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The objectives of this paper are to estimate the annual Malmquist TFP(total factor productivity) index of Korea and China’s road freight transport with DEA(data envelope analysis) and to decompose the index into technical efficiency change and technology change. In the process of the estimation, we used labor, capital, and fuel as input factors and ton-km of road freight transport as output factor. The panel data of Korea and China’s road freight transport industry from 1985 to 2004 are used. The results of the analysis show several points. First, there was no significant improvement in China’s TFP growth before 1997, but there was continuous growth in TFP since 1997 because of constantly increasing domestic freight transport demand. Second, there was downward trend in Korea’s TFP, especially there was a large reduction of productivity in 1998 because of the huge reduction of road freight transport demand during the period of the economic crisis. Third, the technology improvements play a significant role in the TFP growth and the technical efficiency had negative effects on the TFP growth of Korea. However, the technology improvements as well as the technical efficiency had positive effects on the TFP growth of China’s road freight transport industry.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the recovery and resilience tourism strategies and possible future development of four main Chinese tourism cities.

The authors collected data from the official accounts of tourism administrations of these cities, tourist attractions and opinions from media and newspapers in Sina Weibo platform. The authors adopted an inductive approach in observing relevant social media posts and applied content analysis to identify main China’s tourism prevention and recovery strategies.

During the mass pandemic infection period, top-down prevention and control measures were implemented by the Chinese central and local governments, with feasible and regional recovery policies and protocols being adapted according to local situations. Measures related to tourism industrial re-employment, improvement of international images and governmental financial supports to re-boost local tourism in Chinese cities were paid great attention. Digitalization, close-to-nature and cultural heritages became important factors in the future development of China’s tourism. Dark tourism, as a potential tourism recovery strategy, also obtained huge emergence, for the memory of people deceased in the pandemic and for the inheritance of national patriotism.

This study enriches the current literature in urban tourism recovery studies analyzing the specific case of Chinese tourism cities and fulfill some voids of previous research mostly focused on the first wave of the pandemic and the recovery strategies mainly of Western cities. It also provides valuable suggestions to tourism practitioners, destinations and urban cities in dealing with regional tourism recession and finding possible solutions for the scenario associated to the COVID-19 and other similar health crisis.

Catering services play important role in the Spanish economy, accounting for 6.2% of GDP in 2021. To overcome the adverse economic impacts of COVID-19, catering services are considered one of the drivers to stimulate economic growth. Hence, the main aim of this paper is to analyse the sociodemographic profile of the family's main breadwinner who allocates most of his expenditure budget on different catering services before and during the pandemic caused by the COVID-19 in Spain.

The official Family Budget Survey in Spain was used. This offers information on expenditure by families in 2019 and 2020. CHAID multivariate analysis was employed. This has proved a valuable tool in predicting expenditure, as well as determining the cause–effect relationship of this expenditure.

Findings establish the main breadwinner's expenditure on catering services based on predictors such as “year” affected by the pandemic; “type of employment contract”; “gender”; and “age”. A gender “pub-gap” in consumption in bars and cafes has been revealed, and families with a male breadwinner, on a permanent contract, between the age of 40 and 60 spent the most on catering services.

This research presents a new interdisciplinary approach to family breadwinners as a company whose spend on catering is shaping the economic recovery and leading to new answers for hospitality management. Identified factors can lead to improved decision-making and contextualisation of economic models for food service providers in a post-pandemic future.

This study aims to seek to analyse the relationships between profitability, productivity, external debt and growth in SMEs. The authors also analyse firm size and age as explicative variables of small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) growth.

In this paper the data were collected for 3309 SMEs for the period 2010–2019. The authors estimate the model using the system generalised method of moments dynamic estimator.

The results show that after a certain level of profitability, this determinant positively impacts SME growth. Productivity influences positively the firm growth. There is a positive effect of external debt on SME growth, which can be explained by the insufficiency of internally generated funds. The authors obtained a negative signal between size and firm growth, contradicting Gibrat's Law (1931). Moreover, the results suggest that SMEs grow less after a certain age, suggesting that small firms grow less after reaching the minimum scale of efficiency.

For SME owner-managers, this study enhances the importance of profitability and labour productivity for firm growth. For policymakers, the results suggest the need for favourable conditions for SMEs in accessing external finance.

Profitability negatively impacts on SME growth. However, the authors found that above a certain level of profitability, probably, as firms accumulate retained earnings, profitability has a positive effect on SME growth. Moreover, this study shows that labour productivity and debt positively impact on SME growth, evidencing the importance of the availability of financial resources to sustain the growth of these firms.

This paper aims to provide an estimation of the costs of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic with a special focus on Spain. Costs include macroeconomic costs of foregone gross domestic product (GDP) attributable to the pandemic and the direct and indirect costs of prevention, treatment and lost productivity. This study also analyzes the cost-effectiveness of the test-tracking-quarantine (TTQ) strategy in Spain.

The macroeconomic costs of foregone GDP attributable to the pandemic are estimated for different countries and areas by comparing the present GDP forecasts for 2020 and 2021 with counterfactuals estimated before the COVID-19 crisis aftermath. The total cost of the COVID-19 for Spain in 2020 was obtained using the cost of illness approach with a bottom-up process. A cost-effectiveness analysis of the TTQ strategy in Spain is based on the estimation of the total costs of TTQ and the health gains and avoided health-care costs associated with the TTQ strategy. A sensitivity analysis explores the consequences of uncertainty in key parameters.

