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A major obstacle regarding the measurement of an organization's sustainability and accountability in the space economy is defining the context and boundaries of commercial activity in outer space. Here, we introduce an ecosystem framework to address this obstacle. We utilize this framework to analyze the space mining sector. Our ecosystem framework sets the space mining sector's boundaries and helps a firm identify key stakeholders, activities, policies, norms and common pool resources in that sector and the interactions between them; a significant step in structuring how to measure space sustainability and accountability.

Borrowing theories and perspectives from a wide range of academic fields, this paper conducts a comprehensive context analysis of the space mining ecosystem.

Using our ecosystem framework to define the context and set boundaries for the space mining sector allowed us to identify sustainability-related issues in the sector and offer roadmaps to develop sustainability measures and standards.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is one of the first papers to introduce a framework to define boundaries in the global space economy and provides a tool to understand, measure and evaluate the space mining sector's environmental, social and economic issues.

In the digital era, the banking sector has transformed into a powerful intermediary, effectively connecting surplus and deficit units. This dynamic landscape empowers savers to secure their finances and generate returns, while simultaneously enabling businesses and individuals to access capital for investment and promoting economic growth. This study explores the relationships among banking development dimensions – represented by primary assets and liabilities, bank capital (core capital and required reserves) and economic growth as measured by components of gross domestic product (GDP).

The study consolidated monthly balance sheets from digital banks over a 20-year period, resulting in an aggregate monthly balance sheet that reflects the financial position of all digital banks in the Palestinian economy. The research employs both maximum likelihood and Bayesian structural equation modeling to measure the causal pathways of the consolidated balance sheet with the individual components of GDP.

The results revealed that bank main assets (investments and loans) and liabilities (deposits) collectively explain for 97% of bank capital. Investments and loans demonstrate significant negative correlations with bank capital, while deposits exhibit a positive impact. This leads to a fundamental conclusion that a substantial proportion of retained earnings within the banking sector is reinvested, fueling expansion and growth. Additionally, the results showed a significant relationship between bank capital and various GDP components, including private consumption, gross investment and net exports (p = 0.000). However, while the relationship between bank capital and government spending was insignificant in the maximum likelihood estimation, Bayesian estimation revealed a slight yet positive impact of bank capital on government spending.

This research stands out due to its unique exploration of the intricate relationship between bank sector development dimensions, primary assets and liabilities and their impact on bank capital in the digital era. It offers fresh insights by dividing this connection into specific dimensions and constructs, utilizing a comprehensive two-decade dataset covering the digital banks records.

This research aims to empirically investigate the impacts of product and international diversification strategies on firm-level inventory performance.

This study empirically examines the associations between product and international diversification strategies and inventory performance based on a sample of 64,124 observations across 7,367 US publicly traded firms between 1989 and 2019 from the COMPUSTAT Segment, Fundamental Annual and Fundamental Quarterly data files. We employ both linear and nonlinear regression models to perform our empirical analysis.

This research provides strong evidence that there exists a U-shaped relationship between unrelated product diversification and inventory level and a partially inverted U-shaped relationship between international diversification and inventory level. We also find a positive impact of related product diversification on inventory level, but there is no significant curvilinear relationship between related product diversification and inventory level.

Our research findings offer important insights into top management’s strategic planning for diversification strategies and operations manager’s inventory control policies to achieve the strategic fit between corporate diversification and inventory management.

Product and international diversification strategies not only play an essential role in the firm’s competitive advantage, but also have a significant influence on operations manager’s inventory decision. This research is among the first to systematically investigate how top management’s related product, unrelated product and international diversification strategies may have complex nonlinear impacts on inventory performance.

India started economic reforms at a rapid pace to catch up the world economy by following the services-led-growth model during the post-liberalisation period. Over the years, the growing unemployment rate posits a re-look into the dynamics of growth model for wider work force participation. In this backdrop, the paper aims to examine the dynamics of structural changes in employment pattern in view of economic growth led by services-led growth model in India.

The study employs a non-linear autoregressive model (NARDL) to examine the effect of the growth rates in three broad economic sectors namely agriculture and allied, services and industry on work force participation representing the employment opportunities in India.

The results highlight that the rapid expansion of the service sector has not occurred with enough employment opportunities by the same rate. By contrast, the growth in the industrial sector significantly creates employment opportunities in the short and long run. These results support the industry led growth model over the services for sustainable and inclusive economic growth in the country.

The study relies on combined labour force participation rates rather than gender-specific rates. Further, the regulatory, working conditions and economic incentives may affect the gender-specific engagement of the labour force in three broad sectors.

The results offer important insight into changing patterns in employment with policy lessons. A wider workforce force participation calls for expansion of manufacturing activities through pro-industry programmes.

The study makes pioneer efforts to examine the dynamics of labour force participation with respect to the growth of three broad economic sectors of the Indian economy. The results provide new insights with policy implications for the changing employment pattern and policy response.

