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Purpose: Preserving a country’s culture is crucial for its sustainability. Handicraft is a key draw for tourism destinations; it protects any civilisation’s indigenous knowledge and culture by managing the historical, economic, and ecological ecosystems and perfectly aligns with sustainable development. It has a significant role in creating employment, especially in rural regions and is an essential contributor to the export economy, mainly in developing nations. The study focuses on the skills required and existing gaps in the handicraft industry, its development and prospects by considering women and their role in preserving and embodying the traditional art of making handicrafts.

Approach: A framework has been developed for mapping and analysing the skills required in the handicraft sector using econometric modelling; an enormous number of skills have been crowdsourced from the respondents, and machine learning techniques have been used.

Findings: The findings of the study revealed that employment in this area is dependent not only on general or specialised skills but also on complex matrix skills ranging from punctuality to working in unclean and unsafe environments, along with a set of personal qualities, such as taking initiatives and specific skills, for example polishing and colour coding.

Implications: The skills mapping technique utilised in this study is applicable globally, particularly for women indulged in casual work in developing nations’ handicrafts industry. The sustainable development goals, tourism, and handicrafts are all interconnected. The research includes understanding skills mapping, which provides insights into efficient job matching by incorporating preferences and studying the demand side of casual working by women in the handicraft sector from a skills perspective.

There is growing empirical evidence that firm heterogeneity is technologically non-neutral. This chapter extends the Gandhi, Navarro, and Rivers (2020) proxy variable framework for structurally identifying production functions to a more general case when latent firm productivity is multi-dimensional, with both factor-neutral and (biased) factor-augmenting components. Unlike alternative methodologies, the proposed model can be identified under weaker data requirements, notably, without relying on the typically unavailable cross-sectional variation in input prices for instrumentation. When markets are perfectly competitive, point identification is achieved by leveraging the information contained in static optimality conditions, effectively adopting a system-of-equations approach. It is also shown how one can partially identify the non-neutral production technology in the traditional proxy variable framework when firms have market power.

This chapter provides an empirical assessment of the effects of infrastructure provision on structural change and aggregate productivity using industrylevel data for a set of developed and developing countries over 1995–2010. A distinctive feature of the empirical strategy followed is that it allows the measurement of the resource reallocation directly attributable to infrastructure provision. To achieve this, a two-level top-down decomposition of aggregate productivity that combines and extends several strands of the literature is proposed. The empirical application reveals significant production losses attributable to misallocation of inputs across firms, especially among African countries. Also, the results show that infrastructure provision has stimulated aggregate total factor productivity growth through both within and between industry productivity gains.

This study examined the factors influencing willingness-to-repurchase for each class of airline service, and integrate the constructs of service quality, satisfaction and willingness-to-repurchase which were rooted on Engel-Kollat-Blackwell (EKB) model. The study focuses on the domestic and international arrival of passengers at Murtala Muhammed International Airport in Lagos and Nnamdi Azikwe International Airport in Abuja. Information was gathered from domestic and foreign passengers who had post-purchase experience and had used the airline's services more than once. The survey data were obtained concurrently from arrival passengers at two major international airports using an electronic questionnaire through random and purposive sampling techniques. The data was analysed using the ordinal logit model and structural equation model. From the 606 respondents, 524 responses were received but 489 responses were valid for data analysis and reporting and were obtained mostly from economy and business class passengers. The study found that the quality of seat pitch, allowance of 30 kg luggage permission, availability of online check-in 24 hours before the departing flight, quality of space for legroom between seats, and the quality of seats that can be converted into a fully flatbed are the major service factors influencing willingness-to-repurchase economy and business class tickets. Also, it was found that passengers' willingness to repurchase is influenced majorly by service quality, but not necessarily influenced by satisfaction. These results reflect the passengers' consciousness of COVID-19 because the study was conducted during the heat of COVID-19 pandemic. Recommendations were suggested for airline management based on each class.

By examining the impact of the day of the week during the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent economic recession, it is possible to provide insights into market behaviour during volatile times that can be furnished to investors and policymakers for informed decisions.

