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This collection of original papers had its origin in a series of annual meetings of the National Association of Forensic Economics (NAFE) held in Great Britain, Ireland, Italy, and the United States from 2004 to 2008.¹ NAFE sponsored these meetings to explore common research areas in the calculation of damages in personal injury and death litigation in Western Europe and the United States. NAFE was founded in 1986 and is the largest association of economists and other damages experts specializing in the calculation of economic damages in litigation in the United States and Canada. The Journal of Forensic Economics (JFE) is the journal of NAFE and has been the primary outlet of peer-reviewed research in forensic economics over the past 22 years. The field of forensic economics has generated a substantial literature on methodologies and empirical research in the calculation of damages in personal injury, death, employment, and commercial litigation; and the use of that literature in the United States and Canadian courts by economists, Certified Public Accounts (CPAs), and actuaries has become commonplace in the past two decades (Thornton & Ward, 1999).²

The approach to the determination of damages for loss of future earnings in Britain is by means of a simple formula in which an annual loss (the multiplicand) is multiplied by a discounted work life expectancy (WLE – the multiplier) to produce a lump sum, the capitalised value of which is intended to provide an ‘assumed annuity’ equivalent to the annual loss. The discounted WLE is calculated with reference to actuarially determined figures which are published in the Ogden Tables. The Ogden Tables provide a set of statistical tables with explanatory notes for use in personal injury and fatal accident cases. These tables are collated by an inter-disciplinary working party comprising lawyers, accountants and actuaries, including the Government Actuary. Their purpose is to provide lawyers in England and Wales with the information that will enable them to undertake the calculation of a future pecuniary loss without recourse to evidence from financial experts. As such it is a requirement that the tables and procedures be readily comprehensible to lawyers.¹

It is a common feature of both the English and the US legal systems that any person injured through the fault of another can claim monetary compensation, in the form of damages, for the injuries sustained.¹ The objective and measure of such damages is also the same across the jurisdictions, namely to restore the individual, in financial terms and in as far as it is possible to do so, to their pre-injury position. However, the approaches adopted in the two countries towards determining the level of damages are very different. In the United States, courts make extensive use of economists (called forensic economists), economic data and econometric methods to quantify damages, particularly in the calculation of those which relate to future losses. The courts in Britain do not, favouring instead the routine application of a simplified formula which is populated by figures chosen by judges, albeit with increasing reference to published actuarial averages. There has been a long-standing antipathy on the part of the judiciary towards evidence from financial experts. This has been justified on the grounds that predicting the future is nothing more than crystal ball gazing for which a judge is as well suited as any other profession.²

The traditional method of compensation for a future continuing loss in UK tort law has always been by means of a lump-sum payment.¹ The lump sum is calculated by means of a simple formula in which a net annual sum (the multiplicand) is multiplied by a factor (the multiplier) that takes into account early receipt by a rate of discount periodically set by the Lord Chancellor (at 2.5 percent since June 2001). The resulting sum provides a ‘rough and ready’ estimate of the capital sum that, if invested to achieve a real net rate of return of 2.5 percent, will fund the estimated annual loss over the expected period of that loss. The operation of this formula in the calculation of damages for loss of future earnings was demonstrated in previous chapters (4) and (5) of this volume.

Gary R. Albrecht, Ph.D., North Carolina is an economist at Albrecht Economics located in Winston-Salem. He specializes in economic forecasting and forensic economics. He has been an Assistant and Adjunct Associate Professor at Wake Forest University, and he was the Director of Econometric Modeling at the University of Kansas. He is a past vice president of the National Association of Forensic Economics. His research has been published in the Journal of Forensic Economics, Journal of Legal Economics, Trial Briefs, and The Earnings Analyst, in addition to his authoring various economic research reports and book chapters. He holds a Ph.D. degree in Economics from Indiana University.

Purpose: This study links SDG goal 9 of industry, innovation strategies and another infrastructural environment to branding relating to destination and interactive marketing. Digital marketing tools with various applications aim to offer hi-tech services to customers in interactive marketing services, namely multiple goods and services, data and innovative techniques in the tourism and travel sector. Exploring the study would add to the existing literature supporting interactive marketing procedures and destination branding. Branding relating to destinations fosters tourists around the globe facilitating economic growth and development and supporting the local economies.