We seek to quantify the relationship between urbanization and economic growth in China using recent advances in econometric techniques.

This study adopts a smoothed instrumental variables quantile regression (SIVQR) estimator to obtain consistent estimates of the effects of urbanization on economic growth in China. Our approach accounts for the differential impacts of urbanization across the conditional distribution of economic growth while allowing for an identification strategy that addresses the endogeneity of urbanization. Our main findings reveal that ignoring urbanization endogeneity leads to inconsistent estimates of urbanization effects. Further, we find a positive relationship between urbanization and growth resembling an inverted U-shape. This supports the hypothesis that the beneficial effects of urbanization intensify at initial stages while diminishing beyond a certain threshold, due perhaps to weakening scale economies.

Our main results indicate that the individual productivity gains brought by urbanization outweigh the negative effects thereof that impede productivity, thus contributing to the economic growth in China. Further, we find that ignoring differential impacts of urbanization underestimates the beneficial effects of urbanization for provinces whose quality of governance is in the vicinity of the center of quality distribution. Ignoring the endogeneity of urbanization generates inconsistent estimates of the elasticity of economic growth with respect to urbanization. Finally, we estimate an inverted U-shape resembling relationship between urbanization and growth.

First, future studies would benefit from incorporating more data as provinces further east on the mainland become more urbanized and urbanization runs its course. Second, controlling the barriers to rural-urban mobility would contribute to the robustness of the estimated relationship between urbanization and growth once such data became available. Unveiling the impact of government-imposed barriers is key to designing optimal policies that help fuel economic growth in the country. Finally, future research could benefit from information on urbanization sources not considered here such as inter-provincial migration, as such data become publicly available.

Quantifying the beneficial effects of urbanization on economic growth can help guide the government in China to further fuel the growth through a set of relevant policy tools that promote urbanization.

Rural-urban migration in China lays the groundwork for economic advancement in recipient cities and economies, as it may induce scale economies. This can benefit both the economy at large and the migrants.

The SIVQR estimator accounts for potential heterogeneous effects of urbanization across the entire conditional distribution of growth while allowing for an identification strategy that addresses the endogeneity of urbanization. An additional distinguishing feature of the current study is our use of the most recent novel, provincial-level data obtained from the National Bureau of Statistics of China. Our focus on a single country allows sidestepping issues arising from the inconsistency of the definition of urban across different countries while accounting for intra-country urbanization drivers intrinsic to China, such as natural features and geographic characteristics. Therefore, our approach has the potential to sidestep the bias resulting from the differences in mechanisms behind urbanization-growth relationships across different countries.

Keeping in view the robust growth of Islamic banking around the globe, this study aims to comparatively analyze the association between liquidity creation and liquidity risk for Islamic banks (IBANs) and conventional banks (CBANs) in Pakistan and Malaysia over a period of 2004–2021. The moderating role of bank loan concentration on the aforementioned relationship is also studied.

Regression estimation methods such as fixed effect, random effect and generalized least square are deployed for obtaining results. Liquidity creation Burger Bouwman measure (cat fat and noncat fat) and Basel-III liquidity risk measure (liquidity coverage ratio) are also used.

The results give us insight that liquidity creation is positively and significantly related to liquidity risk in both IBANs and CBANs of Pakistan and Malaysia. This relationship has been moderated negatively (reversed) and significantly by credit concentration showing the importance of risk management and loan portfolio concentration.

It is analyzed that during the process of liquidity creation, IBANs in Pakistan faced more liquidity risk for both on and off-balance sheet transactions in the presence of moderation of loan concentration than IBANs in Malaysia necessitating strategic policy-making for important aspects of liquidity risk management and loan concentration while creating liquidity.

Such studies comparing IBANs and CBANs comparison keeping in view liquidity creation, liquidity risk and loan concentration are either limited or nonexistent.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the most recurrent variables characterizing the collaborative relationships of industrial symbiosis (IS) (hereinafter also referred to as “anatomic” variables) established in the attempt to adopt circular economy (CE) by collecting evidence from a rich empirical set of implementation cases in Italy.

The current literature on IS was reviewed, and a content analysis was performed to identify and define the “anatomic” variables affecting its adoption in the circular economy. We followed a multiple-case study methodology investigating 50 cases of IS in Italy and performed a content analysis of the “anatomic” variables characterizing each case.

This research proposes the “anatomic” variables (i.e. industrial sectors involved, public actors involvement, governmental support, facilitator involvement and geographical proximity) explaining the cases of IS in the circular economy. Each “anatomic” variable is discussed at length based on the empirical evidence collected, with a particular reference to the impact on the different development strategies (i.e. “bottom-up” and “top-down”) in the cases observed.

Current literature on IS focuses on a sub-set of variables characterizing collaboration in IS. This research builds on extant literature to define a new framework of five purposeful “anatomic” variables defining IS in the circular economy. Moreover, we also collect and discuss a broad variety of empirical evidence in what is a still under-investigated context (i.e. Italy).