This study investigates the day-of-the-week effect on the Colombo Stock Exchange (CSE), with particular emphasis on the variations in this effect during the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent economic crisis.

The study applies the Exponential Generalised Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity (EGARCH) model, allowing for the evaluation of asymmetric responses to positive and negative shocks. The data span from January 2006 to December 2022 and are segmented into different periods: the entire sample, war and post-war periods, the COVID-19 pandemic and the economic crisis period, each reflecting distinct market conditions.

The study uncovers a significant day-of-the-week effect on the CSE. Mondays and Tuesdays typically show a negative effect, while Thursdays and Fridays display a positive impact. However, this pattern shifts notably during the COVID-19 pandemic, with all weekdays exhibiting significant positive impact, and varies further across different waves of the pandemic. The economic crisis period also shows unique weekday effects, particularly before and after an important political event.

This study investigates the impact of corporate social responsibility (CSR) on corporate innovation. We selected the listed nonfinancial firms of South Asian Economies. The sample of the study comprised a total of 426 listed manufacturing firms of South Asian Countries for period spans 10 years from 2012 to 2021. In this study, descriptive statistics, multicollinearity diagnostic tests, correlation analysis and two-step dynamic panel system generalized method of moments (GMM) were applied to analyze the data. CSR measured with three proxies' social indicators, environmental indicators, and CSR composite index of social and environmental indicators. However, corporate innovation is captured with number of citations received in a year and number of patents filed in the year. Overall, findings of the study using all measures of CSR shows that CSR significantly and positively related with corporate innovation. Our results find support for CSR-innovation view with all measures of CSR. The findings suggest that the current study is helpful for managers, regulators, policymakers, and researchers. For managers, the study helps them to make the CSR and innovation decision. The policymakers should take appropriate innovative decision while considering factors such as CSR. This study can also be extended by considering this study for developed and emerging economies sample.

The search for luxurious hospitality experiences increasingly coincides with the imperative to mitigate negative impacts in the pursuit of greater sustainability. This is a task often understood as being complex particularly in the context of luxury hospitality which often resonates with conspicuous consumption. This chapter uses a case study approach to analyze the complex relationship between luxury tourism and sustainability. The study focuses on the development of “luxury” from a materialistic perspective toward an experience economy and relates this to the concept of sustainability and agreements relevant to the tourism industry. The environmental impact of luxury hospitality is then discussed. The case study on properties in Costa Rica, South Africa, the Maldives, Vietnam, and French Polynesia focuses on philosophy, facilities, energy and waste consumption, food and beverage, conservational and educational activities, and alignment to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs). The focus is on the properties and shows limitations in that it is not applicable to the whole tourist journey and experience. All properties understand luxury as based on experiences and involvement in nature. Measures to mitigate environmental impact and foster conservational and educational activities are mainstream practices. Comparing the cases with academic literature on luxury, sustainability, ecotourism, and environmental policies underline that sustainability-driven luxury hospitality shows valuable steps toward a more sustainable product but is ultimately faced with the dilemma of taking into consideration and ultimately mitigating the impacts of the entire travel value chain.

The great recession of 2008–2009 busted the market bubble and highlighted the loopholes in the banking sector related to excessive leverage and inadequate capital. It has led to the increased rigidity of financial regulations, forcing banks to focus more on compliance rather than moving towards innovation. All these factors together led to the emergence of new players in the financial market in the name of financial technology (Fintech) companies. With the help of Fintech, banking operations are now being revolutionised and transformed into techno-friendly systems. They, hence, can promise to act as a game changer for the banking sector as a whole.

This chapter aims to understand different perspectives of Fintech and how it helps the banking sector to improve its operations. This chapter will also offer insight into various types of Fintech instruments used by the banking sector, collaboration between banks and Fintech, and the benefits of its application to the banking sector.

This chapter attempts to lay out a literature review on Fintech. It examines the implications of applying Fintech in the banking sector to revolutionise its traditional banking operations and achieve its pre-established targets. Different techniques banks use to match up with Fintech and adapt it easily in its organisational structure.

This chapter presents a list of challenges linked to the application of financial technology in the banking industry. The chapter will also address the difficulties of using Fintech and ways to deal with them.