Search results

The biggest enlargement of the European Union (EU) took place in May 2004 when 10 new countries (Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia) joined the union, increasing the number of member states from 15 to 25. Of these newcomers, eight are former Eastern European countries with transition to Western-type market economies. These emerging markets provide increasingly growing investment opportunities and international diversification options for fund managers and individual investors. Well-known features of emerging equity markets are high returns, high volatility, and low correlation with developed markets. Bekaert and Harvey (2002) find that this correlation is on average increasing, particularly for those emerging markets that have liberalised their financial markets. Mateus (2004) finds similar results with EU access countries for recent years. Additional features of emerging markets are sparse data, low liquidity, and large price changes due to political changes or market crashes (e.g. Hwang & Pedersen, 2004).

The purpose of the paper is to show the impossibility of teaching an individual to live and realize their potential in a modern dynamic environment by being within an artificial education system and explore the idea of life-creating education.

The study is based on the models of future education and community. Education is viewed from the position of a student’s ability to self-realize in the modern world. This paper relies on the analyses of basic characteristics of formal education, the challenges to it from the point of view of contemporaneous society and the main routes to improve education.

An artificial education system with its translation of a stable experience model is obsolete. Formal education does not provide an individual with the necessary life experience. Learners’ interest and involvement into cognitive activity; joint creative activity and production of personal knowledge; self-determination; and personal fulfilment are the main features of life-creating education. It involves the whole society into learning, modifies teachers’ functions and requires developing flexible management tools.

This original work shows basic principles of life-creating education and maps the way forward. The represented results will be useful for developing new models of education improvement.

This paper aims to analyse the asymmetric impacts of world oil price on macroeconomic variables in Vietnam, including domestic oil price, inflation and output growth.

The mixed data sampling (MIDAS) approach is employed to examine the impact of world oil price changes on macroeconomic variables as the former is high-frequency data (daily), and the latter is low-frequency data, usually monthly or quarterly.

Changes in world oil price cause asymmetric impacts on domestic oil price and inflation, but no significant effects on output growth. In terms of magnitude, a positive change in world oil price causes a stronger effect than a negative change in world oil price. In terms of timing, a positive change in world oil price causes a slow pass-through impact on domestic oil price and inflation. Meanwhile, domestic oil price and inflation decrease quickly following a negative change in world oil price.

This study investigates the asymmetric impact of oil price on the Vietnam economy in terms of both magnitude and timing, which is not explored by previous studies. In addition, it exploits daily information of oil price changes to analyse macroeconomic variables in lower frequency by employing MIDAS approach.

Strategic management researchers in Europe challenged the historical concern of the field with economic performance. As a result corporate social responsibility (CSR) has been transformed into a key strategic issue. Given the large amount of social problems in Latin America, much of them related to the large amount of foreign direct investments inflows over the last decade, the growing literature on strategic corporate social responsibility (SCSR) produced in the US has been reproduced in the region by consulting firms, big corporations firms and strategic management researchers. Drawing upon critical arguments of Latin American scholars on the dominance of the US literature in the region and on problematic outcomes of the large amount of foreign direct investments inflows this paper develops a critical analysis on the so‐called SCSR. The vantage point construed by big corporations within the fields of strategic management and organization studies, the increasing dependence of the field of strategic management on corporate resources, and the decreasing power of the state and civil society in relation to big corporations are pointed out as key issues for the development of a critical approach on SCSR in Latin America. In the end the author argues that the responsibilities of big corporations, especially in Latin America, are too important to be addressed only by the field of strategic management.

This chapter presents a model of distribution dynamics in the presence of measurement error in the underlying data. Studies of international growth convergence generally ignore the fact that per capita income data from the Penn World Table (PWT) are not only continuous variables but also measured with error. Together with short-time scale fluctuations, measurement error makes inferences potentially unreliable. When first-order, time-homogeneous Markov models are fitted to continuous data with measurement error, a bias towards excess mobility is introduced into the estimated transition probability matrix. This chapter evaluates different methods of accounting for this error. An EM algorithm is used for parameter estimation, and the methods are illustrated using data from the PWT Mark 6.1. Measurement error in income data is found to have quantitatively important effects on distribution dynamics. For instance, purging the data of measurement error reduces estimated transition intensities by between one- and four-fifths and more than halves the observed mobility of countries.

