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Women’s empowerment is a multidimensional concept that encompasses different aspects such as access to education, freedom to make vital decisions, labor market access, wages, and political participation, among others. In this research, the authors construct a multidimensional index of women’s empowerment that takes into account individual resources and achievements and analyze its evolution across countries using data from the United Nations Development Programme and the United Nations for 17 gender indicators across 96 countries over the period 1995–2015. By means of exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis, the authors identify three dimensions of women’s empowerment: reproductive health, economic participation, and basic education. In addition, the authors use cluster techniques to classify countries into four groups with similar behavior patterns in the different domains of women’s empowerment: a group of countries with high levels in the domains of reproductive health and basic education but with low levels in economic participation; a group of countries with high levels in the domains of reproductive health and economic participation that should pay attention to education; a group of countries with medium levels across the three dimensions of women’s empowerment, especially in reproductive health and economic participation; and a group of countries with low levels in all the dimensions of women’s empowerment, especially in reproductive health and basic education. The comparison of these different patterns serves to highlight the aspects in which improvements have been made or, on the contrary, to highlight the obstacles that are hindering the improvement of gender equality. Finally, the results suggest that advancements in women’s empowerment improve the countries’ level of development.

Every businessperson has repeatedly heard myriad reports and newscasts about the huge market opportunity in Asia. But western business managers will be caught flat‐footed if they do not update their notions of the new competitive capabilities of Asian companies and the rate at which they are evolving.

Nine conventional notions are presented in this article that are critical for business leaders to change.

Western businesses must reassess the strengths and weaknesses and update their competitive posture. First they need to jettison outdated conventional wisdom.

Western companies need to start including Asian players and industry clusters in their competitor screening process, if they have not already. They must evaluate how these rivals could encroach on their businesses and develop strategies now to preempt them.

To compete, western companies are learning new capabilities to develop products around consumer preferences and to engineer a cost structure to deliver them profitably at local price points.

Using literature and related documents, the study reviews and analyzes the global trend of liberal arts education (LAE) resurgence and experimentation in different societies across three continents, East Asia, North America, and Western Europe. The study explores how LAE has been incorporated into different societies, how the variations in each model reflect local traditions and values, and what these adaptations contribute to the new LAE model. Through the angle of new institutional theory, the study focuses specifically on how these local models are impacted by institutional factors, the constraint of market, policy, state, as well as historical figures or organizations. This research with document analysis of global LAE summarizes the innovation and insights to date and calls for further research on LAE through new institutional theory and ideal types. This study builds the foundation for further research exploring the implementation and educational outcomes of LAE in different societies.

Generation Z, including individuals born from the mid-1990s to the late 2000s, is said to be different from other generations before. Generation Z is said to be the generation of digital natives, with multiple identities; a worried and creative generation who value collaborative consumption; and a generation looking forward. The authors present here tentative observations of Generation Z in Asia using theoretical approaches and scientific backgrounds: the authors show how socialisation theory (parents and peer group) and technology (relationship with smartphones) offer meaningful perspectives to understand Generation Z behaviours in Asia. Finally, the authors ask some key questions about dealing with Generation Z in Asia in the field of smartphone use, consumer behaviour (shopping orientation), collaborative consumption (sharing), and work context.

Implementing the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) unarguably demands huge financial investments. However, the United Nations has acknowledged the huge financial gap militating against the implementation of the SDGs worldwide, leading experts to question the possibility of complete implementation of the goals by their terminal dateline of 2030. While the bulk of the finance currently outlaid on the SDGs comes from traditional sources including foreign direct investments (FDIs), there is the need to focus more attention on developing and exploiting impact investments that are more suitable for financing development programmes and projects. In this chapter, the SDG implementation profiles of the 12 Arab West Asia countries concerning the five most targeted SDGs were evaluated and sustainable finance issues were discussed. Secondary data were retrieved from World Bank's DataBank. The data were descriptively analyzed. Based on the profiles generated, debt relief is put forward as a possible impact investment mechanism suitable for funding the SDGs. Specifically, this chapter recommends that outright cancellation of debts based on the debt-for-SGD swap could serve as some of the impact investments needed to boost the global drive for a developed, peaceful, and just world.

The purpose of this study is to examine if consumers have substantially common color preferences in hospitality uniforms for destination brands. Employee uniforms with their dimensions of style, material and color are a crucial part of the coordinated brand message of a business or a destination; however, this has been a void in tourism and hospitality literature. Current visitors to Hong Kong were studied using intercept surveys in four different groups controlling for potential confounding factors. Although results reveal the common perception and preference for black-white-formal uniforms for Hong Kong’s hospitality industry across different treatment groups as well as different cultural groups, implications and discussions are provided as a call for further research in this venue of inquiry.

This is a cross-sectional study using a site intercept survey with structured questionnaires on Chinese and international travelers in Hong Kong. Four different surveys were used as different treatments for four groups of respondents that were randomly assigned into each group. Each group was presented with a different default pair of male and female uniform pictures for the initial evaluation on the first page of the survey, followed by a list of uniforms with different colors and styles on the second page of the survey to select and evaluate their own pairs of male and female uniforms.

Results revealed that consumers’ general favorite colors may not apply to their preferences for the employee uniforms for a destination they visit. Also, there were similarities in the favorite color and choice uniform color for the three general culture groups, such as Chinese, Asia-Pacific and Western consumers, included in the study. Besides, findings implied that Hong Kong may be a strong brand with a uniform color preference for hospitality uniforms for different consumer segments.

