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The paper traces the development of employee ownership in the UK since the 1980s. It proposes that employee ownership is a function of macro-level contexts and micro-level decisions, with the latter framed and guided by the former. The macro context comprises the regulatory framework and the provision of incentives to adopt employee ownership. The paper shows how the evolution of these has led to a steep increase in employee ownership in the last eight years.

The paper draws on several sources of empirical data to chart the development of employee ownership in the UK since the 1980s and to identify the current features of employee ownership. Two firm-level surveys conducted in 2015 and 2020/21 are supplemented by qualitative case study data collected in the early 1990s. An annual census of all employee-owned firms facilitates a comprehensive overview of the current state of UK employee ownership.

It is found that there has been a steep increase in the number of UK employee-owned firms since 2014 after several decades of uneven growth. This is attributed to the introduction of new incentives and to refinements of the regulatory framework. Over the period, there has been a shift from hybrid employee ownership, combining direct and indirect forms, to indirect ownership associated with the employee ownership trust model.

The paper provides an original history of employee ownership in the UK using rich and unique data, along with the most comprehensive picture of current employee ownership to date.

In Italy, worker cooperatives (WCs), whose workers hold major control rights over collectively-owned assets, are the leading vehicle for the promotion and development of employee ownership. Worker cooperatives are present in all regions and in most economic sectors, employing about 506,000 workers and generating a turnover of about €22 bn. Despite their history and diffusion, the high prevalence of WCs in Italy is under-researched and -thematised and requires new research.

The paper leverages unpublished primary and secondary data from Centro Studi Legacoop databank, the Aida-Bureau Van Dijk databank and the Cooperative Registry of the Ministry of Economic Development (CRMED) to explain the spread of WCs in Italy.

This paper reveals descriptive statistics of WCs and investigates their distribution across economic sectors and regions, their economic and financial performance and gives an overview of the relevant legislation. The paper indicates that older small- and medium-sized cooperatives located in central and north-eastern Italy perform best economically. However, in recent years, an increasing number of young cooperatives has emerged in South Italy thanks to favourable legislation, cooperative finance and the diffusion of cooperative know-how. Limitations to such results are reported in the conclusions.

The paper sheds light on past and recent development trends of WCs in Italy, highlights their growth in South Italy and revitalises the debate on the drivers, structures and rationales of employee-owned enterprises in Italy. Findings generate implications for research and practice. Given the tendency of WCs to better protect jobs than investor-owned enterprises, the spread of these enterprises may help workers find better and more stable jobs, counter-cyclically mitigating the dangerous effects of macro- and meso-economic fluctuations and instability.

The paper aims at studying the effect of management practices on the extensive and intensive export margins of Egyptian manufacturing firms.

The study relies on the 2020/2021 Egyptian Industrial Firm Behavior Survey (EIFBS) which comprises 2,383 manufacturing firms representing small, medium, and large sized firms located in different regions of Egypt: Urban Governorates, Lower Egypt, and Upper Egypt. It constructs an overall management z score for each firm to estimate its effect on a firm’s probability of exporting and value of exports using Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regressions.

Results indicate that good management is associated with a higher probability of firm exporting as well as higher export revenues conditional on exporting, robust to controlling for the level of domestic sales. These effects do not differ by firm ownership or type of sector, but rather by firm size, with managerial competence raising the probability of exporting more for large-sized firms. Additionally, good management is associated with higher firm productivity, innovation and worker training propensities which gives evidence that it is both an efficiency and a quality enhancer. Moreover, monitoring and targeting practices have significant positive effects on both margins, while incentives are only significant for the extensive margin.

Firms that aim at enhancing their export prospects and revenues should devote resources to review and upgrade their management systems to boost their product quality and production efficiency. Policy-wise, the government should create a competitive market environment that is open to both domestic and foreign firms’ entry to stimulate the adoption of better management practices.

The paper is the first to explore the link between firm management practices and export outcomes for a MENA country (Egypt). It makes use of a recent survey, the 2020/2021 Egyptian Industrial Firm Behavior Survey (EIFBS). The findings shed light on the importance of different management components (monitoring, targeting and incentives) in driving a manufacturing firm’s export performance.

The paper presents the concept of Solidarity Economy proposed by the Austrian-Brazilian economist and professor Paul Singer who passed away in 2018 at age 86 years in his home in São Paulo. Singer arrived at the concept of Solidarity Economy by mixing utopian socialist thought originated in Europe during the Industrial Revolution with the wisdom of Latin American working people to find alternative paths to the capitalist economic system. Following the teachings of Paul Singer, we, as practitioners and academics, report the first stage of the formation of a popular cooperative in the sector of recycling that occurred between 2019 and 2021 in the Town of Goiás, Goiás, Brazil. Our analysis of this collective endeavour leads to two main lessons: first, Solidarity Economy is an even broader proposal of an alternative to the capitalist economy than Paul Singer imagined, because its roots are not restricted to the European cooperativism of the nineteenth century, and second, economics must be taught in more popular way because the most urgent economic problems affect primarily the working people.