This chapter examines World Bank publications, including publicized reports and widely disseminated policy statements like the World Development Reports, as well as the plans and appraisals of two specific operations in Indonesia. Based on this examination, the author suggests that characterizations which emphasize the Bank's intransigence or celebrate its responsiveness fail to provide a satisfactory description of country-level education policy evolution. The chapter begins with two of the major theoretical frameworks that have been used to study the Bank's work in education. This is followed by a summary of the evolution of the Bank's involvement in education at the international level. The third part of this chapter analyzes two educational reforms that the World Bank has promoted in Indonesia in the last 10 years – programs advancing vocational education and decentralization – and examines how these priorities have been affected by local context and demands and shifts in the global discourse on education. The author concludes that the World Bank's role in the diffusion of education reform is best understood from a world culture perspective but that its interests – and the interests of its primary shareholders – are advanced in particularly opportune moments like democratic transitions.

We revisit the problem of redesigning the Master in Business Administration (MBA) program, curriculum, and pedagogy, focusing on understanding and seeking to tame its “wicked problems,” as an intrinsic part and challenge of the MBA program venture, and to render it more realistic and relevant to address major problems and their consequences. We briefly review the theory of wicked problems and methods of dealing with their consequences from multiple perspectives. Most characterization of problems classifies them as simple (problems that have known formulations and solutions), complex (where formulations are known but not their resolutions), unstructured problems (where formulations are unknown, but solutions are estimated), and “wicked” (where both problem formulations and their resolutions are unknown but eventually partially tamable). Uncertainty, unpredictability, randomness, and ambiguity increase from simple to complex to unstructured to wicked problems. A redesigned MBA program should therefore address them effectively through the four semesters in two years. Most of these problems are real and affect life and economies, and hence, business schools cannot but incorporate them into their critical, ethical, and moral thinking.

This paper aims to investigate whether Islamic indexes, Bitcoin and gold still act as hedges or/and “safe-haven” assets during the COVID-19 pandemic crisis. This paper examines the role of the Morgan Stanley Capital International all-country world index, Islamic index, gold and Bitcoin as a hedge or safe-haven asset for the world conventional stock market over the period from April 30, 2015 to March 27, 2020.

In this paper, the authors re-evaluate the hedge and safe haven properties of Islamic indexes, gold and Bitcoin following Baur and Lucey’s (2010) and Baur and McDermott’s (2010) methodology.

Empirical results show that the Islamic index is not a hedge or a safe haven asset for the world conventional stock market during the recent coronavirus crisis period. Different from the whole period, the authors find that gold is a strong hedge but only a weak safe or is not a safe haven during the coronavirus sub-period. Bitcoin reports distinctive properties, as it acts as a weak hedge and not a safe-haven asset.

This paper is the first study that investigates whether the global Islamic index still acts as hedges or “safe-haven” assets during the new COVID-19 crisis period. The results can help investors make informed decisions when adding cryptocurrencies and Islamic indexes to their portfolios during the coronavirus crisis.

The purpose of this paper is to explore and discuss possible solutions to integrate the concepts of smart city (SC) and intellectual capital management, especially referring to structural capital. On the basis of this, the authors propose a theoretical framework that highlights the relevance of structural capital for strategic and operational planning of smarter cities.

Using a neuropsychological analogy, the authors assume that the development of SCs corresponds to the development of a sensorial or even a nervous system for cities based on their structural capital, and the development of city intellectual capital (CIC) corresponds to a further phase of the cities’ mind development. The authors propose a practical framework that combines the concepts of city nervous system and city mind. It can be used as an instrument for project management. In this model, sensorial data – associated with the implementation of cities’ sensorial systems – should naturally contribute with open data to the development of higher abstract functions that in turn supports the creation of CIC.

This paper highlights the interrelations between intellectual capital (IC) (especially its structural component) and SC and their synergic capability of improving both an SC’s competitiveness and sustainability, and by this illustrates the benefits of combining both concepts in a common theoretical framework.

Given the paper’s theoretical nature, the empirical validation of the proposed framework is missing. This limitation will be addressed in forthcoming empirical research.

By proposing a framework that combines the concepts of SC and IC, the paper contributes to theory development regarding the strategic management of cities and the application of IC.

We analyze how institutional persistence unfolds. Building on an historical analysis of 3,307 bottle labels in the Bordeaux wine community, France, between 1924 and 2005, we find that the persistence of a chateau tradition requires considerable effort at maintenance. Instead of greater compression and taken-for-grantedness, we propose that expansion along multimodal carriers provides a marker of a deepening institutionalization. We underscore the role of community organizations in enabling a wine tradition to persist. The implications of our findings for institutional theory and multimodality research are discussed.