Search results

This study analyses the concept of happiness management based on the empirical validation of the interactions between emotional wage, organisational justice and happiness at work. It complements a holistic view of the management models used in recent corporate governance. This perspective explores the dimension’s emotional wage mediating role and influences on organisational justice and happiness at work. The effect of organisational justice on happiness at work is also analysed.

A quantitative, cross-sectional, descriptive and correlational study is proposed. A sample of 502 workers in the education sector in Costa Rica was selected. A structural equation model (PLS-SEM) was developed to test the proposed theoretical model. The SPSS-AMOS 23 and SmartPLS 4 computer programs are used for this purpose.

The results show that emotional wage has a positive impact on happiness at work and that it mediates positively between organisational justice and happiness at work. Developing organisational policies to include these variables as necessary resources for corporate governance is recommended.

The first limitation of this study is due to the type of sampling, which was purposive. The kind of population and the time of execution of this study were determining factors when deciding on the mode of application of the instrument. However, an attempt to reduce the bias associated with this element could be made by expanding the sample to as many respondents as possible. The second limitation was that the data were collected within a specific time frame. Longitudinal studies address Thcould. The third limitation stems from the scarcity of literature on happiness management. In this regard, this type of research currently needs to be explored in emerging economies. It makes it difficult to determine whether the empirical results obtained in this paper can be generalised to other territories in the global village. Moreover, the last limitation is that the authors of this research have only explored the moderating role of emotional pay in the relationship between the dimensions of organisational justice and happiness at work. It would be interesting to consider other mediating variables to have a clearer picture of the organisational justice–happiness at work construct from the happiness management approach.

As already indicated throughout this research, emotional wage, organisational justice and happiness at work are constructs that positively drive employee satisfaction, motivation and well-being. Human talent management strategies undertaken by organisations should encourage the adaptation of actions that stimulate employees' quality of life, corporate social responsibility and ethical management practices to be more competitive in today’s markets. It requires implementing the dynamic management models that provide internal customers with a high sense of belonging, job satisfaction and commitment to their professional performance. In other words, this will require robust leadership styles and corporate cultures that stimulate employee creativity, loyalty and innovation. For this reason, management of organisations must implement human resources policies to attract and retain creative talent through happy leadership. It requires, among other things that the philosophy of happiness management becomes a critical strategic resource for companies to promote nonfinancial benefits for employees, including emotional wage (Ruiz-Rodríguez et al., 2023).

In the current business environment, there has been a transformation in leadership styles, motivation and the development of a sense of belonging in organisations' human capital. Based on this trend, the study of happiness management becomes a social strategy to improve the conditions, in which the organisations compete to attract highly demanded human capital. It is why this research contributes elements that have an impact on citizenship by proposing the management models based on happiness at work and quality of life.

This study adds to the happiness management literature by including emotional wage, organisational justice and happiness at work in human resources and strategic management. It also contributes to the academic debate on the need to formulate organisational cultures that empower workers in their professional performance based on happiness and positive emotions.

This research aimed to conceptualize organizations as open and purposeful systems to study how organizational culture (OC) influences firms' Innovative Performance (IP). The authors proposed goal setting and internal integration/external adaptation paradox as central to explaining OC's mediating and suppressing effects on IP.

The authors collected data from 372 Costa Rican organizations and analyzed them with structural equations. This research used the Denison Model instead of the usual typology-based approaches.

The mission had a direct and high impact on IP. The mediated effect via adaptability was also elevated, as well as the suppressor effect through consistency. There was no effect on IP of involvement. According to these results, the Open and Rational Systems Framework emerge as the main theoretical explanatory concepts.

Disaggregating the OC through a performance-oriented dimensional model makes it possible to study the dynamics between the elements that compound it and facilitate integrating these findings with other research streams.

This study provides empirical evidence on the impact of the Panama Canal expansion (PCE) on the economies of Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) countries, particularly in light of the emergence of larger container ships such as neo-Panamax and post-Panamax vessels.