The authors’ goal in this paper is to study if there are long-run effects on the wages of those workers who entered the labour market overeducated but who have, over time, been able to overcome this situation by obtaining a job for which they are correctly matched.

This study universe is constituted by workers entering the labour market with a university degree between 2004 and 2012. The age range of these individuals is between 22 and 35 years old. With the data of the 8,359 selected individuals, the authors have constructed a balanced panel covering the period 2013–2017. This methodology is developed in two steps. First, the authors estimate a wage equation with the traditional variables and, second, the authors use the estimated coefficients of these variables to predict the wage paths of a representative individual in each group.

The main result the authors obtain indicates that the wages of those who manage to overcome an initial situation of overeducation do converge but very slowly to the respective wages of those others that entered the labour market correctly matched from the beginning. The authors consider this result to point towards the existence of scarring effects in wages induced by an initial situation of overeducation. The authors also present evidence, beyond education, about the influence that the occupational characteristics that a worker has on wages.

The factors that can influence the catching-up of wages are multiple, and it is not feasible to test all of them empirically. Therefore, the wage convergence process the authors present may also be influenced by other variables for which the authors do not have information.

This paper contributes to different branches of the labour market. First, the authors present new evidence within the literature dealing with the so-called scarring effects on wages related to the conditions entering the labour market. Secondly, this study’s results provide a new argument that complements those developed so far that explain a reduction in the wage skill premium detected among young graduates in Spain. Finally, this paper contributes to advancing research about the effects that overeducation has on wages.

The question the authors are attempting to answer in this paper can be formulated in the following terms: when a worker manages to overcome an initial situation of overeducation, what happens to his/her wage? Will it adjust quickly to the new working situation, or will we observe a slow convergence to the wages of workers with an employment history without overeducation situations? To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this topic has not yet been studied. Researchers have mostly focused their attention on comparing the wages of overeducated workers with the wages of those who are correctly matched. In this case, the authors compare the wages of correctly matched workers, but with the difference that some were initially overeducated and others were not.

In the previous chapters, we discussed the gig economy, knowledge economy, and its characteristics of each. The concept of knowledge workers is discussed in detail and their role in the knowledge economy and in creating knowledge. This chapter will explain how the knowledge economy and gig economy are connected and how the concept of knowledge workers and professional gig workers are connected. We will differentiate skilled gig workers from low-skilled workers and their role in economic development and productivity. Furthermore, we will explain their involvement in the organisation and how they can manage them and utilise their knowledge to increase productivity. The end of this chapter will discuss the platform economy concept and explain the platform economy's aspects in detail. This chapter emphasises how working globally is facilitated by digital transformation and IT infrastructure and how managing the professional workforce will create the opportunity to connect to a variety of job demands, particularly from developed countries.

The outset of the COVID-19 pandemic caused disruptions of all forms in the supply chain globally for almost two and a half years. This study identifies various challenges in the effective functioning of the existing supply chain during COVID-19. The focus is to see the disruptions impacting the energy storage supply chains.

The procedure entails a thorough analysis of scholarly literature pertaining to various supply chain interruptions, confirmed and verified by experts working in an energy storage company in India. These experts also confirmed the occurrence of more disruptive factors during their interviews and questionnaire survey. Moreover, this process attempts to filter out the relevant causal disruption factors in an energy storage company by using the integrated approach of qualitative and quantitative methodologies.

The results provide practical insights for the company management in planning and devising new strategies to manage supply chain disruptions. Supply chains for companies in other industry sectors can also benefit from the proposed framework and results in making them more robust to counter future disastrous events.

The study provides an easily adaptable decision framework to different industries by closely examining supply chain disruptions and identifying associated causes for building a robust supply chain focused on the energy storage sector. It examines four disruption dimensions and investigates possible outcomes and impacts of disruptions.

This study explores the integration of smallholder farmers into the export market in Vietnam, an emerging economy. By introducing a prospective framework, we seek to provide insight into factors that influence this integration process.

This study examines the expected growth and entry of Vietnamese smallholder farmers into high-value export markets. We collected information from 200 independent farmers as well as from five local extension workers, who provided information on 50 farmers.

The study reveals that the adoption of new business models is more influential than the variables traditionally included in models of export-market integration in predicting expected growth and entry into high-value export markets. In addition, the results highlight divergent views between farmers and extension workers regarding the role of collectors, with farmers perceiving collectors as potential partners, while extension workers see them as impediments to growth.

The prospective model presented in this study highlights the importance of policy interventions aimed at promoting new business models and addressing infrastructure and capital constraints for the sustainable transformation of agricultural sectors in emerging markets.

This is one of the first articles to apply a prospective approach to export-market integration and demonstrate its efficacy through an empirical study. The suggested prospective approach could facilitate the design of policies aimed at export-market integration within the context of dynamic, emerging markets.