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The study evaluates small marginal farmers’ (SMFs) potential behavior, attitude and trust in the adoption of innovative emerging technologies.

The study employed an agile multi-factor approach to conceptualize a digital marketplace to connect a supply chain ecosystem for stakeholders.

The empirical findings suggest that most SMFs are willing to embrace innovative technologies. Nonetheless, they lack the necessary technological oriented education, training and funds to innovate. However, their reluctance to adapt changes is attributable to their fear of losing past customs and practices; they were threatened by the reaction of intermediaries (arthyias) to the adoption of technologies, which could result in them suffering huge losses.

This innovative disintermediation business model has a significant potential to reduce information asymmetry, cost and hoarding – and can thus increase the SMFs’ profit margins. Agricultural technological innovations have a profound potential to impact their supply chain logistics positively by reducing the wastage of perishable food and thus enhancing the consumer experience.

Globally, urban planners and decision makers are pursuing place-based initiatives to develop and enhance urban infrastructure to optimise city performance, competitiveness and sustainability credentials. New discourses associated with big data, Building Information Modelling, SMART cities, green and biophilic thinking inform research, policy and practice agendas to varying extents. However, these discourses remain relatively isolated as much city planning is still pursued within traditional sectoral silos hindering integration. This research explores new conceptual ground at the Smart – Natural City interface within a safe interdisciplinary opportunity space. Using the city of Birmingham UK as a case study, a methodology was developed championing co-design, integration and social learning to develop a conceptual framework to navigate the challenges and opportunities at the Smart-Natural city interface. An innovation workshop and supplementary interviews drew upon the insights and experiences of 25 experts leading to the identification of five key spaces for the conceptualisation and delivery at the Smart-Natural city interface. At the core is the space for connectivity; surrounded by spaces for visioning, place-making, citizen-led participatorylearning and monitoring.The framework provides a starting point for improved discussions, understandings and negotiations to cover all components of this particular interface. Our results show the importance of using all spaces within shared narratives; moving towards ‘silver-green’ and living infrastructure and developing data in response to identified priorities. Whilst the need for vision has dominated traditional urban planning discourses we have identified the need for improved connectivity as a prerequisite. The use of all 5 characteristics collectively takes forward the literature on socio-ecological-technological relationships and heralds significant potential to inform and improve city governance frameworks, including the benefits of a transferable deliberative and co-design method that generates ownership with a real stake in the outcomes.

Hazel Kyrk, one of the first women economists at the Economic Department of the University of Chicago and author of A Theory of Consumption (1923), conducted groundbreaking research for the Bureau of Home Economics of the US Department of Agriculture and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Kyrk made a considerable contribution to the development of standards for a “decent living,” the Consumer Price Index, and the conceptualization of what would later turn into the definition of the poverty line. This chapter evaluates Kyrk’s use of eugenic notions of gender and race that were widely used in Kyrk’s day. This chapter shows that eugenic reasoning impacts Kyrk’s theoretical work only superficially but does structure her research on consumption standards through her focus on the white middle-class family as the unit of analysis for consumer behavior. This chapter also makes clear that the American Institutionalist approach to consumer behavior, rather than marginalized and side-tracked due to a lack of theoretical progress, was relegated to the margins of economics science together with the research of women economists into Home Economics departments and policy research at government institutions.

This paper aims to assess the impact of digital financial innovation on financial system development in Common Market for eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA). This paper evaluates the dynamic relationship between digital financial innovation measures and financial system development using time series data from COMESA countries for the period 1997–2019.

A dynamic autoregressive distributed lag model (ARDL) was adopted and the mean group (MG), pooled mean group (PMG) and dynamic fixed effect (DFE) of the model were estimated to evaluate the short- and long-run impact. In addition, the dynamic generalized method of moments (DGMM) was adopted for a robustness check. The Hausman test results show PMG to be the most consistent and efficient estimator, while the coefficient of lagged dependent variable of different GMM is less than the fixed effect coefficient, and, as such, suggests system GMM is the most suitable estimator. Data for the study were sourced from World Bank Development Indicator (WDI, 2020), World Governance Indicator (WGI, 2020) and World Bank Global Financial Development Database (GFD, 2020).

The result shows that digital financial innovation significantly impacts financial system development in the long run. As such, the evidence revealed that automated teller machines (ATMs), point of sale (POS), mobile payments (MP) and mobile banking are significant and contribute positively to financial system development in the long run, while mobile money (MM) and Internet banking (INB) are insignificant but exhibit positive and inverse relationship with financial development respectively. Further investigation revealed that institutional quality and a stable macroeconomic environment including their interactive term are significantly imperative in predicting financial system development in the COMESA region.