This study uses the Bayesian structural time Series (BSTS) model to evaluate the economic effects of the PCE on 21 countries within the LAC region. It utilized the World Bank's gross domestic product (GDP) figures between 2000 and 2019 as the primary variable, alongside the human development index (HDI) (X1), container throughput (TEU) (X2) and unemployment rates (UNEMPL) (X3) covariates. This allowed a precise and robust approach to analyzing time series data while accounting for uncertainties and allowing the inclusion of various components and external factors.

The findings revealed that the PCE has a positive and statistically significant impact on most countries within the Caribbean Transshipment Triangle, ranging from 9.2% in Belize to 46% in Cuba. This suggests that the causal effect of the PCE on regional economies was not confined to any specific type of economy or geographical location within the LAC region. Where the growth rates were statistically insignificant, primarily in some Latin American countries, it coincided with countries that are primarily driven by exports and service industries, where bulk and oil tanker vessels are likely to be the main carriers for exports rather than container vessels.

The practical implications of this research are crucial for various stakeholders in the maritime industry and economic planning. The factors influencing economic growth resulting from investing in maritime activities are vital for decision-makers to create policies that lead to positive outcomes and sustainable development in regions and countries with flourishing maritime industries. The methodology and findings have significant implications for governments, managers, professionals, policy-makers and investors.

Using composite indices, the paper examines the nexus between militarization, globalization and liberal democracy. The democratic peace theory, the conflict inhibiting effects of international trade – a key and dominant facet of globalization – and the democracy promoting globalization hypothesis form the theoretical underpinnings of the empirical investigation.

To probe into the issue at hand, the paper adopts a dynamic panel VAR estimation procedure. Given the usual data constraints, the sample consists of 113 countries, and the estimations span the period 1995–2019.

The findings from the dynamic panel VAR estimations suggest the presence of a negative and statistically significant nexus between the level of globalization and the level of militarization. No statistically traceable nexus between globalization and liberal democracy was found.

The findings offer empirical support to the hypothesis that the strong links of interdependence shaped by globalization reduce the need for military preparedness. The results lead to a tentative inference in favor of the doux commerce thesis. Nonetheless, given that the estimations span a historically specific period – the entire post-bipolar era – the inferences that stem from the findings should be treated with caution.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the composite indices Bonn International Centre for Conflict Studies (BICC) militarization index, the globalization index of the Swiss Economic Institute (Konjunkturforschungsstelle) (KOF), LibDem, polyarchy have not hitherto been jointly used in previous studies to examine the nexus between militarization, globalization and liberal democracy.

Is humanity heading to immortal living? If so, what areas of society are playing an active role in achieving this? In order to understand this, the study explores the relationship between immortality and the wellness and medical tourism industry to seek potential relationships between them and ultimately, asks difficult questions about the growth of these tourism sectors and the potential need for greater regulation of them.

Taking a pragmatic philosophical approach and through the examination of refined information from secondary sources and published material and reports, the study presents original theoretical knowledge and a model exploring tourism and human immortality.

This paper argues that continued growth in the wellness and medical markets today could lead to a world where transhumanists and cyborgs are present in our world, even taking over from Homo sapiens. The study presents a model highlighting the potential role of wellness and medical tourism markets, illustrating the potential for future consumer services that could further fuel the search for immortality. Thus, how such markets and consumer desires are (in)directly supporting humanities desire for (non-human) immortal existence.

Today, individuals are driven by wellness practices and medical and cosmetic desires and are willing to travel the globe in search of companies who are either capable of carrying out the desired procedures or seeking prices more affordable to them. This research offers novel insights into these complex relationships and maps the affiliation between wellness and medical practices and the concept of immortality.

Nicotine is consumed by one in five of the global adult population, mostly by smoking tobacco cigarettes. Modern electronic cigarettes came onto the market from around 2007 and have considerable potential to improve population health by displacing tobacco smoking. The purpose of this study is to map the use of e-cigarettes, but this is difficult due to absence of data sources for many countries.

