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The purpose of the paper is to review the social consequences of the Great Recession of 2008‐2009. In particular, it looks at impacts on the world of work – unemployment, informal and vulnerable employment, working poor and youth unemployment, and on public health – hunger and malnutrition, suicides, domestic violence and child abuse. In all fronts, the Great Recession had serious adverse impacts and morphed into a global social crisis. The situation is made worse due to obsessions with fiscal consolidation in the midst of tepid and uncertain recovery. The paper argues that policies matter and advocates for strengthening social protection and continued stimulus in order to ensure robust recovery.

The paper is a general review and it draws on the findings of the United Nations flagship publication, Report of the World Social Situation 2011. It is an analytical narrative of impacts of on‐going economic crisis.

The paper finds a worsening employment situation – rise in unemployment, informal and vulnerable employment, youth unemployment, and working poverty. It also finds adverse public health impacts in terms of rise in malnutrition and hunger, suicide rates, domestic violence and child abuse. Finally the paper finds that policies matters in mitigating worst impacts as well as sustaining recovery.

The findings are tentative as the social impacts of economic crisis become obvious after a long time lag.

The paper argues that policies matter and advocates for strengthening social protection and continued stimulus in order to ensure robust recovery.

This paper aims to assess the impact of 2008 recession (Great Recession)-led environmental turbulence on the manufacturing small and medium enterprise (SME) sector and its related competitive priorities.

A mixed methods research strategy, consisting of a survey of 104 manufacturing SMEs located in the UK, complemented by 17 in-depth interviews with senior management representatives from this survey group.

Senior managers have prompted a realignment of competitive manufacturing priorities accounting for external financial and market conditions. Differing competitive priorities post-recession are given to various areas of manufacturing decision-making, the greatest impact being on manufacturing costs. Manufacturing flexibility, performance in meeting customer deliveries and enhancing supplier selection are merited to increase priority with relatively little change for process technology, quality and environmental practices.

The sample of survey participants was relatively small, therefore prohibiting an assessment of differences in competitive priorities by sub-sectors of manufacturing SMEs. This was offset by a healthy number of informative, in-depth interviews that provided a richness of examples and insight into the shifting priorities for the sector.

Clear priorities have emerged around reducing manufacturing costs, being more flexible in manufacturing and improving outward performance relating to customers and suppliers.

This builds on established manufacturing strategy constructs and points to necessary competitive priority realignment focused on the performance areas listed above.

This paper aims to explore how the Celtic Tiger economic boom and Great Recession influenced drug and alcohol use in one Irish city.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 48 people, living in Cork City, who had previously used drugs and/or alcohol problematically. All participants had engaged with services for their problematic use and had at least one year of abstinence at time of interview.

Some participants reported that their drug and/or alcohol consumption increased during the economic boom; others, who were already in (self-defined) active addiction, reported how full employment lessened some of the harms of their problematic use. For others, problematic use struck once the economy entered a downturn and, heavy drink and drug use became a means of soothing the strains of economic recession.

The paper provides two key contributions. Methodologically, it demonstrates how large-scale national quantitative data can mask local idiosyncratic tendencies, suggesting the need for mixed-method approaches for understanding drug market trends. The paper also provides insights into the impact of global and local economic conditions on drug and alcohol consumption in Ireland.

Over the years, the impact of the business cycle on firm strategy has been neglected in the area of strategic management and remains one of the most important but least developed research streams in management scholarship. Studies in this area are scattered across time and domains, therefore, there is a need to consolidate this fragmented literature to provide a comprehensive review and thus avenues for further research. This study aims to address this gap.

In this study, the systematic literature review (SLR) method is used to select and examine research articles in the area of firm responses and decisions during recession. This SLR examines 127 studies and carries out a thematic synthesis of the literature.

Based on the SLR and thematic synthesis of the literature, the themes identified in this study include – severity of recession impact (Theme 1); firm specific characteristics (Theme 2); resource adjustment activities (Theme 3); and firm performance (Theme 4), based on these themes and analysis this paper maps and proposes various relationships and linkages in this research domain that can be explored further for the development of scholarship in this field of study.

This paper fulfills the need for a systematic review of the extant literature on firms’ responses during recession. The study synthesizes literature and carries out a thematic analysis from 1980 till the period February 2024 to provide directions to advance this domain of literature.

This study identifies measures to recover economic growth and build sustainable societies and markets in post-COVID-19 scenarios – with a perspective of resilience and adaptability to climate change and massive biodiversity loss. Additionally, this study uncovers the interventions implemented to address economic, environmental and social consequences of past crises based on a systematic literature review. Specifically, this chapter provides answers to the following six questions:

1. What has been done in the past to rebuild social, economic and environmental balance after global crises?

2. Where (geographical region) did the analysis on measures taken concentrate?

3. When have scholars analysed past measures to rebuild business and society after a global crisis?

4. How did the past measures to rebuild business and society after the global crisis take place?

5. Who promotes the measures to rebuild business and society after a global crisis takes place?

6. Why is it important to study the previous literature on past measures to rebuild business and society after a global crisis takes place?

