Eu business-to-business trade contacts in waste management: a natural resource-based view approach

This study analyzes the “Sewage and refuse disposal and sanitation” industry (Waste) as a producer of services able to break down its negative externalities and transform them into an asset flow for competitive advantage. The conceptual lens used is the resource-based view (R-BV) of the firm and in particular its spill-over, the “natural” R-BV. For EU-27 countries of the last decade, the Ghosh input-output model is applied to identify the valuable relationships concerning sale intermediate trade contacts (ITC). These latter have been proved to be an intangible resource flow capable, if Valuable, Rare, Inimitable and Non-substitutable, to engender positive effects on Waste sale turnover. In fact, it was found that there is a systematic log-linear relationship between the Waste valuable ITC and the sale multiplier which remained stable above the EU average. Furthermore Gini index and Lorenz curve demonstrate that Waste resource is quite concentrated and thus rare. This result suggests the necessity of developing initiatives aiming to strengthen the partnership between businesses, enhancing the sale-network profitability. Given the stable highness of the sale multiplier, the Waste branch can seize the opportunity to leverage the competitive advantage to expand its turnover. However in the next decades, businesses will be challenged to create new concepts of strategy. It seems likely that the basis for gaining organization sustainable competitive advantage in the coming years will be rooted, according to Natural R-BV, increasingly in a set of emerging capabilities in environmental field, such as waste minimization, green product design, and technology cooperation.