Search results

African countries are endowed with both human and natural resources. These resources constitute integral components for any economic development due to the long-lasting relationship with all sectors in an economy, yet there is an obvious disagreement between growing economy and employment generation in Africa. Though there has been a growing pattern of economic size, particularly the gross domestic product (GDP) among African countries, most of these economies are low in human development. The disagreement between economic growth and employment generation in Africa despite abundant natural resources located on the continent calls for public discourse among scholars. Therefore, the purpose of the study is to examine the peculiar drivers of unemployment intensity in a region characterized by endowed resources.

The paper adopts two approaches; the authors employed the pooled mean group (PMG) estimator and utilised stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) to generate a government efficiency index between the period 1991 and 2017 among sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) countries.

The empirical results through the single output-multiple inputs framework indicate that on average, there is a low level of government efficiency towards increasing the objective of human development in Africa. However, in the long run, natural resource endowment has a positive and significant relationship with employment generation for SSA. Hence, the study established that a low level of government efficiency has a long-lasting effect on low human development experienced in Africa.

The need to improve the level of government efficiency towards economic development by making both human and physical capital more effective will spur the exploration of natural resources.

The paper provides an empirical study of the effectiveness and efficiency of government through PMG and SFA in establishing the relationship between government approaches and employment level in selected SSA countries.

This article deals with the impact of ethnic origin on individual employability, focussing on the first stage of the hiring process. Deeply, the authors’ goal is to fathom whether there is a preference for native job candidates over immigrants, decomposing the discrimination against minority groups into its statistical and taste-based components by means of a new approach.

The authors built up a data set by means of an ad hoc field experiment, conducted by sending equivalent fictitious CVs in response to 1000 real online job openings in Italy. The authors developed the discrimination decomposition index using first- and second-generation immigrants.

The authors’ main result is that both first- and second-generation immigrants are discriminated compared to Italians. In between the two categories, second-generation candidates are discriminated especially if their ethnicities are morphologically different from those of natives (i.e. Chinese and Moroccans). This last finding is a clear symptom of discrimination connected to taste-based reasons. On the other hand, first-generation immigrants of all nationalities but Germans are preferred for hard-work jobs.

The authors develop the discrimination decomposition index to measure the proportion of the two kinds of discrimination (statistical and taste-based) over the total one and apply a probit model to test the statistical significance of the difference in treatment between the three groups of natives, first-generation and second-generation immigrants.

The aim of this paper is to disentangle the contemporaneous and non-contemporaneous relationship between regional business cycles and manufacturing productivity in a developing country, namely Colombia.

The methodology is quantitative. To deal with the problems of endogeneity in the production function and with the law motion of productivity (the Markov process), the authors obtain Total Factor Productivity (TFP) through the Wooldridge’s two equations system that can be jointly estimated under the generalized method of moments framework (GMM). Secondly, to avoid bias we estimate regional business cycles through the Kalman filter. Subsequently, we implement an instrumental variables/generalized method of moments regression (IV/GMM) to capture the contemporaneous and endogenous TFP–GDP cycles’ linkage at the regional level. Lastly, to deal with the non-contemporaneous link, the authors estimate a vector autoregressive model with exogenous variables (VARX) for each region. We also present the corresponding impulse–response functions.

The authors’ general results suggest a remarkable causality, both contemporary and non-contemporary, from productivity to GDP (but not vice versa) in the most developed regions of the country. This implied productivity could influence in the economic growth of regions in short and long runs. These results are different than those expected by economic theory and should be considered by local economic policy makers.

The authors consider that a more detailed analysis should be carried out at the level of each sector within the manufacturing industry to further clarify these findings.

The policy should be oriented to obtaining cutting-edge technologies through subsidies, and also should facilitate the access to financial capital and the investment in R&D laboratories. On the other hand, the link with international trade also must be reinforced because the importing of intermediate inputs and exporting of output allow the firms to obtain embodied technologies, also to incur on learning by exporting and importing processes and finally to gain experience and competitiveness in foreign markets.

The causality in the region that provides more than 50% of economic activity within the country (Third region) is only in one directional, from TFP towards gross domestic product (GDP) and not vice versa. As the influence from GDP towards TFP is minimal in the remaining regions, the manufacturing productivity influences both short and long run regional economic growth in Colombia. This implies that economic policy at the level of macro-region must be modified; the government should give additional support to the manufacturing sector, especially in developed regions and for the small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) (wich represent 92% of manufacturing firms) to increase economic growth in the future.

