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Democracy can be viewed as an end state (structure) or as a process. In the 20th century, theories of the democratic structure and process (and thus the end state to be achieved and the structures necessary to achieve it) were highly contested. Some argued that only by freeing markets from state control could democracy materialize. Others argued that getting policies right would promote democracy – and a free market. A third group argued that the state was the problem, and that only by relying on civil society could democracy emerge and be maintained. We can classify differing approaches to democracy under three ideal types that drove debate and practice, depending on the sector seen as critical to the process. Stemming from 19th century theorists, three sectoral approaches were in conflict: those that stressed the market (neoliberalism), those that stressed the state (statism), and those that stressed “the people” or civil society (the populist approach).

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the capability of the hidden Markov model using Googling investors’ sentiments to predict the dynamics of Islamic indexes’ returns in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) financial markets from 2004 to 2018.

The authors propose a hidden Markov model based on the transition matrix to apprehend the relationship between investor’s sentiment and Islamic index returns. The proposed model facilitates capturing the uncertainties in Islamic market indexes and the possible effects of the dynamics of Islamic market on the persistence of these regimes or States.

The bearish state is the most persistent sentiment with the longest duration for all the MENA Islamic markets except for Jordan, Morocco and Qatar. In addition, the obtained results indicate that the effect of sentiment on predicting the future Islamic index returns is conditional on the MENA States. Besides, the estimated mean returns for each state indicates that the bullish and calm states are ideal for investing in Islamic indexes of Bahrain, Oman, Morocco, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates. However, only the bullish state is ideal for investing Islamic indexes of Jordan, Egypt and Qatar.

This paper has used data at a monthly frequency that can explain only short-term dynamics between Googling investor’s sentiment and the MENA Islamic stock market returns. Moreover, this work can be done on the stock markets while taking into account the specificity of each activity sector.

In fact, the findings of this paper are helpful for academics, analysts and practitioners, and more specifically for the Islamic MENA financial investors. Moreover, this study provides useful insights not only into the duration of the relationship between the indexes’ returns and the investors’ sentiments in the five states but also into the transition probabilities which have implications for how investors could be guided in their choice of future investment in a portfolio with Islamic indexes. Findings of this paper are important and valuable for policy-makers and investors. Thus, predicting the effect of Googling investors’ sentiment on the MENA Islamic stock market dynamics is important for portfolio diversification by domestic and international investors. Moreover, the results of this paper gave new insights into financial analysts about the dynamic relationship between Googling investors’ sentiment and Islamic stock market returns across market regimes. Therefore, the findings of this study might be useful for investors as they help them capture the unobservable dynamics of the changes in the investors’ sentiment regimes in the MENA financial markets to make successful investment decisions.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first to use the hidden Markov model to examine changes in the Islamic index return dynamics across five market sentiment states, namely the depressed sentiment (S1), the bullish sentiment (S2), the bearish sentiment (S3), the calm sentiment (S4) and the bubble sentiment (S5).

With the aim of finding a balance between social and economic benefits, the social economy has reemerged in the crisis of the welfare state. The Fordist welfare state can be characterized by state-provided welfare, the mediation of paid work and welfare by the labor market and redistributive policies. Globally, neoliberalism and the market have given rise to social exclusion; in this context, the social economy is emerging as an alternative to the market domination of societies. This paper aims to construct a conceptual framework of welfare provision in an open innovation era.

The welfare state system between the Fordist welfare state and post-Fordist welfare state is different on provision and delivery of welfare service. To construct the conceptual relation among the social economy, the state and the market and welfare provision in the social economy, this study mainly used the literature review.

Attention should be paid to civil society at the local level to ignite social economy through open social innovation. Various social actors in the local community need to change and develop the social economy with collaborative entrepreneurship and collaborative economic mindsets.

This paper presents the welfare service model led by social economy and open innovation, as well as social change. To fill the shortage of welfare provision caused by crisis of the welfare state, social economy is considered as an alternative for neo-liberalism. This study emphasizes that endogenous local development is a prerequisite for social economy as a welfare supplier.

In the social economy, reciprocity, democracy, self-help and social capital at the local level are emphasized. Also, open innovation put emphasis on collaboration economy among the local community, firms and the public sector: this emphasis can be expected to affect the welfare provision system and the social relations surrounding welfare. To address social problem and social needs, the social economy can adapt and apply the open innovation model.