The global number of vapers was estimated to be 68 million in 2020. New data in 2021 offered an opportunity to update that estimate. The method of assumed similarity was used for countries with missing data. The average prevalence of vaping was calculated for each World Health Organization region, World Bank income classification group and the legal status of e-cigarettes in each country. The number of vapers was calculated for the adult population. The estimate was refined by adjusting for changes in market value size and the actual year of surveys.

Population prevalence data on e-cigarette used were available for 48 countries. We estimate that there were 82 million vapers worldwide in 2021: 9.2 million in the Eastern Mediterranean region; 5.6 million in the African region; 20.1 million in the European region; 16.8 million in the Americas; 16.0 million in the Western Pacific region; and 14.3 million in South-East Asia.

Global, regional and national estimates of the numbers of vapers are important indicators of trends in nicotine use, and monitoring the uptake of vaping is important to inform international and national policy.

Although previous research has examined the role of franchising for the economic development of countries, no empirical study to date has investigated the importance of franchising for social, infrastructural, and institutional development. The authors address this research gap by applying research results from the field of sustainable entrepreneurship and highlight that franchising has a positive impact on economic, social, institutional and infrastructural development.

This study uses a fixed-effects model on a panel dataset for 2006–2015 from 49 countries to test the hypothesis that franchising positively influences various dimensions of country development such as economic social institutional and infrastructural development.

The findings highlight that franchising has a positive impact on the economic, social, infrastructural, and institutional development of a country. Specifically, the results show that the earlier and the more franchising systems enter a country, the stronger the positive impact of franchising on the country's economic, social, institutional, and infrastructural development.

This study has several limitations that provide directions for further research. First, the empirical investigation is limited by the characteristics of the data, which are composed of information from 49 countries (covering a period of 10 years). Because franchising is not recognized as a form of entrepreneurial governance in many emerging and developing countries, the available information is mainly provided by the franchise associations in the various countries. Hence, there is a need to collect additional data in each country and to include additional countries. Second, although the authors included developed and developing countries in the analysis, the authors could not differentiate between developed and developing countries when testing the hypotheses, because the database was not sufficiently complete. Third, future studies should analyze the causality issue between franchising and development more closely. The role of franchising in development may be changing depending on different unobserved country factors, economic sector characteristics, or development stages.

What are the practical implications of this study for the role of franchising in the development of emerging and developing economies? Because public policy in emerging and developing countries suffers from a lack of financial resources to improve the social, infrastructural and institutional environment, entrepreneurs, such as franchisors who expand into these countries, play an important role for these countries' development. In addition to their entrepreneurial role of exploring and exploiting profit opportunities, they are social, institutional, and political entrepreneurs who may positively influence country development (Schaltegger and Wagner, 2011; Shepard and Patzelt, 2011). Specifically, the findings highlight that countries with an older franchise sector (more years of franchise experience) may realize first-mover advantages and hence larger positive spillover effects on their economic, social, institutional and infrastructural development than countries with a younger franchise sector. Hence, governments of emerging and developing countries have the opportunity and responsibility to reduce potential market entry barriers and provide additional incentives for franchise systems in order to trigger these positive spillover effects. The authors expect that the spillover effects from the franchise sector on the economic, institutional, social and infrastructural development of a country are stronger in emerging and developing countries than in developed countries.

Previous research has focused on the impact of franchising on the economic development of a country, such as its growth of gross domestic product (GDP), employment, business skills, innovation and technology transfer. This study extends the existing literature by going beyond the impact of franchising on economic development: the results show that franchising as an entrepreneurial activity offers opportunities for economic, social, institutional, and infrastructural development, all of which are particularly important for emerging and developing economies. The findings of this study contribute to the international franchise and development economics literature by offering a better understanding of the impact of franchising on country development.

