The global economy has entered a decade of deep transformation driven by the confluence ofgeopolitical conflicts, climate pressures and accelerating technological rivalry. What began as a sequence of shocks in the early 2020s- pandemic disruption, war in Europe, and rising strategic tensions in East Asia-has evolved into a structural reorientation of globalization, security policies, alliance formation and industrial development. Fragmented globalisation has replaced the efficiency-driven integration of previous decades, as states and firms reorganise supply chains along political and security lines. Climate-related shocks further reshape macroeconomic conditions, fiscal priorities and long-term productivity trajectories. These forces interact with rapid technological change, including advances in artificial intelligence, new national armament priorities, and transformations of organisational practices. Sectoral developments in defense, pharmaceuticals, healthcare and energy illustrate how geopolitical pressures and technological imperatives are reshaping industrial capabilities and strategic policy choices. At the firm level, AI adoption reconfigures decision-making, skill requirements and capability development, underscoring the role of national learning systems in sustaining long-term competitiveness. In this editorial we outline a research agenda that highlights the analytical and empirical challenges for the fields of applied economics, business studies and policy analysis. The editorial concludes by discussing future research directions related to supply chain fragmentation, institutional adaptation and the evolving climate-security-technology nexus.
This study investigates the dynamic interactions between Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), Unemployment Rate (UR), Electricity Consumption (EC), and Economic Growth (EG) in Turkey over the period 1970-2022, using wavelet-based time-frequency analysis. By applying the Maximal Overlap Discrete Wavelet Transform (MODWT), the research decomposes the data into different time scales to capture short-, medium-, and long-term co-movements among these key macroeconomic variables. The findings reveal that FDI exhibits a weak negative relationship with unemployment in the short term, which turns positive in the long term, suggesting potential structural challenges in labor absorption. Meanwhile, the impact of FDI on electricity consumption becomes increasingly positive over time, indicating growing industrial and energy demands associated with foreign investments. The relationship between FDI and economic growth is found to be positive in the medium term but weakens or even reverses over longer horizons, reflecting the complex and evolving role of foreign capital in the domestic economy. These results underscore the importance of considering time-varying effects when evaluating the macroeconomic consequences of FDI. The study offers valuable insights for policymakers aiming to design effective strategies for attracting and utilizing foreign investment to support sustainable and inclusive economic development.
This study examines the factors influencing registered nurse (RN) turnover in the United States across two periods: 2018 (pre-pandemic) and 2022 (post-pandemic). Using data from the Health Resources & Services Administration's (HRSA) National Sample Survey of Registered Nurses (NSSRN) and Nursing Solutions Incorporated's (NSI) National Health Care Retention and RN Staffing Report, the analysis explores key predictors of turnover, including average weekly working hours, workplace setting, and educational background. The findings highlight a significant relationship between increased working hours and RN turnover, with the latter attributed to burnout and emotional exhaustion. Domestically educated nurses exhibited higher turnover rates, which may have been influenced by new opportunities, such as travel nursing. Hospital settings presented a nuanced effect, with stability benefits countered by heightened stress. Regional disparities in turnover were evident, with the Southeast experiencing pronounced challenges. While the pandemic amplified pre-existing workforce strains, it also prompted systemic changes, such as enhanced mental health support, which moderated turnover in some contexts. Overall, the study emphasizes the importance of targeted interventions to address RN retention and sustain the healthcare workforce.
This paper examines the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the volatility of the TUNINDEX stock market. Our main goal is to decipher how this worldwide health epidemic has influenced Tunisia's financial stability. A thorough empirical approach was employed, leveraging sophisticated econometric techniques such as GARCH and VECM to scrutinize daily market data. The analysis uncovers a notable escalation in TUNINDEX volatility during the pandemic, emphasizing the critical role of investors' sentiment, economic, and monetary interventions in mitigating the crisis. These insights shed light on the dilemmas and prospects facing investors, portfolio managers, and policymakers in navigating market volatility amidst pandemic uncertainty.
This paper explores the role of economic freedom in explaining the relationship between foreign direct investment and domestic investment for a panel of 18 African countries for the period running from 1996 to 2021. In particular, the paper uses the JKS panel Granger causality test to underpin the direction of causality between the variables. This procedure is adopted because it is robust under cross-sectional dependence and allows for slope heterogeneous coefficients. The study used the Feasible Generalized Least Squares (FGLS) estimator for parameter estimates. The robustness of the results from the FGLS model was checked through the Panel Corrected Standard Error (PCSEs) estimator. The results from the multivariate functions of the JKS test show that domestic investment and economic freedom jointly Granger-cause foreign direct investment. Similarly, foreign direct investment and economic freedom are found to jointly Granger-cause domestic investment. The results further show evidence of bidirectional causality between foreign direct investment, economic freedom, and domestic investment. The results from both the FGLS and PCSEs estimators indicate that domestic and foreign direct investment have significantly positive effects on each other. However, economic freedom has significant positive and negative effects on domestic and foreign direct investments, respectively. The policy implications are discussed.
