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This study aims to explore how student recruitment practitioners at regional Australian universities strategise student recruitment efforts in Thailand. There is scarce research addressing regional universities, with prior studies focusing on metropolitan universities. Similarly, most prior studies have focused on high-volume markets, with little research exploring emerging markets such as Thailand.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with student recruitment practitioners from regional universities that were responsible for recruiting Thai students. Thematic analysis was conducted to identify key themes.

Regional universities lack strategic ambidexterity in their approach to recruiting international students. They viewed Thailand as requiring longer term investment and were unwilling to dedicate their limited resources towards developing this market at the expense of other markets that would yield enrolments to contribute towards short-term targets.

Implications are provided with relevance to the student recruitment practitioner, with strategic ambidexterity discussed.

The paper fills a gap in the research by exploring international student recruitment and contextualising both regional universities and Thailand as a recruitment market. This study provides useful considerations that may be relevant to other emerging markets.

The study explores how the intention to export affects financing and non-financing variables for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in a low-income country (LIC). The objectives of this study are (1) to discern between regional and global exporting and (2) to evaluate its policymaking implications.

Primary survey data were collected from 330 Rwandan SMEs and were analysed using ordered logistic models as an application of the expectation-maximisation iterating algorithm, which was tested for robustness using a sampling model variation.

The results show that alternative sources of finance are the predominant choice to finance the intention to export within and outside Africa. As the scope of export intentions broadened from regional to global, there was a shift in preferences from less formal to more formal lending technologies, moving from methods like factoring to lines of credit. Moreover, reliance on bank officers became more significant, with increasing marginal effects. Finally, the study determined that government financing schemes were not relevant for SMEs pursuing either regional or global exporting.

Whilst alternative sources of finance predominate the export intentions of Rwandan SMEs, establishing a robust banking relationship becomes crucial for global exporting. Despite this implication, the intention to export should prompt more transparent communication regarding government financial support programmes. There is an opportunity for increased usage of relationship lending to customise support for SMEs involved in exporting, benefiting both the private and public sectors.

This study accentuates how export distance alters SME financing priorities. The results also contribute to understanding how the value of relationship lending changes when less familiar markets (i.e. global exporting) are the objective. Moreover, the study offers a new perspective on how institutional voids affect entrepreneurial financing decisions in LICs.

This paper aims to examine the COVID-19 pandemic’s impacts on the regional progression toward the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through the lens of the adoption of 2030 Agenda by firms from different Italian regions.

Mixed methods were adopted. First, a content analysis was performed on 330 nonfinancial declarations released in the 2019–2021 period by a sample of 110 Italian listed companies from different regional macroareas. Second, regression analyses were run to test the impact of regional localization of businesses on SDGs adoption over pre-/during/post-COVID era.

The regional localization of businesses does not affect the SDGs adoption in the pre-COVID-19 era because Italian firms mainly address social goals. Instead, SDGs adoption is affected by regional localization of businesses both during and post-COVID-19 age, when Northern firms prioritize economic and social goals, whereas Southern firms shift from social to environmental goals.

This study fills the need of considering the subnational specificities in literature on sustainable development by capturing connections between firms, belonging territory, SDGs and COVID-19 crisis.

The aim of this paper is to discuss a selection of policy strategies, regional initiatives and market approaches to uncover the realities of twenty-first-century building energy performance. A position that market-based approaches, human influence and policy interventions are part of an ecosystem of building energy performance is presented.

An exploratory search of secondary sources spanning the last three decades was conducted. Both peer-reviewed and grey literature were included to capture a broader understanding of the discourse in literature. Research questions guided the literature search, and a data extraction tool was designed to categorise the literature. The primary limitation of this study is that only a few applications could be discussed in a condensed format.

Several challenges about the current status quo of building energy performance were identified and summarised as follows. (1) Inconsistencies in measurement and verification protocols, (2) Impacts of market approaches, (3) National policy priorities that are at variance with regional targets and (4) Ambiguous reporting on environmental impacts of energy efficiency (EE) technologies.

The practical implications of the findings in this paper for practice and research are that as part of the building energy performance ecosystem, national responses through government interventions must become adaptive to keep up with the fast-paced energy sector and social trends. Simultaneously, before market-based approaches overcome the messiness of socio-economic dynamics, institutional conditions and cultural nuances, they ought to transparently address environmental impacts and the infringement of several SDGs before they can become viable solutions to building energy performance.