The authors’ contribution is threefold. First, they pay special attention to the contemporaneous cyclical relationship (i.e. pro-cyclical, counter-cyclical or acyclic) and the non-contemporaneous causality with productivity. Second, they estimate productivity with the GMM two equation system considering an endogenous Markov process. Third, to the best of their knowledge, at least in the case of Latin America, there are no studies in this direction combining these statistic methods, including that of Colombia.

This paper investigates the impact of governance on economic growth, considering the spatial dependence between countries.

The study employs spatial regression models to estimate the impact of governance on economic growth in a sample of 116 countries worldwide in 2017.

The findings imply that the influence of governance on economic growth is statistically significant. Moreover, if all other economic control variables are constant, 1% increase in governance raises the economic growth on average by 1% at 10%, 5% and 1% significance levels, respectively. Furthermore, each country's rise in economic growth favorably and substantially influences the economic growth of its bordering nations. The unobserved characteristics or similar unobserved environments in adjacent countries also affect its economic growth.

This study adds to the discussion and investigation of the influence of governance on economic growth by considering the spatial dependence between countries, which is lacking in the literature.

Chinese beer consumption has undergone major changes within the last decade. The combination of a growing middle class and greater exposure to foreign products has resulted in a significant increase in beer imports. The authors examined transformations in this market and how beer preferences have changed over time. This study focuses on changes is origin-specific preferences (e.g. German beer and Mexican beer) as reflected by habit formation (i.e. dynamic consumption patterns) and changes in demand sensitivity to expenditure and prices.

The authors estimated Chinese beer demand – differentiated by source – using a generalized dynamic demand model that accounted for habit formation and trends, as well as the immediate and long-run effects of expenditures and prices on demand. The authors employed a rolling regression procedure that allowed for model estimates to vary with time. Preference changes were inferred from the changing demand estimates, with a particular focus on changes in habit formation, expenditure allocating behaviour, and own-price responsiveness.

Results suggest that Chinese beer preferences have changed significantly over the last decade, increasing for Mexican beer, Dutch beer and Belgian beer. German beer once dominated the Chinese market. However, all indicators suggest that German beer preferences are declining.

Although China is the world's third largest beer importing country behind the United States and France. Few studies have focused on this market. While dynamic analyses of alcoholic beverage demand are not new, this is the first study to examine the dynamics of imported beer preferences in China and implications for exporting countries.

This paper aims to test the hypothesis that the effect of production slowdown on labour demand can be muted by labour hoarding.

This study adopts a production function approach, using data from Malta, a small state in the EU.

The results confirm the hypothesis and indicate that firms are normally prepared to employ and dismiss more workers in the long run than in the short run.

This finding has important implications for developed countries, including that labour hoarding can be of certain relevance in times of economic slowdown as shocks are absorbed by internal flexibility.

The results of this study add on to the existing literature in two ways. First, this study compares two industries –manufacturing and financial services– for which the former sector received support to hoard labour after the financial turmoil of 2008. Consequently, the dominance of labour hoarding in manufacturing relative to financial services is uncovered and the effect of hoarding practices on labour demand is estimated. Second, Malta is an interesting case because it is one of the smallest economies in the world and faces a high degree of vulnerability because of constraints associated with small size and insularity. As a result, firms adopt policy-induced measures to minimise adjustment costs.

The study examines the amplifying role of users in the e-healthcare sector and holistically show its current state and potential. The paper aims at contributing to the scientific literature with a comprehensive review of the current state of the art on the application of user innovation (UI) in the e-healthcare sector, as a solid step for discussing the potential, trends, managerial gaps and future research avenues in this field. Despite the crucial importance of the topic and increasing attention toward it in the last few years, there is a lack of comprehensive scrutiny on different angles of involving users in health technology innovations so far.

This study combines two methods of bibliometric analysis and extensive content analysis of 169 journal articles on Scopus and Web of Science to unfold five research questions regarding the mechanisms of involving users, innovations characteristics and the role of users throughout the innovation process.

A clear result of the applied methodology is the profiling of users involved in e-health innovations in seven categories. The results of this study shed light on the current practice of not involving users in all the stages of the innovation process of m-health, telemedicine, self-managing technologies, which is contrary to the best practices of the UI application.

Collection of relevant studies due to lack of comprehensibility of the keywords.

The offered propositions can act as a roadmap to potential research opportunities as well as to organize such innovations from a managerial perspective in particular healthcare organization managers and the middle managers operating at R&D sectors and policymakers.

This study is the first of its kind that digs out the application of UI strategies such as user-centered design in the context of e-healthcare and provides a bibliometric and extensive content analysis of the studies conducted in this theme over the years.