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In this research study, grocery shoppers were interviewed to identify the factors that influence satisfaction with their primary store and the factors that encourage them to continue patronising this store despite being presented with an inducement to shop at another store. The study estimated two models; one predicting store satisfaction and the other predicting store loyalty. The results demonstrate that the significant factors that contribute to store satisfaction have little in common with the factors that impel shoppers to stay store loyal. Moreover, there was no evidence from this study that shoppers' overall store satisfaction was by itself a significant influence on their continued patronage of the store. Retail firms often do not recognise that the elements that contribute to customer satisfaction are different from those factors that help sustain store loyalty and consequently do not separate their resources between the two sets. Unless retail firms remain vigilant to changing consumer behaviour patterns, they will not be able to tell apart the elements of the retail mix that could typically insulate their primary customers from responding to special competitive offers.

Since the early seventies an increasing attention has been paid to the impact environmental polict nmight have on foreign trade. One of the most important issues is whether countries with relatively strict environmental regulations tend to experience a deterioration of international competitiveness and thus a fall in exports and a rise in imports, of the pollution-intensive commodities or, on the other hand, benefit from the improvement in environmentally more sensitive industries. So far, most empirical studies have concluded that the proportion of environmental costs to the total production costs is still so marginal that environmental policies have hardly any effect on comparative advantage patterns and thus on foreign trade. One of the few exceptions is Van Beers and Van den Bergh (1997), who found that stricter regulations have some negative impact on bilateral trade flows between OECD countries. The aim of this paper is to show that tyhis outcome is partly due to model mis-specification. The analysis id based on a triple indexed model and on its variants. It is found that, as soon as both the importing and exporting country specific effects are taken into consideration, the relationship between stricter regulations and foreign trade becomes statistically insignificant. This suggests that environmental costs do not have a real impact, neither negative nor positive, on foreign trade. Copyright Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2002.

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Current account, Intertemporal budget constraint, Cointegration, Central Europe, C32, F41, P24,