This paper presents building energy performance as an ecosystem comprising human influence, market-based approaches and policy interventions which form interdependent parts of the whole. However, evidence in the literature shows that these aspects are usually investigated separately. By presenting them as an ecosystem, this paper contributes to the discourse by advocating the need to re-align building energy performance to socio-economic-political dynamics and contextually viable solutions.

In today's complex and rapidly changing business environment, cross-boundary growth is increasingly critical to the survival or even success of organizations. The purpose of this study is to examine the forming mechanism of firm’s cross-boundary growth by integrating the two important antecedent factors of performance pressure and managerial discretion into a united framework and theoretically analyze the direct role of performance pressure on firm’s cross-boundary growth as well as reveal the moderating role of managerial discretion. Also, the authors select listed manufacturing companies in China as samples to empirically test the research hypotheses.

The authors design a multiple regression model to perform empirical analysis by using a panel of 4,002 year-observations in 1,334 listed manufacturing companies between 2013 and 2016. The sample data sources mainly come from the Wind Database, which is mainland China's leading financial database and software services provider. The hypotheses proposed are tested by adopting a panel data set of the listed manufacturing companies of China.

Empirical results show that performance pressure has a positive effect on the cross-industry growth and cross-domestic regional growth but a negative effect on the cross-international regional growth, and managerial discretion has a different moderating effect. Specifically, capital intensity strengthens the positive effect of performance pressure on cross-industry growth but weakens the negative effect of performance pressure on cross-international regional growth. State ownership enhances the positive effect of performance pressure on cross-domestic regional growth but decreases the negative effect of performance pressure on cross-international regional growth. CEO duality increases the negative impact of performance pressure on cross-international regional growth.

This study provides several implications for top executives, including how to dialectically consider the double-edged effect of performance pressure on cross-boundary growth of firms, create an appropriate environments of managerial discretion and design the types of cross-boundary growth strategies that top executives can follow in the volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity era.

Although the relevant literature highlights the importance of performance pressure, it has not been related to the cross-boundary growth of firms. This paper makes an incremental contribution to the literature on the forming mechanisms of firm’s cross-boundary growth by providing an important perspective of performance pressure to firm growth determinants and taking into account the moderating role of managerial discretion.

The circular economy (CE) has been endorsed as representing a model that is able to achieve environmental protection through decreased use of raw materials, together with changing economic values and social inclusion thanks to its demand for a wide variety of skill profiles. This has motivated many policy initiatives to support the implementation of the CE. The purpose of this study is to follow such policy initiatives in three geographically anchored industry-specific networks.

The study contributes to the research debate on the CE through a spatial approach with a focus on how the implementation of the CE is conditioned by spatial and regional contexts. The authors investigate three different networks in Sweden for CE with different locations and industrial profiles.

The findings reveal the difficulty that exist in relation to the implementation of the CE. The network and support functions in combination with private industry are vital. The risk of sustaining an uneven regional economic development is evident.

Although research on the development of the CE has proliferated, geographical approaches to this development are comparably rare to date. The authors seek to contextualise the strategy development and policy implementation of a CE policy.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the historical trends and status of the national development of artificial intelligence (AI) from a nationwide perspective and to enable governments at different administrative levels to promote AI development through policymaking.

This paper analyzed 248 Chinese AI policies (36 issued by the state agencies and 212 by the regional agencies). Policy bibliometrics, policy instruments and network analysis were used to reveal the AI policy patterns. Three aspects were analyzed: the spatiotemporal distribution of issued policies, the policy foci and instruments of policy contents and the cooperation and citation among policy-issuing agencies.

Results indicate that Chinese AI development is still in the initial phase. During the policymaking processes, the state and regional policy foci have strong consistency; however, the coordination among state and regional agencies is supposed to be strengthened. According to the issuing time of AI policies, Chinese AI development is in accordance with the global situation and has witnessed unprecedented growth in the last five years. And the coastal provinces have issued more targeted policies than the middle and western provinces. Governments at the state and regional levels have emphasized familiar policy foci and played the role of policymakers, along with regional governments that also functioned as policy executors as well. According to the three-dimension instruments coding, the authors found an uneven structure of policy instruments at both levels. Furthermore, weak cooperation appears at the state level, while little cooperation is found among regional agencies. Regional governments cite state policies, thus leading to the formation of top-down diffusion, lacking bottom-up diffusion.

The paper contributes to the literature by characterizing policy patterns from both external attributes and semantic contents, thus revealing features of policy distribution, contents and agencies. What is more, this research analyzes Chinese AI policies from a nationwide perspective, which contributes to clarifying the overall status and multi-level relationships of policies. The findings also benefit the coordinated development of governments during further policymaking processes.

