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Trafficking¹ in human beings is gross.² It constitutes one of the most egregious violations of human rights.³ The vile nature of human trafficking is also hinged on the fact that it commodifies human beings. Hence its categorisation is modern slavery.⁴ So much of trafficking activities follow the pathways5 of other transnational forms of organised crimes and irregular cross-border movement of people.6 In response to this egregious crime, several international, regional and country laws and instruments have been used or proposed for combatting human trafficking.7 These instruments forbid trafficking in human persons and provide several preventive measures, prosecution of perpetrators and protection of victims of human trafficking.8 The number of state parties to the United Nations Protocol to prevent suppress and punish trafficking in persons, especially women and children, supplementing the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime (the Palermo Protocol), demonstrates the global commitment to combatting human trafficking. However, the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on legal systems, and the capacity of both state and private institutions to combat human trafficking, has added a knotty twist to the global problem of human trafficking. This essay looks at the trends of human trafficking in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. It also highlights international law and policy approaches that state parties and civil society organisations should adopt to counteract the changes and sustain the fight against human trafficking. Thus, the essay contributes to updating the legal and policy approaches to combat human trafficking in this era.

This article explores the use of informal socio-cultural practices to mitigate formal institutional voids in a qualitative study of informal self-employment in Bulawayo in Zimbabwe. Informal socio-cultural values and practices such as ubuntu and indaba were observed to be making meaningful contribution to business and lives. Development of formal institutions as a consequence was not observed though. The article proposes that economic development efforts might best serve communities in sub-Saharan Africa by facilitating institutional development that converges with local socio-culturally informed practices rather than focus on attempts to absorb informal work into a homogenously understood formal institutional system.

This first chapter provides a general overview of the book. The chapter describes workforce management and the lack of adequate attention to this concept within construction organisations. In the fourth industrial revolution era, where emerging technologies have continued to change how business functions, the need for an effective approach towards managing the construction workforce becomes crucial. Having a construction workforce management practice model was deemed vital at this point, where technological advancement is rapidly changing the construction environment, and skill shortage is evident in the construction industry of most countries around the world. As such, this chapter establishes that the development of a construction workforce management model that will help improve the management of construction workers serves a critical value of the book.

Purpose: This chapter explores the changing global dynamics of employability and the current skill gaps among college students. Employability is defined as the measure of how desirable an individual is in the workforce, that is, their skills and knowledge. This chapter is centred on the students’ existing skills, missing skills, and the skill requirements of different industries.

Methodology: For this study, both primary and secondary data have been collected. Case studies have been used to analyse the skill gaps among students and industry requirements. Primary data has been collected from Indian students and case studies from other countries.

Findings: After conducting primary surveys and analysing case studies, we were able to conclude that there are serious skill gaps among students – especially in industries related to new emerging technologies. Educational institutes are not keeping pace with technological changes, and, in some cases, are not taking care of students’ interests. This is a serious problem for unemployed youth around the world.

Practical Implications: This chapter will help design the curriculum, addressing core issues of skill shortages in the labour market in developing and underdeveloped countries, decreasing the labour shortage and increasing employment, and helping countries’ national income.

Significance: This study is important as it addresses the issue of unemployment by providing a clear understanding of the present needs of industries. Educational institutions and the government will be able to design the best curriculum and education policies to provide the youth with all the necessary skills to help them fulfil the needs of industries.

Purpose: This chapter addresses the skills shortages in Kosovo’s labour market, emphasising the service sector. The labour market economy is very dynamic, and Kosovo, with the youngest population in Europe, also has the highest unemployment level among youths. Therefore, we aim to analyse the mismatches of the skills demand in the labour market.

Methodology: The scientific methods used in this chapter are quantitative methods applying analytical and critical approaches based on economic theory. In this chapter, we analysed secondary data from Labour Force Surveys (LFS) and official reports such as the World Bank and UNDP. We have also conducted primary research with the employees of SMEs in the service sector, with specifically related questionnaires for descriptive issues.

Findings: The logit model used in this research has shown goodness of fit and yielded significant results. Based on the empirical findings, we have found a need for some main soft skills such as communication skills, language skills, ICT skills, and additional training to help gain employability skills. These findings suggest that there is a need for more skills in the service sector, significantly impacting the employees’ job performance and the job seeker’s level of employability.

Significance: Noticeably, countries that are still in the transition process face inequalities in the labour market and have a very high level of unemployment. The findings can be used in analysing demand-side management of the labour market and mismatching of skills in transition economies by policy makers.

Spirituality in the workplace is a concept that has been emphasized a lot in recent years. However, the relationship of this concept with gender and discrimination has not been adequately addressed. Individual and organizational positive outcomes of spirituality in the workplace cannot be obtained when discrimination is in question. This is because the concepts of spirituality and discrimination in the workplace are completely opposite to each other. In order to prevent discrimination based on gender, sexual orientation, race, age, religion, disability and to establish spirituality in the workplace, organizations should follow awareness and training programs to eliminate prejudices of their management and employees, give importance to differences, develop an understanding of democracy and justice within the organization and development egalitarian and anti-discrimination policies and application. In this direction, while the differences are managed correctly, spirituality will be established in the workplace.

The world has seen significant level of emergence of the developing nations over the years. But the world has been going through certain economic crises – be it the worldwide recession of 2008 – that had a worldwide impact, be it the ongoing depression in economic activities since 2018–2019 due to several economic issues. Under these circumstances, how far these developing nations have been able to cope up with is an issue of worry. Can they overcome these depressions or recessions and get on the sustainable path of progress again and compete at par with the developed nations? In this chapter, we have used multiple regression analysis to analyse how far and to what extent these recessions have had impact on the exchange rates (ERs) and other important variables, including growth, of the selected eight developing nations. By taking ER as our dependent variable and five important macroeconomic indicators as regressors, we have checked if the recession caused any structural breaks in these economies or not. We have found the significant impact of gross domestic product (GDP), inflation and trade balance on ER, while the effects of net foreign direct investment (FDI) and rate of interest were not significant. By applying Chow test, we have seen that there is existence of structural breaks in these economies over the period of 2007–2010. These breaks can be attributed to the global recession as well as economic activities prior to the recession. We have also conducted few diagnostic tests to prove the robustness of our analysis.