Need for the Study: It is observed from the literature that very few studies have been identified across the globe from various researchers on the interactive marketing and destination branding that ensures brand loyalty and reassesses the intent of the tourists just before the epidemic pandemic in the form of COVID-19. Artificial Intelligence, as part of information technology, offers various interactive marketing services in the form of different social media marketing strategies, attractive websites for tourists and travel providers and image building on destination branding. This study would help fill the marketing gap, which results in branding relating to destination, brand loyalty and reassessing the intent of various tours and travel plans just before the pandemic.

Methodology: The study focused on the literature, demonstrating the stimulus organism methodology and examining the impact of potential marketing strategy, which is interactive focusing on the destination branding, loyalty relating to the brand and also procedures to revert with the intent that would motivate and facilitate the customer’s confidence showering the loyalty relating to the brand in the travel and tourism sector.

Findings and their Practical Implications: The study revealed that the marketing relating to interactive methodologies in the hi-tech digital approaches ought to be carried out to create opportunities for prospective tourists willing to get information about various tourists destinations with the help of various marketing techniques such as different social media applications, easy access of websites for accessing the tourist destinations and relevant information, accessing images pertinent to the tourism destinations with the ease of chat box and providing suitable audios and video sources to the potential customers.

The purpose of this study is to analyze and compare the level of professionalization of the real estate broker's occupation in Victoria, Australia, and Sweden. As previous studies have indicated that the real estate agent occupation in both regions is experiencing low levels of trust, an analysis of the level of professionalization is warranted.

The data used in the analysis in this paper have been gathered from a number of different high-quality sources. In Sweden, information has been obtained from the Swedish Real Estate Agents Inspectorate, the Association of Swedish Real Estate Agents and the Swedish Real Estate Agents Association, and Real Estate Statistics. For the Victorian case, information has been obtained from the Real Estate Institute of Victoria, which is the leading professional body in organizing real estate agents. Furthermore, information has also been sourced from the Business Licensing Authority as well as Consumer Affairs Victoria. The focus of the analysis has been on the institutional changes of the real estate profession, including the education required to become an agent, the legislation and supervision of real estate agents and the role of the professional bodies that organize the real estate agents. 10;

The analysis shows that both the real estate brokerage market in Victoria and Sweden could be characterized as mature. Using the definition of a profession from Millerson (1964), the authors conclude that the brokerage industry has a number of the characteristics of a profession such as a long albeit interdisciplinary education, strong professional bodies, code of conduct and some level of self-regulation.

This research examines two countries, both considered mature in their house market process. Findings may be very different if the research methodology was applied to house markets that do not exhibit the same level of regulatory control.

Even though the real estate occupation can be considered as a semi-profession, there is still room for improvement when it comes to how consumers perceive the trustworthiness of real estate agents. Therefore, the professional bodies ought to strive to find ways on increasing the status and trustworthiness of the profession. These could include increasing the transparency as well as continuing education for its members.

Users of real estate services need to have confidence in the skills and expertise of real estate agents they engage. The magnitude of the monies associated with real estate transactions should cause users to seek out agents who are proficient in what they do, and to this end, the professionalism of agents is critical to the provision of accurate and informative information to guide users toward positive and beneficial outcomes.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that analyzes and compares the development of the real estate profession in Victoria and Sweden, using theories from the study of professions.

Legislative protections supporting New Zealand's compulsory arbitration system made unions a vital part of industrial relations from 1894 to 1991. Following a dramatic shift to a more deregulated labour market, the union movement suffered a sharp decline in influence and membership during the 1990s. In October 2000 the Labour‐Alliance Coalition that formed government in 1999 introduced its Employment Relations Act that includes new protections for registered trade unions. The early impact of the legislation has been to promote the registration of a plethora of new unions. However, the new unions formed since the introduction of the Act represent very few workers and have narrow interests. Although they exist formally as unions, these organisations are more accurately alternative forms of employee representation that exist to facilitate enterprise bargaining and, in some instances, to allow employers to frustrate the activities of larger, established unions.