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The purpose of this paper is threefold. The paper aims to explore and present empirical evidence of microeconomical perspective of credit rationing phenomenon with special emphasis on the small and medium‐sized enterprise (SME) sector in the Republic of Croatia. In addition, the intention of this paper is to discuss SMEs' (ir)relevance in economic recovery and growth. Thus, macroeconomical implications of credit rationing problem are indirectly underlined.

Empirical analysis of credit rationing in the corporate bank loan market was carried out on a sample from the Croatian financial market which included data on approximately 4,300 small, medium‐sized and large companies in the period from the end of 2008 to the first quarter of 2010. Multiple linear regression model was developed in order to examine enterprise's size and borrowing costs nexus as well as borrowing costs' determinants. Descriptive statistics provided certain evidence on magnitude of credit rationing and pointed out different levels of interest rates after which credit rationing and credit discouraging appears for various sizes of enterprises.

In comparison to the large enterprises, SMEs continuously encounter higher borrowing costs, upon which this discrepancy enlarges in the aftermath and presence of financial crisis. Credit spread which is used as a proxy of borrowing costs is statistically significantly determined with enterprise's size, collateral and internal credit rating of a borrower, whereas enterprise's size evidenced the highest explanatory power. Descriptive statistics showed that market cleaning of the SMEs credit applications evolves on the level of higher interest rates.

The paper recommends thorough reexamination of economic importance of SMEs in Croatia and calls upon more efficient support strategy and fund allocation. Precisely, government actions should stimulate more inclusive bank finance of creditworthy SMEs.

This paper should induce and actualize better understanding of pitfalls, blunders and potentials of SMEs in fostering economic growth. More specifically, conclusions should be helpful to policy makers, national prudential authorities and students of economics.

Inclusion of borrowing costs in the analysis that presents a cut‐off point of demand and supply driven credit rationing could be a useful method for future empirical research on credit rationing.

Although several microeconomic and macroeconomic factors driving banks' credit quality have been well-studied in the literature, one aspect which appears to have received limited attention is bankruptcy reforms. To address this issue, the author exploits data on Middle East and North Africa (MENA) country banks during the period 2010–2020 and examines the impact of bankruptcy laws on their credit quality.

In view of the staggered nature of the implementation of legal reforms across countries, the author utilize a difference-in-differences specification to tease out the causal impact.

The findings reveal that bankruptcy reforms lead to a significant improvement in banks' credit quality. The impact is manifest mainly for conventional banks and driven by an increase in recovery intensity. The author also presents evidence which shows that such reforms exert positive real effects, although this impact differs across country characteristics.

The study is among the early ones for the MENA region to assess the interlinkage between bankruptcy reforms and banks' credit quality.

Purpose – Entrepreneurship development has become a goal of many countries to achieve economic development. Islamic economics is concerned with marketing, trading, business and entrepreneurship activities. This chapter examines the role of entrepreneurship development in Islamic economics.

Methodology/approach – This chapter is purely theoretical in nature. Thus, the Glorious Qur’an, Hadith and other related documents are its major sources.

Findings – The discussion reveals that entrepreneurship development has the potential to promote economic growth and development, employment, self-reliance and national growth. The discussion identifies a lack of capital and financial support as a principal obstacle to the development of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurs. This chapter further reveals that the success of entrepreneurship development and other commercial activities requires organisation in terms of coordination, networking and sharing of resources, as well as cooperation between government, public sector, private sector and enterprise.

Originality/value –The chapter is original in its form and arrangement having emerged as a novel attempt and the first of its kind. The chapter has a pearl of value to the Islamic economists, entrepreneurs, academic circle, and all those who may consider it relevant for application in their desirable business and cherish the value of its standing.

