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In 2015, the UN adopted 17 goals for the Agenda for Sustainable Development. The library’s work is visible in all the primary goals, particularly with respect to public access to information, technology, and lifelong learning. Libraries are at the intersection between culture, education and lifelong learning, public health, and social work.

The Norwegian Parliament adopted the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) as a foundation for regional and municipal planning. SDGs are also incorporated in the Strategy for Libraries (2020–2023). In connection with the Strategy, the National Library of Norway (NB) allocating funding for projects aimed at the development of public libraries and special libraries.

The authorities want people to enjoy and participate in outdoor life and trials. This improves health and quality of life, and it is a central part of the Norwegian cultural heritage.

In the last years, it has become popular to bring the library to people enjoying the outdoors. People can encounter both books and literary activities when out in nature or at a cabin far from the public library. Through the project and development funds and the celebration of National Book Year 2019, and measures related to the Strategy, the NB has supported projects for open-air libraries. This makes public libraries more visible and available to people and will reach new user groups and promote a sustainable society. Several of the SDGs are utilized through the development and use of new methods for creating open-air libraries.

14 projects are presented to show the importance of bringing the library to people enjoying the outdoors.

This study aims to measure impact of several firm-specific factors on alternative measures of leverage. The authors also aim to study impact of the subprime crisis on such associations.

The authors utilized an unbalanced panel data of 973 firm-year observations on 47 UK listed non-financial firms for the years 1990–2019. Book-based and market-based long-term and total leverage measures have been used as explained variables. The explanatory variables are profitability, size, two measures of growth, asset tangibility, non-debt tax shields, firm age and product uniqueness. Fixed effect and random effect models with clustered robust standard errors have been utilized for data analysis. To find the effect of subprime crisis, original dataset was split to create pre-crisis and post-crisis datasets.

The authors find that profitability significantly reduces leverage while firms having more tangible assets use significantly more debt in capital structure. Firm size and non-debt tax shield have statistically insignificant positive impact on leverage. Having more unique products reduces use of external debt, albeit insignificantly. Growth, when measured as market-to-book ratio, has inconsistent impact, whereas capital expenditure insignificantly reduces leverage. Age is found to be an insignificant predictor of leverage. After the subprime crisis, firms started relying more on internal fund instead of external debt, more particularly short-term debt. Having more collateral is gradually becoming more important for availing external debt.

Data limitations restrict generalization of the findings.

This is one of the pioneering attempts to show how subprime crisis altered the theoretical domain of capital structure research in the UK.

The purpose of this paper is to spotlight the research output in the field of grey literature (GL) during the 13-year period between 2007 and 2019 as reflected in the Scopus database.

This study has used Scopus, an abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature, to collect data for the specified 13-year period. The sources, which had “grey literature” in their titles, were considered for the study and the period was from 2007 to 2019. The downloaded results were analysed using specific parameters. The SPSS and Excel have been used for analysing the retrieved data. The VOSviewer has been used for visualizing the network.

Scopus indexes different kinds of documents such as articles, books, chapters, conference papers, editorial, erratum, letters, notes, reviews and short surveys. There were 345 publications, which received 309 citations. GL-Conference Series: Conference Proceedings published the most number of articles. The majority 51.9 per cent of the articles were published in collaboration with authors from European countries. The term “grey literature” occurred most commonly as author keyword and index term.

The present study highlights how the area of GL has evolved during the 13-year period. The findings of the study pave the way for more detailed exploration of GL, which has relevance for the researchers.

This study aims to examine the financial reporting quality during the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) enforcement period in the emerging markets of India and Indonesia by using Ohlson’s (1995) valuation model. The study further endeavors to compare the quality of the reporting environment and its impact on stock prices for both these emerging economies by using a price model during the IFRS conversion period.

This paper aspires to obtain insights about the value relevance of accounting information during the IFRS enforcement period for India and its Southeast Asian neighbor, Indonesia which is identical in terms of inclusive growth and development. In that context, 3,325 Indian (National Stock Exchange indexed) and 815 Indonesian (Indonesian stock exchange indexed) firm-year observations were examined by using Ohlson’s price valuation model for five years, representing the IFRS adherence period.

The findings of the paper insinuated that the value relevance of book values and earnings, both, have increased throughout the IFRS enforcement period for both economies. However, the investigation revealed that the incremental interpretive power of earnings is more substantial and evident during the IFRS adherence phase than book values which indicates investor’s inclination toward earnings management over book values.

The findings may assist the regulators, investors, firms and standard setters of both economies in examining the effectiveness of financial reporting curriculums as it brings forth informational improvement in the financial market. This study also outstretches the discussion on the subject in other emerging nations where the market is imperfect with insufficient information, poor enforcement and limited regulations. This investigation has few limitations such as limited data and period, only two emerging economies and two control variables, thus provide scope for future research.

This paper endeavors to investigate and compare the value relevance of accounting information during IFRS convergence period between India and Indonesia with an aim to assist in improved decision making for both, regulatory bodies and market participants in both the countries.

The key contribution of the study is to examine whether the accounting information is value relevant during the IFRS convergence period for the two fastest-growing economies in Asia, India and Indonesia and it is the first such empirical research to the best of the author’s knowledge. The study is an extended contribution to the modest research administered in developing nations.