This study needs to be considered as an exploratory attempt to bring researchers’ attention to the several questions still to be answered by future research. The results and discussions provided in this study are beyond being robust or conclusive; insights about potential brand connotations with employee uniform colors need to be taken as potential leads for future studies because there is a need for further study in this area.

The importance of hotel employee uniforms for quality hotel experience was the highest for the Chinese group, whereas it was the lowest for the Western group. Chinese and Asia-Pacific respondents placed more importance on uniforms as a cue for a quality hotel experience, which signal a higher level of involvement in visible cues in the consumption environment. Hence, hotels as well as destinations catering to these groups need to take their market segment preferences into consideration before making decisions about brand cues for their products.

There is a lack of attention to the color aspect of service encounter in tourism and hospitality literature. Therefore, color needs attention from researchers as a new venue of research in tourism and hospitality, especially in the tourism destination context. This study is a spearhead to generate interest by intriguing questions for future attention from researchers.

The purpose of this paper is to measure the levels of psychological distress in adults entering Western Australia (WA) as refugees through the Australian Humanitarian Programme. To determine if the introduction of mental health screening instruments impacts on the level of referrals for further psychological/psychiatric assessment and treatment.

Participants were 300 consecutive consenting refugee adults attending the Humanitarian Entrant Health Service in Perth, WA. This service is government funded for the general health screening of refugees. The Kessler-10 (K10) and the World Health Organisation’s post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) screener were the principal outcome measures used.

Refugees had a high rate of current probable PTSD (17.2 per cent) as measured with the PTSD screener and mean K10 scores were significantly higher than general population norms. The K10 showed high accuracy for discriminating those with or without probable PTSD. Being married and having more children increased the risk of probable PTSD. In regard to region of origin, refugees from Western and Southern Asia had significantly higher scores on both screeners followed by those from Africa with those from South-Eastern Asia having the lowest scores. Referral rate for psychiatric/psychological treatment was 18 per cent compared to 4.2 per cent in the year prior to the study.

This study demonstrates increased psychological distress including a high rate of probable PTSD in a recently arrived multi-ethnic refugee population and also demonstrates significant variations based on region of origin. In addition, it supports the feasibility of using brief screening instruments to improve identification and referral of refugees with significant psychological distress in the context of a comprehensive general medical review.

This was an Australian study conducted in a non-psychiatric setting. The outcomes of this study pertain to refugee mental health assessed in a general health setting. The implications of the study findings are of far reaching relevance, inclusive of primary care doctors and general physicians as well as mental health clinicians. In particular the authors note that the findings of this study are to the authors’ knowledge unique in the refugee mental health literature as the participants are recently arrived refugees from diverse ethnic groups.

The purpose of this study is to examine talent management process in a region that has been influenced by Eastern culture.

This research is a multiple case study of six MNCs in Asia. Cross-cases analysis was used to reveal differences and similarities. The data were collected through phone interviews with HR managers and written communications as well as organizations’ websites.

The studied companies were dealing with several challenges regarding talent management process, including challenges of attracting and retaining talent, tension between subsidiaries and headquarters, tension between high potentials and non-high potentials and tension between generations. These companies’ strategies for addressing these challenges were also identified and discussed.

This paper revealed talent management orientation, the approach toward and definition of talent and context-specific issues regarding talent management of the selected companies in a region in which this topic has not been sufficiently studied in the past.

The purpose of this paper is to study the market reactions of the banking industry to the Russian–Ukraine war.

This paper uses an event study methodology, regression analyses and interaction effects to study the effect of the war on banks stock prices and analyze factors that explain the cumulative abnormal return.

First, this study finds a significant decline of almost 1.5% in return on the war date. Similar patterns were observed for all continents, but Europe had the most severe drop of about 4%. Second, after excluding the contemporaneous influence of the whole market using the market model, global bank equities returns fell by about 1% on the war date, indicating that bank stocks were more severely impacted by the war than the average stock market. Net-of-market return approach further reveals that bank stock prices decreased 1.4% more on the event day compared to the prewar market average. Third, the impacts of the war and sanctions were persistent when the war continued. Banks stocks were most hit in Europe, Asia and North America.

This paper pioneers the study of the effect of the Russia–Ukraine war on the banking industry. This paper also analyzes the reaction pattern of bank stocks before, during and after the war to explain the behavior and expectations of investors toward the war.

This paper aims to distill from both the Asian “miracle” and the “meltdown” since the Asian crisis, a generic East Asian business model which is changing in the context of globalisation, information communication technology, knowledge‐based economy, deregulation and emerging new competition.

The generic business model considers the creative and innovative nature of intellectual capital in a qualitative macroeconomic development model rather than a quantitative or econometric micro‐level business modeling for the firm or industry. Diverse and heterogeneous both within the whole of East Asia and distinguished as Northeast and Southeast Asia, the putative generic business model is further differentiated in terms of customised idiosyncratic models in more mature Northeast developmental states in Japan, Korea and Taiwan contrasted with Southeast “captured” developmental states as in Indonesia and Malaysia entrapped by ethnic politics.

City‐states Hong Kong and Singapore are exceptional because of their size and resultant globalised states. To each its own may be the conclusion in terms of customised national systems and models, but East Asian ethical and moral dimensions of integrity may generally offer a version moral capitalism of which is suited to global capitalism not of the brute Darwinist kind. In the final analysis, East Asia is increasingly exposed to the global marketplace, competition and globalisation backlash, such that some common denominator comes from DFI and MNCs from multicultural political economy dimensions.

The paper presents a putative East Asian business models.