This chapter reviews the existing empirical evidence on how social insurance affects health. Social insurance encompasses programs primarily designed to insure against health risks, such as health insurance, sick leave insurance, accident insurance, long-term care insurance, and disability insurance as well as other programs, such as unemployment insurance, pension insurance, and country-specific social insurance programs. These insurance systems exist in almost all developed countries around the world. This chapter discusses the state-of-the art evidence on each of these social insurance systems, briefly reviews the empirical methods for identifying causal effects, and examines possible limitations to these methods. The findings reveal robust and rich evidence on first-stage behavioral responses (“moral hazard”) to changes in insurance coverage. Surprisingly, evidence on how changes in coverage impact beneficiaries’ health is scant and inconclusive. This lack of identified causal health effects is directly related to limitations on how human health is typically measured, limitations on the empirical approaches, and a paucity of administrative panel data spanning long-time horizons. Future research must be conducted to fill these gaps. Of particular importance is evidence on how these social insurance systems interact and affect human health over the life cycle.

This paper critically reviews economic impact assessment methods adopted in construction-related projects, to develop and present a novel bottom-up approach suitable to estimate regional economic impacts of building maintenance projects.

A thorough literature review of economic impact assessment in construction projects is carried out to identify the most relevant approach to estimate wider economic impacts of building maintenance projects. Based on these findings, a model based on the bottom-up approach to estimate wider economic impacts is developed. The applicability and face validity of the developed model is demonstrated through a case of cladding replacement program in Australia.

The literature review revealed that bottom-up models are better suited for estimating regional economic impacts of maintenance projects, given the challenges of obtaining micro-level economic data in the maintenance sector. In relation to the total economic impacts (direct and indirect), the results show that for every $1 of government spending on similar projects the Gross State Product would increase by $1.34. In terms of employment impact, over 70% of the direct economic value addition is driven by the increase in labour, where close to 3 FTE jobs will be required for each $1 million of spending on cladding replacement projects.

This paper presents a model to estimate the wider economic impacts of building maintenance projects, which is typically overlooked in the construction management field. The proposed model is developed to incorporate the variability of different building maintenance projects so that the economic impact resulting from these projects could be estimated more accurately. This model can be used by local government decision-makers to justify and prioritise maintenance projects in a similar manner to new construction projects.

This paper aims to investigate the innovation pathway of gerontechnological enterprises under the market-organization-technology (MOT) perspective through configuration analysis.

Based on the analytical framework of technology, organization and market, this paper conducts configuration analysis on the cases of 55 elderly-friendly enterprises in China combined with fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA).

First, this study identifies the three first-level preconditions affecting innovation performance: organization's architectural innovation, technology adapting to aging and market environment attention on the innovation pathway of gerontechnological enterprises. These three first-level conditions include six sub-conditions. Second, this study investigates three innovation pathways by analyzing the configuration effects of preconditions: Configuration 1, technology-balanced type; Configuration 2, organization-market linkage type and Configuration, 3 balanced type. Third, there are differences in the distribution of different configuration types in subdivided industries. The technology-balanced configuration is mainly concentrated in design-driven innovative enterprises, the organization-market linkage configuration is mainly concentrated in medical auxiliary equipment enterprises and the balanced configuration is mainly concentrated in smart elderly care service platform enterprises empowered by digital technology. Fourth, there are differences in the innovation impact paths of the same configuration type. However, the essence lies in the high-level innovation performance formed by the coordinated evolution of technology, organization and market factors, reflecting the characteristics of the same goal through different routes.

The authors' study generates new insights for innovation managers of gerontechnological enterprises about the innovation pathway.

This research enriches innovation management by integrating the linkage adaptation relationship among market, organization and technology factors; further research studies on the different configuration types suitable for different types of enterprises, as well as differentiated innovation pathways under the same configuration type, could contribute to the study on the innovation pathway under a premise of MOT.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the application of a hermeneutic-based approach as innovative way to study the Cultural Heritage management in a mesoeconomic space.

