Which law can be applied to sailing staff on the Rhine river basin ? In spite of the existence of unchanging regulations based on the 1868 Mannheim convention, identifying the applicable rules to sailing staff on ships sailing on the Rhine remains difficult to achoive. The rhineland regime, even if it establishes a certain number on unchanging rules regarding the professional field intended to sailing staff, employed or not, does not aim at ruling relations between employers and employees. However, no international waters can be found on the Rhine river. So, a national law must be found about social security or labour law, in spite of some unchanging rules.
Waterborne container transport is strongly increasing in France, and is already a major transport means for supplying maritime ports and hinterland on the Rhine basin. Public policies aim at strengthening this transport mode, and deal with the issue of terminals location: should they be concentrated or scattered? This paper tries to contribute to this debate, showing first how container river terminals are crossroads of different transport networks, and the effects of maritime transport on river terminals network. Then the paper investigates how river and road transport economics are determining factors for the location of river terminals. The paper concludes by highlighting the concentration or scattering schemes in the location of river container terminals, on the Rhine, Île-de-France, and Nord-Pas de Calais basins.
Although logistics development is a trigger of performance in small businesses, the topic has only been scarcely documented in management academic literature. The aim of the paper is to identify different logistics approaches in small businesses, through a survey relying on a sample of 95 small businesses. An exploratory typology highlights three different logistics approaches. The paper investigates whether these logistics approaches are explained by three variables: growth orientation, partnership with clients, IT resources. Growth orientation and logistics approach co-evolve. Partnerships with clients and IT resources explain logistics approaches. The discussion emphasizes the entrepreneur’s vision as a key factor for logistics development.
In spite of the importance of air travel demand forecasting for several actors of the air transport world, decision in this sector is made in most of cases subjectively or by using classic econometric methods of forecasting which don’t take the non-stationarity and seasonality concepts of economic time series into account. Faced with the non-reliability of these methods, scientific, modern and efficient tool is then turned out to be necessary. In this research, we propose to forecast monthly air traffic by Tunisian airport using three time series econometric models: seasonal ARIMA (SARIMA) model, vector autoregressive (VAR) approach and error correction model (ECM). We also study the forecast combination method that has demonstrated predictive efficiency in the general literature of forecasting compared with individual models, but was rarely used in forecasting tourism and passengers air transport demand.
The Swiss railway system is known for its quality of service and its integration in a particularly dense public transportation system. People are less aware of ongoing institutional reform. This article aims to shed light on passenger traffic reform, more particularly pertaining to regional traffic. Which institutional frameworks are implicated? What have been the results obtained, both for public finances and for travelers? What are the key elements for explaining the recorded gains in performance? What lessons could be drawn for railway reform? In sum, it appears that improved performance is possible in Switzerland even without competition. These improvements are due to the nature of public governance and its impact on the various stakeholders. Public authorities have imposed ambitious but negotiated targets on operators, coupled with severe financial constraints, in a context of decentralization of public procurement. Given this new institutional framework, railway companies and especially the former monopoly holder SBB have achieved significant productivity increases through management and technical innovations. Client satisfaction, at the heart of the reform, also contributes to these successes.