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The aim of the study is to highlight the perspectives of accounting professionals in Romania on adopting a single set of financial reporting standards for small and medium-sized entities (SMEs).

The study included a combination of qualitative and quantitative methodologies. A qualitative approach was employed to examine the perspectives of accounting professionals on their inclination toward international standards for SMEs or national regulations. The quantitative approach involved doing content analysis on interviews to provide empirical support for the implementation of these standards in a national context.

Romanian accounting professionals want an improvement in financial reporting, but not necessarily through the use of an international standard. And although the level of convergence between the International Financial Reporting Standard (IFRS) for SMEs and national regulations is medium, it is not desirable to apply an international financial reporting standard for SMEs.

This study stands out as one of the few papers that delve into the perspectives of accounting professionals about adopting IFRS for SMEs in a specific country, offering a unique and engaging perspective.

This article employs a panel vector autoregression (PVAR) model to examine the relationship between digital financial inclusion (DFI), economic growth (EG), and gender equality (GE) across different levels of financial development.

Based on the current financial development dynamics, this study applies the PVAR method to two groups of countries: the first group represents the high financial development group, and the second group represents the low financial development group, during the period from 2015 to 2021.

The findings from impulse response functions reveal that digital financial inclusion fosters economic growth in nations with advanced financial systems, while simultaneously mitigating gender inequality. Conversely, in countries with less developed financial infrastructures, digital financial inclusion stimulates economic growth but exacerbates gender disparities. Moreover, the variance decomposition analysis indicates that the linkage between economic growth, digital financial inclusion, and gender inequality is more intertwined in countries with limited financial development than in those with well-established financial systems.

Effective deployment of new technologies relies heavily on technological infrastructure. This policy focuses on constructing and developing information technology infrastructure to create favorable conditions for the implementation of new DFI technologies. This study also emphasizes promoting equitable education and training by ensuring that both women and men have equal opportunities to access quality education and training. This may involve investing in early childhood education, providing access to primary education, and offering scholarships to women in technology, science, and engineering fields.

The study assesses the livelihood resilience strategies among street hawkers during COVID-19 lockdown in the Awutu Senya East Municipality in Ghana.

Using the explanatory case study approach, 12 participants (hawkers) were sampled with the aid of the purposive and convenience sampling techniques. An interview guide was used to collect data.

The study found that street hawking business, prior to the COVID-19 lockdown was a lucrative venture. The COVID-19 lockdown however had mental, psychological and economic effects on the street hawkers in ASEM causing stress, anxiety. loneliness, loss of business capital, and loss of jobs. Hawkers nevertheless demonstrated resilience in their psychological well-being by adopting strategies such as patronizing digital/social media platforms for funny content and entertainment. Hawkers also showed economic resilience through selling products on digital/social media platforms, relied on personal savings, received social support from family members and religious bodies. Government policies and interventions in the form of free water and electricity played a crucial role in building resilience of street hawkers during the COVID-19 lockdown.

The study shows that hawking is a vital avenue for entrepreneurial engagement reducing barriers to entry in formal trading, hence should be considered as key economic venture in the country’s economy. Again, the findings of the study deepen the understanding of stakeholders on the effects of COVID-19 on the psychological and economic life of street hawkers and offers insights into managing both psychosocial and financial stress during crises, emphasizing the potential benefits of resilient strategies for more effective crisis management. The study findings provide insights for government and policymakers on the experiences and coping mechanisms of the vulnerable groups and communities, particularly hawkers during the pandemic.

The study qualitatively assesses the psychological and economic effects of the COVID-19 lockdown and the livelihood resilience strategies employed by street hawkers during the COVID-19 lockdown in ASEM, Ghana.

This study aims to discern and refine the role of emotional intelligence (EI) in the development of customer orientation among banking employees in Morocco. This analysis seeks to enhance understanding about the significance of this emotional skill within the Moroccan banking sector.

The research embraces an interpretivist philosophical perspective to gain insight into the subjective meanings and experiences of study participants. The methodology employed is qualitative, involving data collected from semi-structured interviews conducted with 21 front-office bank employees. The analysis of the data was conducted through employing thematic analysis.

The findings of this study conclude that emotional intelligence fosters and stimulates customer orientation for bank employees. The perception, understanding and effective management of emotions – both those of the contact personnel and their customers – enable employees to better comprehend customer reactions. They experience heightened empathy through the impact of accumulated professional experience, adapt their behaviors according to the emotional state of the customer, maintain a positive relationship with them and ultimately gain their confidence.