What has been done in the past to rebuild social, economic and environmental balance after global crises?

Where (geographical region) did the analysis on measures taken concentrate?

When have scholars analysed past measures to rebuild business and society after a global crisis?

How did the past measures to rebuild business and society after the global crisis take place?

Who promotes the measures to rebuild business and society after a global crisis takes place?

Why is it important to study the previous literature on past measures to rebuild business and society after a global crisis takes place?

Finally, this chapter identifies future research opportunities to rebuild business and society after the past global crises.

Several official institutions (NBER, OECD, CEPR, and others) provide business cycle chronologies with lags ranging from three months to several years. In this paper, we propose a Markov-switching dynamic factor model that allows for a more timely estimation of turning points. We apply one-step and two-step estimation approaches to French data and compare their performance. One-step maximum likelihood estimation is confined to relatively small data sets, whereas two-step approach that uses principal components can accommodate much bigger information sets. We find that both methods give qualitatively similar results and agree with the OECD dating of recessions on a sample of monthly data covering the period 1993–2014. The two-step method is more precise in determining the beginnings and ends of recessions as given by the OECD. Both methods indicate additional downturns in the French economy that were too short to enter the OECD chronology.

Purpose – This study sets out to establish experiential knowledge profiles of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) entering emerging markets and to examine how the different abilities contained in these profiles impact the sustainability of market positions in the new turbulent era of global business.

Methodology – We analyse a sample of 203 entries into emerging markets by Swedish SMEs. The data collected on site at all sample firms is analysed in two sequential stages. First, an exploratory factor analysis is performed to derive four types of experiential knowledge. Second, a cluster analysis is performed to establish experiential knowledge profiles among the entering SMEs.

Findings – The result of the analysis shows that experiential knowledge is a multi-dimensional construct consisting of four main types. Moreover, emerging market entering SMEs are shown to develop different knowledge profiles. We suggest that Masters are well prepared for such periods. Learners most probably will experience high levels of uncertainty, whereas Country and Customer Experts face less uncertainty due to their specialisation on either host market or customer knowledge.

Originality – The chapter shows that the experiential knowledge base of emerging market entering SMEs is an important indicator of the readiness for turbulent times. Firms will be able to sustain market positions differently depending on which type of knowledge profile they belong to.

This study investigates the effect of business cycles on school enrollment in Turkey. During recessions, school enrollment might increase as opportunity cost of schooling declines, yet it might also decrease because of reduced income households have for education. Which effect dominates depends on the context. We empirically explore this in a context displaying canonical features of developing countries.

Using the Turkish Household Labor Force Survey data for a period covering the Great Recession, we estimate the effect of unemployment rate separately for enrollments in general and vocational high schools and in undergraduate programs. To understand the cyclicality, we use a probit model with the regional and time variations in unemployment rates. We also build a simple theoretical model of work-schooling choice to interpret the findings.

We find that the likelihood of enrolling in general high schools and undergraduate programs declines with higher adult unemployment rates, but the likelihood of enrollment in vocational high schools increases. Confronting these empirical findings with the theoretical model suggests that the major factor in enrollment cyclicality in Turkey is how parental resources allocated to education change during recessions by schooling type.

Our finding of pro-cyclical enrollment in academically oriented programs is in contrast with counter-cyclicality documented for similar programs in developed countries, which highlights the importance of income related factors in developing-country contexts. Our heterogeneous findings for general and vocational high schools are also novel.

The purpose of this paper is to explain the effects of innovation, specialisation, qualifications and sectoral structure on the resilience of German regions (municipal level) facing the Great Recession in 2008/2009.

To calculate the effects of various variables on the resilience of German regions against the Great Recession, the authors use quantile regressions. To measure resilience, the authors create a number of indexes representing different parts of the economy: resistance performance index, recovery performance index, shift-share resistance index, shift-share recovery index, manufacturing resistance index, manufacturing recovery index, service resistance index and service recovery index.

The results of this study confirm that locations with employment growth before the crisis and with a good industry structure show better employment dynamics during and after the crisis. The authors find evidence for positive relationship between innovativeness, qualification, the share of the service sector, specialisation and resistance. The authors obtain positive results for related variety and both resistance and recovery. The share of the manufacturing sector only shows a positive relationship with recovery.

The authors expand the existing literature in three aspects: First, instead of using regions as observation units, the authors conduct the analyses on the basis of municipalities and their surroundings. By doing so, the authors reduce the modifiable area unit problem because the authors do not rely on regions defined for administrative reasons. Second, the authors apply quantile regressions to detect nonlinear effects. Third, in addition to the resilience of the whole economy, the authors also study the resilience of the manufacturing and service sectors separately and examine the resilience of the local shift effect.