Destination branding is an essential marketing tool that enables countries, cities, or regions to differentiate themselves based on their unique values from competitors and supports their sustainable development. A destination brand has the potential to gain larger market shares in the ever-growing and competitive tourism sector. Consequently, destination branding has emerged as a popular topic in academia and practice in recent years. A prerequisite for successful destination branding is the development of a distinct destination brand identity. Brand identity plays a critical role as it serves as a foundational element of the brand and shapes its overall image. However, the process of developing destination brand identity is complex, involving multiple dimensions, interdisciplinary approaches, and the active engagement of numerous stakeholders. It necessitates a systematic, coordinated, and long-term effort. The challenges inherent in this process underscore the importance of methodological approaches that clarify how destination brand identity should be crafted. This study uses a dual (Delphi and Factor analyses) methodological approach for creating destination brand identities that effectively articulate a destination's unique value and facilitate meaningful communication with target audiences. The study aims to contribute original insights by presenting a model design for destination brand identity creation, addressing the multifaceted and intricate nature of destination branding. It also aims to pave the way for future research endeavours in this dynamic field. After the study, four prominent brand identities/themes/areas were identified for branding the Adana destination: "Planned City", "Health City", "Modern Agricultural City", and "Sociocultural Centre-Entertainment City".
We investigate the effects of monetary policy on key macroeconomic variables in Turkiye over the [2005, 2019] period. We employ the Factor Augmented Vector Autoregressive (FAVAR) model involving 125 macroeconomic variables, including economic activity, money supply, interest rate, exchange rate, price level, and their sub-items. We aim to provide a comprehensive and coherent picture of the effect of monetary policy on the Turkish economy compared to the standard VARs. We examine the effects of two shocks on Turkish economy: 'interbank interest rate', a proxy variable for the policy rate of the Central Bank of the Republic of Turkiye, and 'spread', an alternative monetary policy measure which is the difference between interbank interest rate and treasury auction rate. Both of these shocks have significant effects on key macroeconomic variables in Turkiye. A positive interbank interest rate shock decreases the industrial production index, money supply, and real effective exchange rate, while increasing the short-and long-term deposit interest rates, which are largely consistent with conventional wisdom. However, following the monetary tightening, consumer inflation increases, contrary to economic theory. Thus, the price puzzle is observed. But a positive spread shock decreases the consumer inflation and the price puzzle disappears.
This study examines whether fair value reporting is related to audit pricing. I posit that the extent of assets and liabilities measured at fair value is positively associated with audit fees. When a client firm has a higher level of its assets and liabilities measured at fair values, its risk of financial misreporting is increased, making auditors increase their audit effort and, thereby, charge higher audit fees. Using firms covered in AuditAnalytics and Compustat database, I empirically examine an association between fair value estimates and audit fees. Consistent with my hypothesis, my findings indicate a positive relationship between the level of fair value assets and liabilities and audit fees. I also conduct several additional analyses which support the main findings. This paper contributes to the fair value literature and the audit pricing literature by offering direct empirical indication on the association between fair value reporting and audit fees. It further provides evidence on the economic consequences of SFAS 157 adoption and identifies the extent of assets and liabilities measured at fair value as one of the audit fee determinants.
Resource-efficient production including life-cycle approaches was stated as early as 2002 as the only way forward for the industry. Now, twenty years later, this is a reality in many ways. This represents a challenge to manufacturing small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) due to a disruptive industrial environment as well as changing market needs that require more capability to manage predictable as well as unpredictable changes. This paper explores some aspects manufacturing SMEs must manage, such as developing new capabilities to stay competitive in a disruptive industrial environment with uncertainties in supply chains, technologies, energy costs, changes in customer demands, and circularity. This paper presents a conceptual guideline for assessing the capabilities to develop as a manufacturing SME in a circular industrial environment. One way to manage this transition towards circularity in an industrial environment can be to develop transdisciplinary collaborations between different stakeholders and competencies.
The social sciences literature is replete with microeconomic models on racial discrimination of minority employment. This paper contributes to the empirics by testing the hypothesis of short run and long run employment relationships among racial groups in the U.S. labor market. The author employs a VECM model using national quarterly BLS data for years 2000 to 2023 to test for short-run and long-run Granger causality between employment among racial groups in 5 broad occupational categories: management and professional; services; sales and office; natural resources, construction, and maintenance; and production, transportation, and material moving.The results overwhelmingly reject the hypothesis of independence in employment among the racial groups. Among other findings, there is evidence to suggest that employment of African Americans in the natural resources, construction, and maintenance occupations Granger cause employment in the White and Latino communities in the short run. This short run burst of African American employment in these occupations may be a sign of forthcoming economic downturn. In this same group of occupations, Latin employment Granger causes Asian and White employment, while Asian employment Granger causes White and Latin employment. GDP and these racial groups Granger cause White and Latin employment in the long run.
