GLOBAL SUPPLY CHAINS AND THE SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

Abstract

: Sustainable development issues are considerably popular subjects within the international research community. On the other hand the importance of the issues related to global supply chains has also increased significantly. This paper will also mention a change in one of the main economic paradigms: from international exchange between countries and individual companies there is a transition to exchange between the participants along the global supply chains. The interest in global supply chains and their management is provoked by the fact that they are a major source of competitive advantage on global markets. Nowadays, global supply chains are an integral part of the activities of a number of companies operating abroad. Every business operation finds its place in one or more supply chains. Within the contemporary context of scarce resources and the widely spread sustainable development idea, the companies compete on a global economic scale where the main business unit is the world as a whole, not an individual country or region. All these trends and global developments provoked our scientific interest and with the project “Corporate governance and the global supply chains” we tried to find out how the global supply chains are actually influenced by the issues of sustainable development. Within the course of the project we have reviewed and analyzed quite a lot of scientific literature, we studied the publicly available information of the big international corporations related to their social corporate responsibility and sustainable development issues. In addition, we have made empirical research among local suppliers of big international companies as well as a number of international NGOs dealing with sustainable development and social policy issues. Some of the findings from our project are presented in the current paper.