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Strategic decision importance has rarely been investigated as a decision-specific characteristic in the strategic decision-making process (SDMP) literature taking into consideration information management while taking important strategic decisions. Here, the ability of decision importance to predict decision effectiveness as an outcome of SDMPs in higher education institutions (HEIs) is examined in the context of Bahrain.

A conceptual model is developed relating decision importance to decision effectiveness indirectly via the SDMP characteristics intuition, rationality and decentralization. Data from a cross-sectional questionnaire completed by leaders of HEIs and academics involved in strategic decision-making in Bahrain are used to test the model and hypotheses via correlation analysis. The paper also considers a literature review of the use of information management while taking a strategic decision.

Decision importance is shown to positively influence decision effectiveness in Bahraini HEIs mediated by rationality and by decentralization in decision-making, although negative effects of decentralization are also demonstrated. However, decision importance does not influence decision effectiveness mediated by intuition.

Due to the small sample size, the results cannot be generalized to contexts beyond HEIs in Bahrain. Additional SDMP characteristics of significance in the context of HEIs could be future investigated, for instance, political behaviour and lateral communication, are not included in the model. Future research exploring the latter two aspects could provide deeper insight into the findings.

The findings of this paper could be considered by HEIs senior management and members of the governing body while strategic decision-making, which could be at different levels, including strategic planning or assessing a strategic decision in terms of effectiveness. This paper will also provide insight one the use of information while considering strategic decision-making.

A model leading for effective strategic decision-making could be used by leaders of HEIs and regulators including licensing bodies and QA agencies to set standards for HEIs for sustainable performance and quality education in line with United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and Initiative. Strategic decision-making will have an impact on the overall performance of HEIs and serve all relevant stakeholder’s including parents, students, employers and industry.

Little research conducted in relation to strategic decision-making in the Gulf Cooperation Council therefore, this research will add original findings and the outcome of this study will lead to future research related to SDMP and the use of information management in the overall strategic decision-making.

The American National Red Cross is in many ways the iconic symbol for disaster response and recovery. The organization, founded in 1881, has a long track record for coming to the aid of those in need in the wake of wars, natural disasters, and other crises. However, in the wake of recent disasters, the Red Cross has been criticized for underperforming. By combining the literature on bureaucracy in Austrian economics and the literature on monocentricity in the work of Vincent Ostrom and Elinor Ostrom, we provide an analysis of the Red Cross that helps explain the organization’s evolution over time and that also yields implications for disaster management more broadly. Specifically, the Red Cross is a bureaucracy that has become increasingly centralized and rigid as it has become further enmeshed with governmental responsibilities.

Will Florida’s agriculture adapt to climate change? Climate disruptions to agriculture and natural resources in Florida are projected to increase in the future. These impacts will be increasingly negative because critical thresholds are being exceeded. This chapter discusses how Florida’s agriculture and natural resources may be affected by climate change in the coming decades.

Agriculture will be affected by invasive alien species, sea-level-rise flooding, and storm surges. A warmer, drier climate will place agriculture in competition with other users for limited water resources. A serious concern for agriculture is that rising sea level will cause coastal groundwater to become more saline and groundwater levels to rise. The loss of coastal wetlands increases the risk of catastrophic damage due to extreme weather events. Degradation of soil and water assets due to increasing extremes in precipitation will challenge both rainfed and irrigated agriculture without the implementation of innovative conservation methods. High night-time temperatures can reduce grain yields and animal-sourced production. Climate change also increases the vulnerability of forests to ecosystem changes due to decreased soil moisture and increased evapotranspiration. The practical implications are that increased innovation will be needed to ensure the adaptation of agriculture and the associated socioeconomic system can keep pace with climate change. Given the difficulties in predicting our future climate, we must develop new risk-transfer innovations that will facilitate damage recovery. Changes in agricultural yields and food prices could have important implications for food security.

Austrian insights on the limits of central planning, the pervasiveness of knowledge problems, and the importance of the entrepreneur in coordinating social change have yielded substantive contributions to the literature on how individuals and communities respond to both natural and unnatural, or manmade, disasters. Austrian economists have examined the political economy of natural disasters, disaster relief and recovery efforts, the economic effects of extended wars, post-conflict societal reconstitution, and the effectiveness of humanitarian aid. This literature advances two main findings: (1) that centralized governments are likely to be ineffective at providing the goods and services that are necessary for community recovery and (2) that decentralized efforts are better suited to address the needs of society, to discover the best course of action for producing and distributing these goods and services, and to adapt to changing needs, circumstances, and technology. This paper examines the Austrian theories utilized to examine disasters, provides a summary of the recent research on both natural and unnatural disasters, and proposes areas for future research.

Climate change is a massive multidimensional shift. Temperature shifts, in particular, have important implications for urbanization, agriculture, health, productivity, and poverty, among other things. While much research has documented rising mean temperature levels, the authors also examine range-based measures of daily temperature volatility. Specifically, using data for select US cities over the past half-century, the authors compare the evolving time series dynamics of the average daily temperature (AVG) and the diurnal temperature range (DTR; the difference between the daily maximum and minimum temperatures). The authors characterize trend and seasonality in these two series using linear models with time-varying coefficients. These straightforward yet flexible approximations provide evidence of evolving DTR seasonality and stable AVG seasonality.

