Search results

It is widely argued that money laundering (ML) is not a new phenomenon and the pervasiveness of ML is associated with some severe economic, social and political costs. Due to the lack of studies on the ML’s issue in the UAE, this study aims to examine the determinants of ML in the country between 1975 and 2020.

The autoregressive distributed lag bounds testing results demonstrate the presence of long-run relationship between ML and the selected macroeconomics variables. The analysis is validated by the dynamic ordinary least squares, the fully modified ordinary least squares and the canonical co-integration regression estimators.

The estimation result reveals that while the real estate market, outflow of money, arms procurement and size of the underground economy influences the size of ML positively, gold trade, the level of financial development and the size of economic activities are negatively associated with ML, both in the short- and long-run.

Up to date from a country-level analysis, no study has been devoted to the ML in UAE, except for Aljassmi et al. (2023). To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to investigate the determinants of laundered money in the UAE economy. Based on these outcomes, strategies and measures which will deter the laundering of illicit funds through the real estate and gold market, remittance system, financial system and arms procurement contracts in the UAE are recommended.

Due to its longer length compared to other construction materials and distinctive stacking patterns, obtaining construction steel bars in congested construction sites with limited storage capacity becomes challenging. Lack of storage space in crowded places prompts the need for building steel bar storage choice optimization. Therefore, this study aims to optimize the construction steel bar procurement plan by providing when and how much rebar to order and how to stack different sizes of rebar considering limited storage capacity.

A novel approach has been presented in this paper by integrating 4D building information modelling (BIM) and mixed-integer linear programming (MILP). This technique uses BIM to retrieve material quantities, including rebar, during the design phase. Following that, activities are scheduled depending on the duration determined by crew productivity data and material quantity. Then, based on the prior price, the price of each unit of rebar is projected for the duration of construction using the exponential smoothing method. After that, the MILP approach is used to generate an optimal steel bar procurement plan for limited storage space following the scheduled rebar-related operations.

The developed strategy minimizes overall procurement costs and ensures the storage of rebar as per standard guidelines. An optimal rebar procurement and storage plan to construct a six-storied RC frame has been presented in this paper as a demonstrative example to show the effectiveness of the proposed method.

This work partially satisfies a long-sought research need for establishing a comprehensive construction steel bar procurement system, making it a very useful source of information for practitioners and researchers. The proposed method can be used to minimize a key performance limitation that the conventional rebar procurement practice for crowded building sites may experience.

Based on the theoretical framework, this paper analyzes the sentiment-herding relationship in emerging stock markets (ESMs). First, it aims to examine the effect of investor sentiment on herding. Second, it seeks the direction of causality between sentiment and herding time series.

The present study applies the Exponential Generalized Auto_Regressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity (EGARCH) model to capture the volatility clustering of herding on the financial market and to investigate the role of the investor sentiment on herding behaviour. Then the vector autoregression (VAR) estimation uses the Granger causality test to determine the direction of causality between the investor sentiment and herding. This study uses a sample consisting of stocks listed on the Shanghai Composite index (SSE) (348 stocks), the Jakarta composite index (JKSE) (118 stocks), the Mexico IPC index (14 stocks), the Russian Trading System index (RTS) (12 stocks), the Warsaw stock exchange General index (WGI) (106 stocks) and the FTSE/JSE Africa all-share index (76 stocks). The sample includes 5,020 daily observations from February 1, 2002, to March 31, 2021.

The research findings show that the sentiment has a significant negative impact on the herding behaviour pointing out that the higher the investor sentiment, the lower the herding. However, the results of the present study indicate that a higher investor sentiment conducts a higher herding behaviour during market downturns. Then the outcomes suggest that during the crisis period, the direction is one-way, from the investor sentiment to the herding behaviour.

The findings may have implications for universal policies of financial regulators in EMs. We have found evidence that the Emerging investor sentiment contributes to the investor herding behaviour. Therefore, the irrational investor herding behaviour can increase the stock market volatility, and in extreme cases, it may lead to bubbles and crashes. Market regulators could implement mechanisms that can supervise the investor sentiment and predict the investor herding behaviour, so they make policies helping stabilise stock markets.

The originality of this paper lies in investigate the sentiment-herding relationship during the Surprime crisis and the Covid-19 epidemic in the EMs.

The purpose of this paper is to use Bourdieu’s Theory of Capital–Field–Habitus to explore how refugees, asylum seekers and migrants accumulate and mobilise social, cultural, symbolic and economic capital to find meaningful work in the Australian construction industry.

The paper reports the results of a survey of refugees, asylum seekers and migrants who have either successfully or unsuccessfully searched for employment in the Australian construction industry.