The integration of the digital economy and the real economy has been a key focus in promoting digital economic development. It denotes a comprehensive digital transformation of national economic activities regarding technological infrastructure and production modes, which is crucial for establishing a modern economic system, advancing industrial infrastructure and modernizing industrial chains.

Firstly, the study delves into the internal logic behind the emergence of the new development dynamic resulting from digital technology's evolution. Secondly, it explores the mechanism of mutual promotion and support between the new development dynamic and the digital economy based on China's shift in focus from international engagement to the domestic economy during different stages of industrialization. Subsequently, it analyzes the characteristics and critical factors of digital economy development and examines the macro-, meso- and micro-level constraints on these factors. Finally, the paper explores approaches to promoting digital economy development while constructing the new development dynamic and provides relevant policy suggestions.

The construction of the new development dynamic and the development of the digital economy are inextricably linked, and only by mutually reinforcing each other can they provide an inexhaustible impetus for China's high-quality economic development.

The new development dynamic and the digital economy development form an indivisible whole. The new development dynamic creates the necessary conditions for digital economy development and promotes the formation of digital production modes. In turn, the development of the digital economy should strive to improve the mainstay position of the domestic economy, enhance the synergy between the domestic economy and international engagement, upgrade value chains while improving the supply and the industrial chains in China and ensure a parallel increase in labor income alongside improved productivity.

This study aims to examine how the adoption of digital technologies affects the business competitiveness of countries in Latin American and European countries.

This study used a structural model based on factors representing the pillars of the Global Competitiveness Index: financial system, adoption of information and communication technologies (ICT), skills, labor market, product market, macroeconomic stability, business dynamism and gross domestic product (GDP) purchasing power parity (PPP) as a percentage of the total world value. The authors considered 17 Latin American and 28 European countries. The model was analyzed by partial least squares-structural equation modeling.

ICT adoption in Latin American countries is a strong predictor of business dynamism (66% of the variance), skills (81% of the variance), product market (75% of the variance), labor market (42% of the variance) and financial system (49% of the variance). Similarly, ICT adoption in European countries is a strong predictor of business dynamism (35.6% of the variance), skills (72.2% of the variance), product market (51.6% of the variance), labor market (81.7% of the variance, but with a negative path coefficient) and financial system (38% of the variance).

Latin American countries should create policies to build skills to increase ICT adoption, and improve business and labor market dynamism. A theoretical implication is that the authors propose two structural models based on the GCI that best explains competitiveness in Europe and Latin America.

Using GCI data, the authors present empirical evidence on the predictors of competitiveness across 17 Latin American and 28 European countries with a special focus on the adoption of digital technologies.

Employment-related measures play a significant part in preventive and mitigative social policies. The importance of these actions is especially emphasised in times of crisis. This paper provides empirical insights into employment-related measures implemented in a sample of OECD countries as a response to the COVID-19 crisis in 2020. Furthermore, it addresses the continuity of the measures by July 2022.

The research applies and further develops a capability approach in the COVID-19 context to provide a theoretically informed empirical understanding of the implemented employment related measures.

The results indicate that countries expanded the coverage of previous preventive and mitigative employment measures horizontally and vertically while also introducing new schemes to protect workers. The main conclusions suggest that most employment-related measures (65.5%) were preventive aiming at saving jobs and broadening peoples capabilities with bridging measures during the crisis. The employment measures served first as an emergency aid. However, most measures were recalibrated and changed incrementally toward 2022.

The data consisted major employment-related measures and changes in social policies the studied countries. The authors focussed the examination on governmental-level measures. Thus, sub-national or sector-specific responses, for example tripartite agreements in certain employment sectors or social transfers in certain areas, were excluded.

The way in which welfare states reacted to employment problems during the COVID-19 pandemic may have an impact on how governments approach social policies in the future. The capability approach exhibits a pronounced strength by facilitating the establishment of sustainable trajectories for social policy and welfare services.

The capability approach embracing the preactive and proactive role of social policies lends a unique perspective on public policies.