Climate change is emerging as an important issue increasing uncertainty in the business circle, and financial institutions through their inaction seem to be unmoved by climate change risk despite the potential for climate change events to affect the financial institutions and the financial system. In this chapter, the effect of climate change on financial institutions and the financial system are highlighted and discussed.

This paper empirically investigates the effect of the coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) on the Indian financial market and firm betas, perhaps the first paper to do so. The results will be helpful for investors tracking betas during future the coronavirus waves.

A conditional capital asset pricing model (CAPM) and multivariate generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (GARCH) model is used to estimate time-varying daily betas of the 50 largest Indian stocks spread across 16 industries over five years (Nov 2017 to May 2021), including the two waves of COVID-19 in India.

The results show that the betas increased during the COVID wave-1 (2020) but not during COVID wave-2 (2021). Moreover, the increase is more pronounced for consumer goods, infrastructure, insurance and information technology, unlike energy (oil and gas, power and mining) industries. Further, there are positive abnormal residual returns during the COVID waves. The results will be helpful for investors tracking betas during future COVID-19 waves.

This is perhaps the first paper to study the firm betas in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Climate finance is regularly not only seen as a tool to efficiently combat global warming but also to solve development problems in the recipient countries and to support the attainment of sustainable development goals. Thereby, conflicts between distributive and allocative objectives arise, which threaten the overall performance of such transfer schemes. Given the severity of the climate change problem, this study aims to raise concerns about whether the world can afford climate transfer schemes that do not focus on prevention of (and adaptation to) climate change but might be considered as a vehicle of rent-seeking by many agents.

Future designs of international transfer schemes within the framework of the Paris Agreement are to be based on experience gained from existing mechanisms. Therefore, the authors examine different existing schemes using a graphical technique first proposed by David Pearce and describe the conflicts between allocative and distributional goals that arise.

In line with the famous Tinbergen rule, the authors argue that other sustainability problems and issues of global fairness should not be primarily addressed by climate finance but should be mainly tackled by other means.

As there is still ongoing, intense discussion about how the international transfer schemes addressed in Article 6 of the Paris Agreement should be designed, the research will help to sort some of the key arguments.

There are prominent international documents (like the Paris Agreement and the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development) seeking to address different goals simultaneously. While synergies between policies is desirable, there are major challenges for policy coordination. Addressing several different goals using fewer policy instruments, for example, will not succeed as the Tinbergen Rule points out.

The integration of co-benefits in the analysis allows for taking into account the social effects of climate policy. As the authors argue, climate finance approaches could become overstrained if policymakers would consider them as tools to also solve local sustainability problems.

In this paper, the authors will not only examine what can be learnt from the clean development mechanism (CDM) for future schemes under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement but also observe the experiences gained from a non-CDM scheme. So the authors pay attention to the Trust Fund of the Global Environment Facility (GEF) which was established with global benefit orientation, i.e. – unlike the CDM – it was not regarded as an additional goal to support local sustainable development. Yet, despite its disregard of local co-benefits, the authors think that it is of particular importance to include the GEF in the analysis, as some important lessons can be learnt from it.

The recent COVID-19 has obliged governments to enact large-scale policies to contain it. A topic of economic debate is the quantification of the impact that these policies can create in the economy, with the aim of activating regulatory mechanisms to minimize this impact. In this vein, this study aims to propose a quantification of the effects of the Italian government policy that blocks nonessential production activities.

The authors use a multisectoral extended inoperability model on the social accounting matrix of Italy. The analysis identifies the pandemic’s impact on outputs, endogenous demands, value-added and disposable incomes of institutional sectors.

The construction and real estate sectors revealed a significant contraction followed by the retail trade and hotel and catering services sectors. The output contraction further impacts the value-added generation, disposable income and final demand components.

The current pandemic is alleged to have a greater impact than the epidemics of the past century, considering the present dimension of the world economy and the increasing interconnections between industries and institutions. In this scenario, it is challenging to safeguard not only human health and life but also the economy. Hence, there is a need to establish a trade-off between health and economics; and in this regard, the current study empirically quantifies the impact of health measures on the economy. The findings of this study help identify the sectors that are more prone to disaster effects and also present the structure of income circular flow in the Italian economy.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the short-run monetary policy response to five different types of natural disasters (geophysical, meteorological, hydrological, climatological and biological) with respect to developed and developing countries, respectively.

An augmented Taylor rule monetary policy model is estimated using systems generalized method of moments panel estimation over the period 2000–2018 for a panel of 40 developed and 77 developing countries, respectively.

In the case of developed countries, the greatest nominal interest rate response originates from geophysical, meteorological, hydrological and climatological disasters, whereas for developing countries the nominal interest rate response is the greatest for geophysical and meteorological disasters. For both developed and developing countries, the results suggest the monetary authorities will pursue expansionary monetary policies in the short-run to lower nominal interest rates; however, the magnitude of the monetary response varies across the type of natural disaster.

First, unlike previous studies, which focused on a specific type of natural disaster, this study examines whether the short-run monetary policy response differs across the type of natural disaster. Second, in relation to previous studies, the analysis encompasses a much larger panel data set to include 117 countries differentiated between developed and developing countries.