This study offers clear theoretical explanations and conceptualizations that have identified and linked pertinent literature on the topic. It focuses on a salient subject, investigating how emotional intelligence influences the customer-oriented behavior of front-office bank employees. Notably, this study represents one of the first attempts to explore this relationship within the Moroccan context. As a result, it contributes to the enhancement of managerial practices and human resource policies, thereby fostering a more productive and harmonious working environment.

The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries have been increasingly investing in their economic and social development in recent years, yet the effectiveness of their spending remains unknown although they have been taking reforms to advance their spending efficiency practices.

The study applies a quantitative approach to analyze panel data using a multiple regression model based on the World Economic Forum (WEF) reports of the global competitiveness index (GCI) from 2009 until 2018.

The results show that policies' strength has a positive and significant influence, while national infrastructure and workforce empowerment have a negative and significant influence over the extent of spending efficiency implementation in the GCC countries.

GCI disclosure assessment criteria changed in 2019 and then stopped in 2020 due to COVID-19. A different version of GCI was published in 2020, which focuses on recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic, and no other issues have been published since then. This represented a barrier to recent data collection.

Practical contribution is the value added by this study to a minimal literature on spending efficiency in the GCC countries. This study’s theoretical contribution to knowledge is the integration of the new institutional sociology (NIS) perspective of institutional theory and the resource slack theory to investigate a set of factors rarely explored in relation to their impact on governmental spending efficiency.

This study provides the following recommendations for policymakers: The GCC government should direct government training bodies and universities (in business majors) to include mandatory spending efficiency subjects to enhance current knowledge. Also, the governmental-related bodies of spending efficiency should make agreements with universities and research centers to improve the diverse R&D aspects of government spending efficiency. Another important recommendation is to enforce the adoption of the GRC concept regarding spending efficiency practices for governmental employees to guide them towards implementing spending efficiency practices.

This study's theoretical contribution to knowledge is the integration of the new institutional sociology (NIS) perspective of institutional theory and the resource slack theory to investigate a set of factors rarely explored in relation to their impact on governmental spending efficiency. Also, the practical contribution is the value added by this study to a minimal literature on spending efficiency in the GCC countries. The research has established empirical evidence to support the findings above.

This paper explores the motivating factors that lead to opportunity recognition among social entrepreneurs in India.

The study followed an exploratory, qualitative design based on thematic analysis of the interview data collected from 13 Indian social entrepreneurs.

The study identifies two aggregate factors that motivate social entrepreneurs: personal and contextual. Personal factors include life experiences, social awareness, social inclination since childhood, spiritual motives, the need for a meaningful career and entrepreneurial intention. Contextual factors included institutional voids, community development, the presence of a role model and volunteer experiences.

This study contributes to the social entrepreneurship literature by providing a model for motivating factors that lead to opportunity recognition. This study enables policymakers and social entrepreneurship educators to identify aspiring social entrepreneurs and provide target-specific support to them.

This study enables policymakers and social entrepreneurship educators to identify aspiring social entrepreneurs and provide target-specific support to them.

The study uniquely contributes to the social entrepreneurship field by offering deep qualitative insights into the motivational and opportunity recognition patterns of social entrepreneurship.

Climate change is an undeniable reality that threatens people’s livelihoods. Flooding and saltwater intrusion, along with the rising sea levels, are affecting agricultural and aquaculture livelihoods in Myanmar’s coastal areas. Although climate change adaptation is gaining popularity as a resilience strategy to cope with the negative effects of climate change, both agriculture- and aquaculture-farmers are more often deterred from implementing climate change adaptation strategies due to practical availability and socioeconomic barriers to adaptation. This study aims to evaluate the barriers and factors that influence farm household’ choice of climate change adaptation measures.

This study was conducted with 599 farm households (484 rice-farmers and 115 fish farmers) based in the coastal areas of Myanmar during 2021–2022 to explore the farmer’s choice of climate change adaptation measures and the determining factors. The multinomial logit regression (MLR) model was used to examine the factors influencing the farmers’ choice of climate change adaptation strategies.