The purpose of this study is to analyze whether higher tourism development in a region is associated with lower-quality employment in that region.

The analysis is based on the last two editions of the European Working Conditions Survey and on the tourism development of European regions. Two samples were studied (2015 and 2021).

Tourism development does not affect the quality of employment in regions. The institutional regime of the country to which the region belongs is associated with the job quality (JQ) in the region.

Only subjective indicators of employment quality are considered in the analysis.

The quality of employment is related to the institutional regime. Policymakers should consider the institutional factors of social democratic countries to improve the low quality of tourism occupations.

Research on the quality of employment in tourism has mostly focused on tourism occupations without considering determinants other than industry characteristics. This research is unique because it includes both the institutional view of JQ and the overall regional employment.

分析一个地区较高的旅游业发展是否与该地区较低品质的就业有关

分析基于最近两版的欧洲工作条件调查和欧洲地区的旅游业发展。研究了两个样本, 分别为 2015 年和 2021 年。

旅游业发展不影响地区就业品质。该地区所属国家的制度体系与该地区的就业品质相关。

旅游就业品质的研究多集中在旅游职业, 没有考虑产业特征以外的决定因素。这项研究的独特之处在于它既包含了工作品质的制度观点, 也包含了整体地区就业情况。

分析中仅考虑就业品质的主观指标。

就业品质与制度体系有关; 因此, 政策制定者应考虑社会民主国家的体制因素, 以改善某些旅游职业的低品质状况。

Analizar si un mayor desarrollo turístico en una región está asociado a un empleo de menor calidad en dicha región.

El análisis se basa en las dos últimas ediciones de la Encuesta Europea sobre las Condiciones de Trabajo y en el desarrollo turístico de las regiones europeas. Se estudiaron dos muestras (2015 y 2021).

El desarrollo turístico no afecta a la calidad del empleo en las regiones. El régimen institucional del país al que pertenece la región está asociado a la calidad del empleo en la región.

La investigación sobre la calidad del empleo en el turismo se ha centrado mayoritariamente en las ocupaciones turísticas sin tener en cuenta otros factores determinantes aparte de las características de la industria. Esta investigación es única porque incluye tanto el punto de vista institucional de la calidad del empleo como el empleo regional global.

En el análisis sólo se consideran indicadores subjetivos de la calidad del empleo.

La calidad del empleo está relacionada con el régimen institucional. Los responsables políticos deberían tener en cuenta los factores institucionales de los países socialdemócratas para mejorar la baja calidad de las ocupaciones turísticas.

Despite the increasing attention given to product-service integration (PSI), little is known about this innovation strategy from a key decision-maker’s perspective. To address this gap, our study draws from personality psychology and decision-making (DM) logics theory to better understand why and how companies’ decision-makers strategize for PSI.

Using an abductive, empirics-first approach, we identify the study’s theoretical building blocks, followed by an exploratory quantitative analysis to generate new theory. We propose a fit-as-mediation conceptual framework suggesting that (1) specific personality traits [i.e. honesty-humility (H), emotionality (E), extraversion (X), agreeableness (A), conscientiousness (C) and openness to experience (O) (HEXACO)] make decision-makers more likely to include PSI in their company’s strategy and (2) depending on their personality, they apply different DM logics (i.e. causation or effectuation) to do so. To empirically examine this, we use data from 289 SMEs’ decision-makers.

We report several meaningful relationships among our key theoretical constructs. For instance, we find that conscientious decision-makers are more likely to develop a PSI strategy via causation, whereas extravert decision-makers are more likely to do so via both causation and effectuation.

This service study is the first to apply the well-established HEXACO Personality Inventory to companies’ key decision-makers. Moreover, it contributes to the microfoundations of PSI strategy and DM logic theories.

The best workplaces have been left out from the literature of social sustainability. These companies may cause a significant impact on society given their excellent human resources practices and the employer brand reputation derived from them. This study aims to fill this gap by analysing the social sustainability for the best organisations to work for in Spain.

Using data from an annual ranking for the best workplaces in Spain during 2013–2021, it is proposed to analyse critical social sustainability indicators, comparing organisations within and outside the ranking. Therefore, the authors ask whether companies from the ranking have greater female presence in CEO positions, generate more employment, pay higher salaries and contribute more to the public sector. Methodology comprehends descriptive, exploratory and inference techniques.

Although companies within the ranking achieve a higher score on it when the CEO is female, it does not translate into a greater female CEO presence with respect to companies outside the ranking. On the other hand, best workplaces achieve higher employment rates and pay higher salaries, almost all the time. Also, these excellent companies to work for generate more contributions to the public sector.

This research covers the relation between best human resources practices and social sustainability development, because the former is a great opportunity for pursuing the innovative and long-term policies necessary for the latter. Therefore, findings are valuable for managers and policymakers.