The paper builds a theoretical framework based on the analysis of relevant literature in the field of cultural economics, heritage economics and conservation and restoration techniques. Then, after having defined the conceptual hypothesis, a hermeneutical interpretative model is designed for the analysis of the processes of Cultural Heritage management with particular regard to the strategies of stakeholder engagement.

The research shows how the mesoeconomic space is that border area where it is possible to solve more easily the conflicts that arise as a result of the different expectations of stakeholders. Hermeneutical analysis, applied in iterative form, allows us to find common connections, points of contact and convergences between the interpretative horizons of the various stakeholders.

The application of the interpretative model allows the identification of the expectations of stakeholders, improving the knowledge of the tangible and intangible attributes of works of art, in order to design appropriate interventions of restoration, conservation and valorization.

The new model of analysis, based on hermeneutic methodology, is designed to understand and describe the social and economic relations between the different stakeholders involved in the management of Cultural Heritage.

This paper examines for the first time the Cultural Heritage sector within the mesoeconomic area between the micro and the macroeconomy. In addition to this mesoeconomic analysis and conceptual approach, the authors introduce as methodology the economic hermeneutics that represents an innovative tool in the field of economic and business disciplines.

In the real estate industry, as well as in other mature markets, producers seek to improve their comparative advantage by correctly addressing the needs and expectations of future users; when projects involve public financial investment (e.g. public/private partnerships), such participation may help to legitimate resource allocation. In this respect few quantitative approaches, affiliated to the study of demand, are able to evaluate the trade‐off that is given between the preferences of individuals when they are faced to choose a single alternative, as is usual in real estate and urban projects. The purpose of this paper is to report the initial results of a research study with the objective of investigating the extent to which techniques used in the design of goods and services could be used to consider future users' preferences on the design processes of real estate developments, such as those promoted by public‐private partnerships in which the inclusion of people's opinion become central for commercial and political reasons.

This article seeks to evaluate the extent to which conjoint analysis, a technique affiliated with designing goods and services through future user/consumer participation, may be used as a support tool in making real estate decisions. This method, born out of the field of marketing analysis, is based on choice experiments and the results are analyzed with conventional multinomial regression models, and can be rooted in “characteristics theory of value” and “behaviorism”.

The results suggest that although this method is helpful in finding the relative relevance of each of the attributes in the projects evaluated, it is not sufficiently clear to: determine the attributes to evaluate; understand the deep reasons motivating preferences; or anticipate future needs that go unnoticed by potential users/buyers in their everyday perceptions. Therefore, this technique is far superior to typical evaluation surveys on independent attributes. However, it is insufficient in the context of intrinsically complex processes.

Although intensively used in the design of short‐life consumption services and products, conjoint analysis has been scarcely used on long‐life goods such as urban premises; in this article this technique is used for first time in the framework of a type of public/private brownfield redevelopment project in Catalonia.

Methodological pluralism in consumer research is usually confined to post‐positivist interpretive approaches. Argues, however, that a positivistic stance, radical behaviourism, can enrich epistemological debate among researchers with the recognition of radical behaviourism′s ultimate reliance on interpretation as well as science. Although radical behaviourist explanation was initially founded on Machian positivism, its account of complex social behaviours such as purchase and consumption is necessarily interpretive, inviting comparison with the hermeneutical approaches currently emerging in consumer research. Radical behaviourist interpretation attributes meaning to behaviour by identifying its environmental determinants, especially the learning history of the individual in relation to the consequences similar prior behaviour has effected. The nature of such interpretation is demonstrated for purchase and consumption responses by means of a critique of radical behaviourism as applied to complex human activity. In the process, develops and applies a framework for radical behaviourist interpretation of purchase and consumption to four operant equifinality classes of consumer behaviour: accomplishment, pleasure, accumulation and maintenance. Some epistemological implications of this framework, the behavioural perspective model (BPM) of purchase and consumption, are discussed in the context of the relativity and incommensurability of research paradigms. Finally, evaluates the interpretive approach, particularly in terms of its relevance to the nature and understanding of managerial marketing.