The findings dispel widely held negative stereotypes of about this group by describing a highly capable workforce which could address significant skills shortages in the industry, while concurrently diversifying the workforce. However, it is found that refugees, asylum seekers and migrants face considerable barriers to finding meaningful employment in the construction industry. In circumventing these barriers, education institutions, charities and community-based organisations play an especially important role, alongside friends and family networks. They do this by helping refugees, asylum seekers and migrants accumulate and deploy the necessary capital to secure meaningful work in the construction industry. Disappointingly, it is also found that the construction industry does little to help facilitate capital accumulation and deployment for this group, despite the urgent need to address diversity and critical skills shortages.

Employing Pierre Bourdieu’s Theory of Capital–Field–Habitus, the findings make a number of new theoretical and practical contributions to the limited body of international research relating to the employment of refugees, asylum seekers and migrant workers in the construction. The results are important because meaningful employment is widely accepted to be the single most factor in the successful integration of refugees, asylum seekers and migrants into a host society and the construction industry represents an important source of potential employment for them.

This paper investigates the effect of state-society relations on the industrially-related growth paths of developed countries.

It introduces a novel theoretical framework, the state-business-labor relations (SBLR) framework, where four main actors are identified: the state, big businesspersons or tycoons, owners and managers of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) or Entrepreneurs and labor. Different SBLR categories or modes are introduced depending on levels of coordination and power relations between the studied actors. The paper then investigates how these SBLR modes, through adopting various policies targeting the industrial sector, lead to different growth paths. Rather than focusing only on economic growth, this research regards a growth path as a matrix of the performance in long-run growth and equality of distribution.

Using regression analysis and statistical data, the results suggest that the Co-Balanced mode, having higher levels of coordination and lower favoritism, leads to the best growth path among the four introduced modes, especially with its emphasis on high levels of venture capital availability and easiness of starting business. while the Lib-Capture mode, characterized by lower coordination and higher favoritism, seems to have the worst growth path and the best implemented policy for this mode is suggested to be high profit taxes that seem to counter the negative impact of the existing high levels of favoritism.

Despite the important findings that this research has reached, this paper is mainly meant to open a further investigation into this topic and open this dimension that the research on VoC and political economy have under-researched. A deeper investigation of SBLR typologies that could only be possible by having richer datasets with more data on coordination for the whole world, rather than only the advanced economies, would further our understanding of the dynamics that shape the growth paths of different countries of the world.

To realize the best industrial growth path, fighting favoritism should be an important objective. The negative impact of favoritism on innovation could not be disregarded in the eve of the fourth industrial revolution, where innovation is increasingly pivotal to future industrial development. Actively engaging societal groups in the policymaking process is important in addressing their concerns and balancing them at the same time. This should lead to the double benefit of formulating better policies that should foster growth as well as provide better distribution of this growth. High levels of coordination should help in realizing this objective. Yet, this could only be possible if societal groups are free to associate and aggregate their power and when there are means of preventing one actor from gaining more favorite treatment and exclusive influence over policymakers. The presence of both powerful and broadly represented business associations and labor unions and the existence of a government interested in coordinating their efforts-rather than letting itself be controlled by one group at the expense of the others-should help in the realization of the best growth path. Thus, institutional reform that empowers societal groups and enables them to defend their interests as well as fights all forms of corruption should lead to the realization of a more prosperous and equitable industrial development, with the “re-industrialization” of the developed world being no exception. The technological and social challenges of intensive automation and digitalization accompanying the fourth industrial revolution make the envisaged institutional reform more urgent.

This paper is introducing a novel theoretical framework for studying the effect of state-society relations, particularly SBLR, on the industrial growth paths of developed countries. It integrates three important bodies of literature in order to build a more comprehensive understanding of the dynamics of state-society relations and their economic consequences. These are the Varieties of Capitalism (VoC), State-Business Relations (SBR) and Industrial Relations. The SBLR framework differentiates between tycoons and entrepreneurs, an important distinction that often goes unnoticed. Different SBLR categories or modes are introduced, depending on levels of coordination and power relations between the actors. It is proposed in this research that the effect on growth paths goes beyond the simple dichotomy between CMEs and LMEs usually present in the literature of VoC and that power relations provide an essential complementary dimension in explaining this causality.

Drawing motivation from the greater exposure to uncertainty and condition changes that affect large projects due to their long lifecycle, this paper aims to investigate how the time factor affects the use of governance mechanisms to pursue the success of these projects.

To pursue its aim, the article applies the dichotomization between the hard and soft mechanisms of project governance to the analysis of a historical case study, whose findings are organized over the short, medium and long periods. The case selected is referred to the peculiar water system, made up of tunnels named “bottini,” that was in use in Siena (Italy) as the old aqueduct. Specifically, the study focuses on the project of expansion of this water system that was realized during the 14th century for the construction of the “Bottino maestro di Fontegaia.”

This article highlights the different relevance that, during the lifecycle of large projects, is assumed by hard and soft governance mechanisms, with the former having main relevance in a short and medium period, and the latter usually emerging in the medium period and, subsequently, playing a growing role for the project success in the long period.

The article contributes to the literature on large projects by providing novel insights about how the time factor impacts the governance of these projects. Furthermore, the case study, with its unique history, highlights the relevance of combining effectively the hard and the soft dimensions of project governance to pursue success.