Indian railways (IR) is one of the largest railway networks in the world. As a part of its strategic development initiative, demand forecasting can be one of the indispensable activities, as it may provide basic inputs for planning and control of various activities such as coach production, planning new trains, coach augmentation and quota redistribution. The purpose of this study is to suggest an approach to demand forecasting for IR management.

A case study is carried out, wherein several models i.e. automated autoregressive integrated moving average (auto-ARIMA), trigonometric regressors (TBATS), Holt–Winters additive model, Holt–Winters multiplicative model, simple exponential smoothing and simple moving average methods have been tested. As per requirements of IR management, the adopted research methodology is predominantly discursive, and the passenger reservation patterns over a five-year period covering a most representative train service for the past five years have been employed. The relative error matrix and the Akaike information criterion have been used to compare the performance of various models. The Diebold–Mariano test was conducted to examine the accuracy of models.

The coach production strategy has been proposed on the most suitable auto-ARIMA model. Around 6,000 railway coaches per year have been produced in the past 3 years by IR. As per the coach production plan for the year 2023–2024, a tentative 6551 coaches of various types have been planned for production. The insights gained from this paper may facilitate need-based coach manufacturing and optimum utilization of the inventory.

This study contributes to the literature on rail ticket demand forecasting and adds value to the process of rolling stock management. The proposed model can be a comprehensive decision-making tool to plan for new train services and assess the rolling stock production requirement on any railway system. The analysis may help in making demand predictions for the busy season, and the management can make important decisions about the pricing of services.

Despite children’s academic excellence in East Asian countries, school education in this region faces a range of challenges to build inclusive and quality education for all. This chapter aims at examining how these challenges occur and what actions have been taken to deal with them. By focusing on China, Japan, and the Republic of Korea, the chapter first reviews reforms of school education since the 1990s in these countries. The subsequent sections then present educational disparity and a new mode of teaching and learning in these countries. It concludes by addressing that East Asian countries must explore more common ground for building a more collective sense and identity to share responsibility for building a resilient, inclusive and sustainable world through global citizenship education and education for sustainable development.

This study aims to explore the nexus of equality and efficiency by considering public hospitals' development dynamics, capacity and technology indicators.

Data was collected from the Ministry of Health Public Hospital Almanacs from 2014 to 2017. The Gini index (GI) is used to estimate the inequality of distribution of hospital performance indicators. A bias-corrected efficiency analysis is calculated to obtain efficiency scores of public hospitals for the year 2017. A path analysis is then constructed to better identify patterns of causation among a set of development, equality and efficiency variables.

A redefined path model highlights that development dynamics, equality and efficiency are causally related and health technology (path coefficient = 0.57; t = 19.07; p < 0.01) and health services utilization (path coefficient = 0.24; t = 8; p < 0.01) effects public hospital efficiency. The final path model fit well (X²/df = 50.99/8 = 6; RMSEA = 0.089; NFI = 0.95; CFI = 0.96; GFI = 0.98; AGFI = 0.94). Study findings indicate high inequalities in distribution of health technologies (GI > 0.85), number of surgical operations (GI > 0.70) and number of inpatients (GI > 0.60) among public hospitals for the years 2014–2017.

Study results highlight that, hospital managers should prioritize equal distribution of health technology and health services utilization indicators to better orchestrate equity-efficiency trade-off in their operations.

A competitive hospitality environment requires attracting new target markets. The purpose of this research is to investigate how young travelers’ intention to stay and electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) are impacted by a hotel’s environmental sustainability communications on social media.

The data were collected from 306 participants via online survey and analyzed in SPSS and AMOS. Structural equation modeling was utilized for hypotheses testing.

The results support the use of social media marketing (SMM) by hotels to communicate sustainability efforts, increasing intentions to stay and expanding eWOM. Hospitality marketers can use these findings to better understand young travelers’ priorities and their information-gathering process when planning travel.

The study revealed the positive relationship between travelers’ perceptions of hotel environmental sustainability and greater intention to stay and positive eWOM. This could lead to increased business and recommendations for hospitality companies from young consumers.

This study advances the understanding of how young customers respond to hotels’ efforts to promote environmental sustainability on social media. The findings add value to practitioners and academics in their understanding of how hospitality marketers can increase intention to stay and eWOM by marketing to young travelers about environmental sustainability on social media.

The purpose and current research objective is to determine sustainable hotel performance through hotel environmental management initiatives (HEMI) with the mediating influence of employee’s’ eco-friendly behaviour (EEB), and to determine the moderating role of environmental strategies (ES) in the relationship between HEMI and EEB.

A total of 95 five-star hotels were contacted, with data collected from only 30 of them. The study used only 433 questionnaires for the final analysis with SPSS 25.0 and SmartPLS 3.2.8.

The results revealed that HEMI is positively associated with sustainable hotel performance and with EEB. EEB is positively associated with sustainable hotel performance. ES significantly influence EEB, and significantly strengthen the relationship between HMEI and EEB. EEB significantly mediates the relationship between HEMI and sustainable hotel performance.

The current research highlights a significant issue: how the management of the hotel industry uses HEMI, ES and EEB to improve sustainable performance. The study fills the gap in the literature and enables hotel management to concentrate on studying exogenous variables to increase sustainable performance.

The current research contributes to the body of knowledge by concentrating on factors that influence sustainable hotel performance. It examines HEMI influence on sustainable performance with moderating (ES) and mediating (EEB) effects, from the leans of natural resource-based view (RBV) theory.