The previous researches on open innovation mainly deal with the business sector and the public sector, but this paper has a focus on the relation between provision of social welfare and social innovation. The social economy is likely to function properly on the foundation of open social innovation.

This article evaluates contemporary Cuban economic policy and development prospects after a decade of market experimentation in a socialist context. An introductory historical review assesses the successes and failures of Cuban development policy in the 1970s and 1980s and describes the staggering dimensions of the economic crisis triggered by the abrupt disruption of Cuba's relations with the Soviet bloc in 1989–1991. The next section, “To the market in the 1990s,” examines Cuban efforts to stabilize the economy in the early 1990s while maintaining a strong social safety net. The historic policy shift toward limited market liberalization within a state-dominated economy is analyzed and the key market concessions described. The economic turnaround of the late 1990s and Cuban macroeconomic and industrial performance over the past decade are then examined. The final part of the article evaluates the coherence and sustainability of Cuba's emerging economic model and assesses prospects for the survival of some form of Cuban socialism.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the wide-ranging implications of the global economic crisis and provide a comprehensive assessment of the how the structure of the market and competition within it is changing as a result.

The research methodology draws on a “financialization” market construct and adapts it to include the public-private interfaces (PPIs) that have appeared since the global economic crisis.

The crisis has turned the global system on a dime. The decades-long surge of globalization, as characterized by market liberalization and ever more fast-paced investment flows, has abated and, in some cases, been dramatically reversed. It has altered the international investment paradigm. Firms have revised their risk functions and are re-arranging their stakeholder relationships.

Much needs to be done to assess the wide-ranging implications of the most recent crisis. This is just one set of “snapshots”, if you will, of the way in which market structure and competition are being altered.

The re-arrangement of stakeholder relationships of both privately owned firms and sovereign enterprises will have far-reaching effects on market structure in such areas as market access and competition, as well as on civil society, writ large.

The paper aims to explore how the undue state control leads to the weak stock market in China. It analyzes how the undue state control is exerted in some key areas in the Chinese stock market. This paper intends to expand the existing literature in the relationships among law, politics, and economy.

This paper mainly adopts the exploratory method to analyze the undue state influences. Under some circumstances, comparative study and historical explanation are also adopted.

The paper suggests that to create a strong stock market and facilitate the development of the listed companies and the whole economy, the state should first release its control on the stock market.

Various fields are contained in a stock market, in most of which the undue state control can be observed. In this paper, only some key ones are explored. Further research on other fields and if possible more first‐hand data are necessary.

This paper not only offers an answer to concerns on the various misconducts in the inefficient Chinese stock market and helps to realize the possible ways out of such dilemma, but also it offers implications for other emerging economies.

The on‐going debate on the role of common‐law versus civil‐law system in the capital market may have ignored the state involvement. This paper indicates that it is the undue state control rather than the legal system that leads to the weak stock market in China.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate changes in the commercial real estate market dynamics as a function of and conditional to the shifts in market state-space environment that can influence agent responses.

The analytical design uses a comparative computational experiment to address the performance of property assets in the current market based on comparison with prior structural patterns. The latent variables developed across market sectors are used to test agent behavior contingent on the perspectives of capital asset pricing conditionals (CAPM) and a behavioral momentum/herd construct. The state-space momentum analysis can assist the comparative analysis of current levels and shifts in property asset performance given the issues that have arisen with the financial crisis of 2007-2009.

An analytic approach is employed framed by a situation-dependent model. This frame considers risk profiles characterizing the perspectives and preferences guiding a delineated market state. This perspective is concerned with the possibility of shifts in market momentum and representativeness conditioning investor expectations. It is observed that the current market (post-crisis) has changed significantly from the prior operations (despite the diversity observed in prior market states). The dynamics of initial findings required an additional test anchored to the performance of the general capital market and the real economy across time. This context supports the use of a modified CAPM model allowing the consideration of opportunity cost in a space-time dynamic anchored with the consideration of equity, debt, riskless asset and liquidity options as they varied for the representative agents operating per market state.