The article considers the utility of a pluralist perspective in the context of current debates around UK corporate governance reform. Oxford School pluralism advanced both a description of how industrial relations (IR) operated in practice plus a prescription for how it should operate. Whilst economic conditions are different today, a pluralist framing provides not only a useful way of understanding interests in firm governance (description) but also a solid grounding for a pragmatic reform agenda (prescription).

Drawing from key texts in the field, the article considers core concepts within pluralist discourse and discusses their relevance to contemporary policy debates.

The article provides a short outline of recent economic and political developments and considers how a pluralist framing helps explain firm-level interests, challenging the dominant narrative of shareholder primacy. It then asks what policy interventions might flow from this analysis of capital and labour investments, and how feasible they are in the current UK context. This allows a discussion of levels of analysis (evident in materialist theories such as “radical pluralism” and the “disconnected capitalism thesis”). Finally, it reflects briefly on the links between corporate governance and wider patterns of inequality, suggesting the pluralist position is consistent with a Durkheimian sociology focusing on the potential in state-led regulatory interventions to tackle anomie and strengthen social solidarity.

The article brings together literature from what are often treated as relatively discrete areas of enquiry (employment relations and corporate governance) and also considers the public policy implications of these connections.

Transaction cost economics sees a broad spectrum of governance structures spanned by two types of economic adaptation: autonomous and cooperative. Stakeholder theorists have drawn much inspiration from transaction cost economics but have not paid explicit attention to the centrality of the idea of adaptation in this literature. This study aims to address this gap.

The authors develop a novel conceptual framework applying the distinction between the two types of economic adaptation to stakeholder theory.

The authors argue that the idea of cooperative adaptation is particularly useful for describing the firm’s collaboration with primary stakeholders in the joint value creation process. In contrast, autonomous adaptation is more relevant for firms interacting with secondary stakeholders who are not directly engaged in joint value creation and may not have formal contractual relationships with the firm. Accordingly, cooperative adaptation can be seen as vital for resolving team production problems affecting joint value creation, whereas autonomous adaptation addresses how the firm maintains legitimacy within the larger stakeholder environment.

Similar to its significance for transaction cost economics, the distinction between the two types of adaptation equips stakeholder theory with a new systematic understanding of a potentially broad spectrum of firm–stakeholder collaboration forms.

This paper seeks to illustrate how interventionist education reforms shape dis/trust-building processes and their impact on teacher professionalism in vocational education and training (VET) across national contexts. Using trust as the object of analysis, we discuss the affective mechanisms of becoming a professional in a standards-based neoliberal environment.

Through an analysis of VET teacher narratives in England and Austria, the paper draws attention to the ways in which policy instrumentalism has created a culture of distrust in VET. Drawing upon foundational work on system trust developed by Niklas Luhmann, we illustrate how conditions for trust sit at symbolic thresholds, which set the conditions for professional recognition within VET.

Our analysis revealed that attempts to standardise VET strategy are fuelled by the need for existential security and predictability, leading to tensions in the cultivation of system trust. Conditions for professional recognition across both contexts were based on practices of documentation and subordination, narrowly defining modes of legitimate self-expression in organisations. This constitutes a crisis of trust in VET teacher professionalism, which undermines pedagogical autonomy and integrity.

We seek to highlight the impact that reduced trust in the governance of VET can have on issues associated with teacher motivation, well-being and retention. The consideration of trust is therefore essential both for policy design and implementation in VET organisations.

The application of trust theory offers a distinctive lens through which to understand the impact of accountability, performativity and governance processes upon teacher subjectivity within VET across national contexts.

Current and predicted continued dramatic increases in international migration and ethnocultural diversity of older adult cohorts pose challenges for health care services. Review studies on ethnoculturally diverse older adults and health care show a lack of focus on their service use experiences. This study aims to report a meta-ethnography that addresses this knowledge gap through answering the review question: How do ethnoculturally diverse older adults who are immigrants experience health careservices?

The authors applied a seven-phase method of meta-ethnography to guide the review. The authors conducted two literature searches (April 2018 and June 2020) in MEDLINE, CINAHL, Embase, Sociological Abstracts and Abstracts in Social Gerontology that yielded 17 papers eligible for review.

“There’s always something positive and something negative” is the overarching metaphor for answering the review question. Findings highlight positive and negative tensions within ethnoculturally diverse older adults’ health care use experiences of understanding and being understood, having trust in providers and the health care system, having needs, preferences and resources met and desire for self-care over dependency. The majority of experiences were negative. Tipping points towards negative experiences included language, fear, provider attitudes and behaviours, service flexibility, attitudes towards Western and traditional health care and having knowledge and resources.

The authors propose concrete actions to mitigate the tipping points. The authors discuss policy recommendations for health care system changes at the micro, meso and macro service levels to promote positive experiences and address mainstream service policy inequities.