable development. In this research, automated content analysis was applied to identify key KM aspects using the Leximancer software. A total of 252 academic papers were analyzed, identifying 10 themes related to key KM concepts in Society 5.0 as they pertain to sustainability. The KM concepts identified were described and mapped to the sustainability triple bottom line. They comprised three primary and three intersecting dimensions, i.e., the environment (planet), society (people) and economic performance (profit) in the socio-economic, eco-efficiency and socio-environmental domains. The most significant themes included “knowledge”, “human”, “companies”, “information” and “system”. Secondary themes included “innovation”, “development”, “resources”, “social” and “change”.

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Knowledge Management in Society 5.0: A Sustainability Perspective

In modern agriculture with its technical needs, it is almost impossible without effective management measures and borrowing capital. Stable development of agriculture, including crop production, certainly depends on technical equipment of agricultural enterprises. The use of financial instruments and management mechanisms is an opportunity for agricultural producers to improve their potential, including the improvement and maintenance of agricultural equipment at an appropriate level, since the activity involves in the performance of a large volume of mechanized work for the production of strategically important products. The aim of the article is to justify the theoretical provisions and to develop the mechanism of management decision making on the use of leasing in the activity of agricultural organizations. The objectives of the research: to analyze the material and technical support of agricultural organizations of the Republic of Tatarstan; based on the use of sociological methods of research to propose an algorithm for determining the variant of the form of financing capital investment, which is based on the choice of alternative options for the reproduction of machine and tractor fleet. The proposed mechanism for making managerial decisions on the use of leasing in the activities of agricultural organizations contributes to improving the efficiency of the production system and provides renewal and formation of technical and technological potential of the industry.

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Development of a mechanism for making administrative decisions on the use of leasing

Cash Flow and Investment Decision: An Application on the Romanian Agriculture Sector

The motivation of this paper derives from the lack of integrated research and structures for managerial training and consultancy regarding the environment responsibility for eco-business. Also, the research underline the need of training and consultancy for eco-business in industrial small and medium size enterprises (SME) from the West part of Romania. The main aspects that were investigated were: the most needed items regarding the training programs, details about the consulting items that are most needed, all with impact on the improving of the companies’ eco-efficiency parameters. This will have a direct impact on the companies’ competitiveness growth through the human resources development, too.

Research on eco-business training requirements

This work assesses the influence of financial constraints on firms’ investment structure. Previous works state that financially constrained firms chose to invest more in tangible assets, in the detriment of intangible assets. However, none of these researches investigated the structure of investment of firms from scientific R&D industry. Therefore, we add to the exiting literature, and we test the impact of leverage, liquidity, and profitability on the R&D firms’ investment structure. We use data at firm level from 2007 to 2014, for 269 companies, located in France (163), Germany (67), and the UK (39), drawing a comparison between these countries. Our GMM analysis shows no significant impact of leverage and liquidity on the structure of investment. For Germany and UK, an increased profitability allows firms to invest more in long-term, intangible assets. These findings remain the same under different difference- and system-GMM specifications.

Financial Constraints and the Structure of the Firm’s Investment: An Application to the Scientific R&D Industry from the Largest EU Countries

Environmental Management Accounting (EMA) refers to a set of accounting and performance tools dedicated to companies’ actions towards improvement of their environmental impact. Furthermore, EMA deals exclusively with the company’s internal costs, as it does not include the external costs of individuals, society, or the economic environment over which the company has no decision-making power. It is recognised that EMA is a relatively new tool in environmental management, which can be defined as the identification, collection, estimation, analysis, internal reporting, and use of information regarding materials and energy flow and environmental costs for both conventional and environmental decision-making process within an organisation. Thus, EMA incorporates and integrates two of the three milestones of sustainable development (environmental and economics dimensions), as they relate to an organisation’s internal decisional process.

A Debate on Environmental Management Accounting

In recent years the advancement in technologies has led to the creation of platforms, apps and websites, which became more and more popular after the financial crisis hit the world’s economy and companies hired less. A new economy arose, the so-called Gig economy: people would no longer be hired directly from a company, but as free lancers working mainly on web-based platforms. Along with these two trends, the landscape became more and more complicated because of the progress being made towards automation.

Mihaela Vartolomei

Papers

Cash Flow and Investment Decision: An Application on the Romanian Agriculture Sector

Research on eco-business training requirements

Financial Constraints and the Structure of the Firm’s Investment: An Application to the Scientific R&D Industry from the Largest EU Countries

A Debate on Environmental Management Accounting

"The Gig Economy and Automation. A Brief Presentation with Discussions"