The study found out that farm households use a variety of adaptation methods at the farm level, with building embankment strategy (23.4%) in agriculture and net-fencing measure (33.9%) in fish farming being the most popular adaptation strategies. Farmers’ decisions to adopt climate change adaptation strategies are influenced by factors such as distance to market, education level of the household head, remittance income and the availability of early warning information, among others. The study also discovered that COVID-19 has had an impact on the employment opportunities of household members and the income from farming as well had a consequential effect on the adoption of climate change adaptation measures. Furthermore, lack of credit (42.4%), labor shortage (52.8%), pest and disease infestation (58.9%), high input costs (81%) and lower agricultural product prices (73%) were identified as major barriers to the adoption of climate change adaptation measures by both agriculture and aquaculture farm households.

This study demonstrates that the COVID-19 pandemic and farm-level barriers are the major factors influencing farm households’ choice of climate change adaptation measures, and that removing practical farm-level barriers and encouraging the adoption of adaptation techniques as potential COVID-19 recovery actions are required. This study also highlighted that the adaptive capacity of agriculture and aquaculture farm households should be strengthened through formal and informal training programs, awareness raising, the exchange of early warning information and the development of proper credit scheme programs.

Based on social exchange theory and social identification theory, I investigated how employee organizational identification affects the effectiveness of commitment-based human resource (HR) practices. I focused on employee attitudes (job satisfaction) and behaviors (proactive knowledge seeking) as HR practices’ outcomes.

Using a structural equation modeling analytical approach, I tested the hypotheses with data from a web-based cross-sectional survey of 208 specialists and engineers of manufacturing subsidiaries in Poland.

Results showed that the positive relationship between commitment-based-HR practices and job satisfaction is weakened for employees strongly identified with the organization. Simultaneously, the connection between seeking knowledge and job satisfaction is stronger and more important for people who identify moderately to strongly.

The study limitations regard mainly its cross-sectional design and single cultural and industrial context.

From the managerial perspective, the study suggests that to enhance proactive employee behavior, companies need to increase employee organizational identification and ensure that employees have a positive perception of the implemented HR practices.

The study contributes to the ongoing discussion on whether individual contingencies affect the effectiveness of commitment-based HR practices in the form of individual attitudinal and behavioral outcomes. The findings revealed that the contingent effect of organizational identification depends on the type of individual outcomes, suggesting that the strength of organizational identification affects how employees decide to reciprocate the organization’s attention and investment.

The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of the characteristics and competencies of entrepreneurs on business performance within the creative industry in Indonesia. By creative industry, is refer to market-oriented enterprises that use creativity and intellectual capital to create, produce, distribute and disseminate creative goods and services through media channels.

This study measured six entrepreneurial characteristics: creative and innovative, risk-taking, need for achievement, leadership, autonomy and proactiveness. In addition, it measured five entrepreneurial competencies: opportunity, strategy, relationship, organization and learning. Data collection was conducted using a questionnaire administered to 294 entrepreneurs operating businesses within the creative industry in Java, Sumatra and Kalimantan, Indonesia.

The findings of this study demonstrated that entrepreneurial characteristics and competencies had a significantly positive effect on business performance. Creativity and innovation emerged as the most influential characteristics, whereas strategy stood out as the most influential competency.

This study aimed to examine whether the personal qualities of entrepreneurs as identified within conventional industries − specifically their entrepreneurial characteristics and competencies − had an impact on business performance in the creative industry in Indonesia. Conventional industries, unlike creative industries, are characterized by the production and distribution of physical goods or basic services, with less emphasis on creative innovation as the core driver.

This research investigates the feasibility, benefits and challenges of environmental sustainability reporting by Small- and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs).

The authors develop an abridged SME environmental sustainability reporting framework based on the environmental aspects of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) Standards for Sustainability Reporting. The authors collect the views of 203 SME accounting practitioners on our proposed reporting framework using a survey questionnaire.

The authors find that the greatest perceived benefit for firms adopting environmental sustainability reporting is that it leads to an improvement in company image. Lack of knowledge, resources and data capturing tools impede implementation of environmental sustainability reporting for both SMEs and accounting practitioners. While SMEs are not yet required to implement environmental sustainability reporting, the research discusses implications for policy makers and practitioners for adopting environmental sustainability reporting in the SME context.

The main limitation of this study is that environmental sustainability reporting for SMEs is in its infancy. A longitudinal survey, or re-examining this survey over time, could be beneficial to assess the long-term benefits and costs of implementing sustainability reporting.

The findings of this study have practical implications for the future development of SME environmental sustainability reporting in the EU and for regulators considering sustainability reporting regulations with a specific focus on SMEs.

The study reconstructs the GRI environmental guidelines into a framework for SMEs and provides empirical evidence on the accountant’s sustainability reporting role.