This study reveals the economic impact of the Indo-Pacific Strategy on the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP).

This paper uses the GTAP model to analyze the economic effects of RCEP under the effect of the “Indo-Pacific Strategy” under different scenarios.

The results show that (1) with the improvement of the implementation effect of the US “Indo-Pacific Strategy,” the welfare level of China has gradually had a significant negative impact, while the welfare level of US Allies and partners has been further improved. (2) The implementation of the Indo-Pacific Strategy will further expand the import scale of Japan, South Korea and other Allies that are both RCEP members and the USA and slightly reduce the import scale of the European Union (EU) and other countries. (3) After the USA implemented the “Indo-Pacific Strategy,” its export scale has significantly improved, and it has been able to completely offset the adverse effects of the signing of RCEP on its exports. China's export scale has also gradually declined, and Japan has benefited the most.

There are three main possible contributions to this article: first, the authors combined geopolitical factors to simulate and evaluate the economic effects of RCEP under different Indo-Pacific Strategy implementation scenarios, which is more relevant than analyzing the economic effects of RCEP in a “vacuum.” Second, the standard static GTAP model can only measure the change of equilibrium state before and after the trade policy. At the same time, the dynamic GTAP model (GTAP-Dyn) introduces mechanisms such as capital flow and capital accumulation and treats time as a continuous variable affected by exogenous variables so that each variable has a time dimension so as better to simulate the medium- and long-term economic effects. This paper refers to the dynamic recursion method of Walmsley (2006) and Yang (2011) to update the base year of the GTAP version 10.0 database to 2020, that is the time when RCEP officially reached 2020. The simulation results of shock variables introduced into the baseline scenario are more reliable. Third, the authors analyze the welfare effect of RCEP and the impact on the import and export of relevant countries from the macrolevel and examine the impact on different products in different countries from the microlevel.

This study analyzes the role of regional cooperative banks in identifying and financing small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) from a proximity perspective. Access to finance is a major challenge for SMEs. Regional cooperative banks can remove this barrier based on cooperative bank's characteristics and geographic proximity to SMEs. Understanding the interplay between these financial actors and firms can contribute to a better support of SMEs development.

The results are based on a case study of eight SMEs located in southwestern France. Interviews were conducted with two regional cooperative funds and eight SMEs. The interview guide included questions related to the company, the projects financed and how financing was accessed.

Results reveal that a combination of three forms of proximity allows regional cooperative banks and SMEs to establish effective financing operations. They show that regional cooperative banks are key players in the existing financing mechanisms for SMEs. Such financing is often used to gain access to larger players at a later stage. The findings suggest the need for public policies that promote the integration of financing actors in regional ecosystems to advance SMEs' development.

This article examines how SMEs access financing, with a focus on regional cooperative banks, which have received little attention in the literature. Moreover, the relationships between these actors are studied through the lens of proximity. Regional cooperative banks are able to finance projects that may have been overlooked by traditional banks due to trust-building local dynamics.

This article focuses on regional-level cooperation in higher education by examining the functional, organizational and political approaches (FOPA) framework for higher education regionalization and using supra-national regional universities as established and successful examples of regional-level higher education cooperation among countries.

A conceptual framework is used to provide the structure for analyzing the key approaches to higher education regionalization, followed by an analysis of supra-national regional universities to demonstrate the application of the model.

The FOPA framework for higher education regionalization includes three approaches. The first is the functional approach, which includes both collaborative academic and research activities among higher education institutions as well strategies and policies to help align systems across a region. The second is the organizational approach, which focuses on networks, organizations, institutions and programs, which facilitate partnerships. The third is the political approach, which includes regional-level agreements, declarations and strategic plans to promote higher education collaboration. Key higher education activities for each approach are discussed in generic terms, with examples provided from major regions of the world.

The research was based on desk research only. No interviews were conducted.

A conceptual analysis and a model were provided for the concept of regionalization of higher education and for regional universities, which can help readers locate their interests and research in the regionalization of higher education. Examples of three different types of regional universities were provided to give concrete illustrations of a regional university.

One of the rationales driving regional universities is to address and increase a sense of regional identify and to meet the social, economic and educational needs of the specified region.

Regional universities, such as the University of West Indies, Arab Open University and the Pan-Africa University, are an understudied phenomenon. Using them as innovative and sustainable examples of higher education regional cooperation and the FOPA model, this study illustrates how single-campus, multiple-campus and virtual regional universities are functioning to meet the diversified needs and priorities across a region through cooperation among countries.