The GDP cost of the COVID-19 is by far larger than all the other components of the cost. The global cost of the Covid-19 crisis in 2020–2021 is estimated at 14% of 2019 GDP (around 12,206 mm$). In the specific case of Spain, it amounts to 24% of the 2019 GDP; which is 397.3 m €. Spain is and will be by far the European country most economically affected by the pandemic. In Spain 2020, the GDP cost accounts for 94.7% of the total cost of the COVID-19 and health-care direct costs are only 2.14%. TTQ is a dominant strategy in Spain. For each euro spent on it, 7 euros will be recovered only in terms of saved health-care resources.

Given the large degree of uncertainty and the fast-evolving nature of the epidemic, a number of assumptions are required to arrive at the estimates provided in this study. The results were found to be robust to the assumptions applied.

TTQ is a key strategy for the contention of the epidemy and it is justified from the economic perspective.

This is the first estimation of the cost of the COVID-19 and the cost-effectiveness of the TTQ strategy for Spain.

The purpose of this study is to identify how firms' sustainability performance is affected by external knowledge sources and absorptive capacity, accounting for the influence of being located in a science and technology park (STP).

Drawing on data from the Spanish Technological Innovation Panel, the authors estimate the determinants of sustainability performance using fixed effects multiple linear regression models with robust standard errors. The analysis covers the period 2009–2016, with a total panel of 8,874 companies and a total sample of 47,870 observations.

This study highlights the heterogeneity in on-park firms’ sustainability performance, which can be explained by the different capacities of these firms when it comes to embedding themselves in STP networks and processes and effectively absorbing the knowledge from the many knowledge sources that may be on offer in the park.

This paper contributes to the literature by examining the influence of external sources of knowledge and absorptive capacity, and the relationship between them, on sustainability performance. This study approaches sustainability performance as an aggregate measure of firms’ competitiveness and potential for long-term survival from the triple bottom line perspective. In addition, this study examines the effect that location in an STP can have on business sustainability performance and, more specifically, the mediating effect that knowledge sources and absorptive capacity can exert on this relationship.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the mediating effect of the identification of valuable external knowledge on the relationship between the development of inter-organizational ties (structural social capital) and the acquisition of external knowledge.

Using a sample of 87 firms from Spanish biotechnology and pharmaceutics industries, the authors have tested the proposed mediation hypothesis by applying the partial least squares technique to a structural equations model.

The study results show that those firms with stronger, more frequent and closer inter-relationships are able to increase the amount of intentionally acquired knowledge, partly due to the greater level of development of their knowledge identification capability. Thus, firms with a higher capability to recognize the value of the knowledge embedded in their inter-organizational networks will be more likely to design better strategies to acquire and integrate such knowledge into their current knowledge bases for either present or future use.

This research contributes to knowledge management and social capital literature by means of the study of two key determinants of knowledge acquisition – structural social capital and knowledge identification capability – and the explanation of their relationships of mutual influence. The paper thus tries to fill this literature gap and connects the relational perspective of social capital with the knowledge-based view from a strategic point of view.

To understand how organizations, public or private, must increase their productivity perception (PP), independently of the sector. This article aims to analyze PP in the digital transformation (DT) process to determine how it is affected by technostress (TS) and work engagement (WE), two concepts that seem to be forces opposing PP.

The authors use data from a questionnaire addressed to personnel in two organizations (public and private). The analysis applies partial least squares technique to the 505 valid responses obtained from these organizations. This analysis is based not on representativeness but on uniqueness.

The results suggest a positive, significant relationship between DT and PP. This article integrates DT and its effects on aspects of people's health, PP and WE. The model thus includes interactions of technology with human elements. In both business and administrative environments, PP is key to optimizing resources and survival of organizations.

DT processes are different and complex because every organization is different. The authors recommend expanding this study to other sectors in both spheres, public and private. Aligning the objectives of the institutions for aid with DT is also quite complicated.

This study contributes to improving participating organizations. It also provides government institutions with a clear foundation from which to encourage actions that promote the health and WE of their workforce without reducing productivity. In addition, this study adds novelty to the research line.

The authors have deepened this line of research by developing fuller knowledge of the relationships among novel and necessary variables in organizations. The authors provide complementary, different and inspiring value in addressing this line of research.

Nowadays, networks are the basic core of social organization and interaction; consequently, networking has become an indispensable requirement in today's societies. In education, the development of different types of collaborative networks has been observed, leading, in recent years, to the creation of educational macro-networks that generate links between schools and different types of institutions. Therefore, this study consists of a systematic review to examine the most relevant findings on this type of educational macro-networks. The authors’ objectives were: to examine the main characteristics of this type of networks; to analyze the consequences they cause; and to determine which aspects contribute to or hinder their construction and development.

A bibliographic search was carried out in Web of Science, SCOPUS and Education Resources Information Center, which yielded a total of 29 studies that were analyzed thematically using Nvivo software.

Among the most noteworthy results are: the wide variety of existing structures; the benefits they generate in terms of learning outcomes, educational equity and the reduction of inequalities; and the influence exerted by the type of leadership and policies in the development of this macro-networks. Finally, future lines of research and policy implications for practice are highlighted.

In this society, networks have become the basic core of an organization and the new form of social interaction. As a result, networks have begun to play a fundamental role in today's societies, even permeating various spheres such as education. In this context, it is essential to analyse this type of relationship in the field of education in order to truly understand its implications in this sector as well as its development and structure.