| Summary: | Thesis (PhD (Logistics))--University of Stellenbosch, 2007. === ENGLISH ABSTRACT: South Africa currently experiences the double jeopardy problem of catching
up to global economic competitiveness whilst at the same time feeling the
pressures of sustainability management spearheaded by a global agenda.
Global sustainability is defined as growth that is shared without depleting
natural resources or damaging the environment. Academic disciplines are
challenged to make a contribution and economics as such should contribute
by providing the lead and lag indicators for the planning and measurement of
scarce resources usuage. This integrative view includes economic subdisciplines,
such as logistics. This integrative view is an acknowledged part of the economics discipline,
except that the macro-economic context of some sub-disciplines, such as
logistics, often receives less attention during the course of academic activities.
The distribution of resources and outputs in the economy is a logistics
controlled cross-cutting factor, but suffers from a lack of macro-economic
perspective, and lead and lag orientated measurement. This state of the
affairs is a historic backlog of logistics and its specific position within
economics. During the primary economic era the world began to configure networks and
markets, which became more pronounced and settled with the dawn and
settling of the industrial era. Logistics then was a “given” and did not receive
much thought even as industrial, market economies developed. Transport
was regarded as an administered cost, i.e. inefficiencies in logistics systems
were evenly distributed between competitors, not giving any specific entity an
advantage. With the advent of global competition and the diminishing returns
on other cost saving measures, companies began to collaborate and integrate
logistics functions within value chains, but the administered part of transport
costs failed to receive the attention it required. In this way, global competitors
did begin to experience disadvantages on a national level as whole economies suffered from inefficiencies in logistics and specifically transport
systems.
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