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Education is a valuable asset that contributes much to economic growth and social development. Due to the economic downturn of the last decade, education is under increased pressure to deliver quality, improve efficiency and reduce costs, while adhering to stakeholders' expectations. Lean thinking (LT) is an approach that aims to improve processes and customer satisfaction, while managing costs and demands for continuous improvement. The beneficial implementation of LT in the manufacturing sector led this concept to evolve into a managerial paradigm with wider applicability to various sectors and practices, including education. The present study undertook a systematic literature review (SLR) of LT in education (LTE) to document its implementation. The SLR used a number of search criteria, resulting in a total of 47 scholarly articles, published from 2003 to mid-2018 in 20 scientific journals, being identified for further examination and discussion. The study produced a comprehensive mapping of recent trends and content of the literature on LTE from various methodological and empirical perspectives. This approach enabled the selected articles to be classified and compared according to relevant features such as publication data, timeline distribution, geographic base of operations, tools, keywords and results. It also oriented the LTE literature within two frameworks to document (a) the maturity of the given study in the research lifecycle and (b) the evolution of LTE research over time. The articles reviewed were thoroughly examined, enabling us to identify limitations or deficiencies that could indicate future research directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using province-level data for South Korea, we analyze the dynamic relationship between economic growth and several energy parameters. Specifically, we decompose the growth effect into scale, composition, and technique effects, and control for regional spillovers through the use of a dynamic GMM estimator for spatial panel data models. The analyzed period, ranging from 2000 to 2017, allows us to look for changes in the regional growth effects following the implementation of the National Strategy for Green Growth in 2009. Our estimates show that the scale and composition effect tended to increase both per capita final energy use and energy intensity, outweighing reductions through the technique effect. In contrast, when considering renewable energy production, the scale and technique effect increased and the composition effect decreased the corresponding figures. Thereby, the technique effect was the main driver of increases in renewable energy production. Despite the larger, yet comparatively small share of renewables in Korea's energy mix, no considerable change of the growth effects can be observed since 2009. Therefore, to reduce the risks for the economy and achieve the political objectives of the green growth strategy throughout the whole country and in a timely manner, a stronger commitment seems to be required. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Natural disasters have caused over a million of deaths and $3 trillion in economic losses during the last 20 years. However, theoretical and empirical studies have not reached a conclusion as for their effect on economic growth, and the results can best be described as mixed. The present study proposes the use of a quantile on quantile (QQ) approach to shed more light on this complex relationship. This approach combines the standard quantile regression analysis with nonparametric estimations and allows us to examine how different quantiles of natural disasters affect different quantiles of GDP growth. Using data from over 100 countries over a 30-years period, we confirm that the results of the QQ approach differ from the ones obtained by standard approaches like fixed effects regressions. We document that the relationship between the intensity of natural disasters and economic growth is mostly negative. Nonetheless, there are some exceptions to this. Our findings reveal that the effect of natural disasters can be occasionally positive, depending on the quantiles that we examine. The magnitude of the effect also differs across different combinations of the quantile of economic growth and the quantile of natural disasters. Finally, we obtain somewhat different results when we estimate separate QQ regressions for groups of countries that differ in terms of climate, economic and democratic development, and across different year lags of the natural disaster index. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We develop a multicriteria approach, based on both scalarization and goal programming techniques, in order to analyze the trade off between economic growth and environmental outcomes in a framework in which the economy and environment relation is bidirectional. On the one hand, economic growth by stimulating production activities gives rise to emissions of pollutants which deteriorate the environment. On the other hand, the environment affects economic activities since pollution generates a production externality determining how much output the economy can produce and reducing welfare. In this setting we show that optimality dictates an initial overshooting followed by economic degrowth and rising pollution. This implies that independently of the relative importance of economic and environmental factors, it is paradoxically optimal for the economy to asymptotically reach the maximum pollution level that the environment is able to bear. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]