This paper integrates neoclassical and behavioral economic constructs. Combines asset pricing with prospect theory and allows the calculation of endogenous time-preferences, risk attitudes and formulation and testing of hyperbolic discounting functions.

The research shows that market structure and agent behavior since the financial crisis has changed from the investment and valuation perspectives operating as observed and measured from 1970 up to 2007. In contradiction to the long-term findings of Reinhart and Rogoff (2008), but in compliance with common perspectives and decision heuristics often employed by investors, this time things have changed! Discounting and expected rates of return are dynamic and are hyperbolic and not constant. Returns and investment for property assets are situational (market state-space specific) and offer a distinct asset class, not appropriately estimated by many of the traditional financial models.

Assist in supporting insights to measure in errors and equations that result in inefficient resource allocation and beta discounting that supports the financial crisis created by assets subject to long-term decision needs (delta function).

The paper offers a combination and comparison of neoclassic asset pricing using a modified CAPM (two-pass) approach within the structural frame of Kahneman and Tversky’s (1979) prospect theory. This technique allows the consideration of the effects of present bias, beta-delta functions and the operation of the Allais Paradox in market states that are characterized by gains and losses and thus risk aversion and risk seeking behavior. This ability for differentiation allows for the development of endogenous time-preferences and hyperbolic discounting factors characteristic of commercial property investment.

The authors examine cryptocurrency market behavior using a hidden Markov model (HMM). Under the assumption that the cryptocurrency market has unobserved heterogeneity, an HMM allows us to study (1) the extent to which cryptocurrency markets shift due to interactions with social sentiment during a bull or bear market and (2) the heterogeneous pattern of cryptocurrency market behavior under these two market conditions.

The authors advance the HMM model based on two six-month datasets (from November 2017 to April 2018 for a bull market and from December 2018 to May 2019 for a bear market) collected from Google, Twitter, the stock market and cryptocurrency trading platforms in South Korea. Social sentiment data were collected by crawling Bitcoin-related posts on Twitter.

The authors highlight the reaction of the cryptocurrency market to social sentiment under a bull and a bear market and in two hidden states (an upward and a downward trend). They find: (1) social sentiment is relatively relevant during a bull compared to a bear market. (2) The cryptocurrency market in a downward state, that is, with a local decreasing trend, tends to be more responsive to positive social sentiment. (3) The market in an upward state, that is, with a local increasing trend, tends to better interact with negative social sentiment.

The proposed HMM model contributes to a theoretically grounded understanding of how cryptocurrency markets respond to social sentiment in bull and bear markets through varied sequences adjusted for cryptocurrency market heterogeneity.

While the momentum anomaly is prevalent in South Africa, few have examined the reasons influencing it. This study examines whether momentum profits vary through time and are affected by the state of the market and market volatility between 1998 and 2019.

The authors consider combinations of portfolio construction, such as the lookback period, weighting scheme, measure of volatility and the volatility window period. They further examine the interaction of momentum with sentiment, default risk and semi-deviation as a measure of risk, as a means of testing whether behavioural factors have significant influence.

The results generally show that neither volatility nor market state has explanatory power on momentum profits.

These results make the momentum anomaly in South Africa an even greater mystery than before as they do not conform to the existing literature from developed economies. The authors do, however, find that default risk is a significant predictor of momentum profits, which is a useful additional factor for those fund managers who utilise momentum strategies. This implies that a fundamental factor, default risk, is a potential explanation for the market-related momentum anomaly.

Throughout the history of commerce, individuals have searched for informational advantages that will lead to their enrichment. In a time of global capital markets, 24 hours a day trading opportunities, and a professional services corps of market experts, informational advantages are pursued by virtually every market participant. This paper examines one of the most vilified informational advantages in modern capital markets: insider trading. In the USA during the 1980s, insider trading scandals occupied the front pages of not only the trade papers, but also quotidian tabloids. Assailed for its unfairness and characterised by some as thievery, insider trading incidents increased calls for stricter regulation of the marketplace and its participants. In the aftermath of the spectacular insider trading litigation in the USA in the late 1980s, many foreign states began to re‐evaluate the effectiveness of their own regulatory structures. In large part, this reassessment was not the produce of domestic demand, but constituted a response to American agitation for increased regulation of insider trading.