Researchers recommend a cohesive and conscious policy that would checkmate the divergence in the short run and suggest a common regional innovative financial strategy that could be pursued to incentivize technology transfer needed to promote financial system development in the long run. More so, plausible product and process innovations may be adapted to complement innovative institutions in the different components of the COMESA financial system.

Digital financial innovation services if well managed increase the inherent benefits in financial system development.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper presents new background information on digital financial innovation that may stimulate the development of the financial system, particularly in the COMESA region. It also exposes the relevance of digital financial innovation, institutional quality and stable macroeconomic environment as well as their interactive effect on COMESA financial system development.

This chapter explores the approaches to digital representation of Australian Aboriginal art and visitor engagement in museum exhibition spaces from a digital design perspective. It discusses recent developments in the fields of digital representation of Aboriginal art, immersive exhibition design and visitor engagement. Through a case study of an immersive exhibition on Australian Aboriginal art in the National Museum of Australia, Canberra, this chapter identifies how Aboriginal art can be digitally represented by appropriate immersive technologies ranging from augmented realities [ARs] and virtual realities [VRs] to mixed reality [MRs] and extended reality [XRs] for enhancing visitors’ immersive digital experience. According to the analysis, the digital representation of Aboriginal artworks needs to be conducted practically, cognitively and ontologically based on understanding Australian Aboriginal history and culture. Visitors can engage with Aboriginal art stories meaningfully through immersive exhibitions through this holistic approach.

This article examines dynamic volatility spillovers between stock index returns of four main hospitality sub-sectors in US during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. These are tourism and travel, hotel and lodging, recreational services and food and beverages. Volatility spillovers are explicitly used as accurate and informative proxies for risk contagion between sectors during turbulent times.

The authors employ dynamic conditional correlation-generalized autoregression heteroskedasticity (DCC-GARCH) and wavelet coherence analysis (WCA) to analyze the phenomenon. The authors’ timeframe is divided into three main sub-periods, namely the pre-pandemic, the first wave and the second wave periods.

This study’s results reveal immense negative shocks in returns of all four sub-sectors on the Black Monday (8th March 2020). Moreover, high volatility persistence was observed during both waves with an exception of tourism and travel which exhibited lower volatility persistence during the second wave. The authors discovered magnified contagion effects between tourism and travel, hotel and lodgment and recreational services during the first wave of the pandemic with tourism and travel being the main volatility transmitter. Lower magnitudes of spillovers were observed between food and beverages and other sub-sectors with a decoupling effect being evident during the second wave.

This study’s findings contribute to the contagion theory by providing evidence of disproportional volatility spillover among hospitality sub-sectors despite being exposed to similar turbulent economic conditions.

Crucial implications can be drawn from this study’s findings to assist in risk management, asset valuation and portfolio management. The importance of close monitoring, safety measures, international diversification and adequacy of liquid assets during health crises cannot be stresses enough for hospitality firms. Retail investors, speculators and asset managers can take advantage of this study’s findings to design trading strategies and hedge against risk.

A body of knowledge pertaining to effects of crises such as COVID-19 on hospitality stocks has been proliferating. Nonetheless, there is still a relative dearth of empirical literature on volatility spillover between hospitality sub-sectors especially during periods of rising economic uncertainties.

This paper presents an analytical framework for modeling and measuring strategic alignment. The resource-product-market (RPM) model is introduced as a means of representing the alignment of the firm's internal resources with its product lines and external markets. A strategic alignment index is defined to measure the degree of alignment represented by a model.

The RPM model is derived as an extension of prior research on diversification indexes. The strategic alignment index is mathematically defined and the properties of the model are characterized using graph theory. The approach is illustrated for two example firms.

The RPM model is flexible and can be used with different types and measures of resources, products and markets. The model represents strategy in a structural manner addressing a vertical type of alignment. The index ranges continuously from 0 to 1.0, providing a useful scale for measurement and comparison.

Practitioners may use RPM modeling to assess the current alignment of their respective firms and to identify strategic alternatives which increase alignment through a taxonomy of 13 strategic moves. The results of applying the model to ten firms are summarized.

The paper contributes to the literature by providing a new method for modeling firm strategy which integrates resource and industry views, thereby enabling a measurement of their alignment. The paper is also novel in the application of graph theory to management.