Starting with a discussion of the contradictory trends shaping the global economy in the 2020s, this essay focuses on three technology- intensive sectors: defense, pharmaceuticals, and energy. In the defense sector, the Russian-Ukraine war and the tensions in East Asia ended a long period of slow growth with a ' call to arms ' and rearmament across OECD. The challenge of the Western industries now is to accelerate output and capacity in a broad range of subsectors and support the safe supply of weapons and spare parts to the Ukrainian army. Thus, RUW is also a battle between different skills in management, logistics, leadership, and training systems, which offers a rich arena for future research in these fields. In the pharmaceutical sector, the Covid-19 outbreak initiated another call to arms, and the industry was quick to respond by rapidly delivering new, effective vaccines. This coincided with a breakthrough for new approaches to cancer treatment, with a potential for major public health benefits, if the industry can handle the side effects and policymakers design cost-effective delivery systems with wide coverage. Again, this calls for focused research in the fields of management, innovation studies, and economics. The third sector discussed in this essay, electricity production, was caught in a perfect storm by the outbreak of the new war. However, the net effect seems to be a major increase in investments in renewables. This creates new challenges regarding, for example, system stability, combinations of flexible and nuclear-based power sources, and the cost-effective diffusion of renewables to emerging economies, thus another arena for important future research.
The price of a college degree has been rising for decades. According to data from the 2020 Digest of Education Statistics, the average undergraduate tuition and fees for full-time students at 4-year, degree-granting postsecondary institutions increased 56% beyond inflation from the 1999-00 academic year to the 2019-20 academic year. Although the average cost of attending college has increased dramatically, the rate of tuition increase is not uniform. Rather, it varies between types of institutions.The purpose of this research is to study escalating college tuition and fees from the perspectives of government intervention and market competition. We argue that the wide availability of federal-government-sponsored financial aid and student loans has led to subsidized tuition inflation. However, rather than there being a direct relationship between federal financial aid and escalating tuition, as many scholars have ventured, we believe that this relationship occurs through student tuition price elasticity and market competition. In light of our analysis, rising tuition is the result of government intervention in the academic business environment. The example of the 1978 airline industry deregulation suggests that removing government intervention in an attempt to encourage price competition would help mitigate tuition inflation. Society, in turn, would benefit from the resulting lower tuition and higher college attendance rate.
This paper uses both a geometrical and mathematical analysis to explain monopolistic third-degree price discrimination, and it also shows how price discrimination affects society. A frequent policy question in the literature on price discrimination is whether to allow third-degree price discrimination or enforce uniform pricing. A key feature to understanding this issue in the context of imperfectly competitive markets is the impact of price discrimination on output. The article shows that a monopoly facing downward-sloping linear demands and constant marginal costs will obtain higher profits under price discrimination than under a single-price strategy, but price discrimination lowers welfare if the total output does not change. When price discrimination causes total output to increase, then this practice will have a beneficial effect on overall welfare.
Theory suggests that inflation expectations play an important role in transmitting fiscal considerations into inflation. We contribute new empirical evidence of a positive relationship between the budget deficit to GDP and inflation expectations of firms. This suggests interdependence between fiscal and monetary policies, which may imply that monetary policy faces more challenges to maintain inflation expectation anchored when the fiscal outcomes worsen. The result is robust to considering other fiscal variables and to controlling for macroeconomic covariates.
Mergers and Acquisition have become a routine affair in the Corporate World. The most recent announcement by Microsoft and its acquisition of Activision Blizzard has been a case in Point. By looking at the recent mergers (past 10 years) and selecting a sample (66) of publicly traded companies we tried to identify the key determinants of such M & A decisions. We posit that the decision to Merge or Acquire can be captured in a simple Binary Logistic model. Our results show that Market Cap; Earnings per Share and the domicile of the Corporation (US or outside) are key determining factors for the decision to merge or acquire. Policy implications suggest that corporations review all the financials, particularly the earnings per share and the market caps very carefully before taking the final decision.
Recently, fingers have been pointed towards the impacts of social media platforms' algorithms. Although billed as transformative and democratic, most social media platforms are often in the headlines for disseminating "conspiracy theories " and "fake news ". However, the debate on new technology is not new. This viewpoint puts the current debate on social platforms in the context of the historical debate. In it, we firstly provide a comprehensive review of a seminal book by Neil Postman (1985), Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. Although published decades ago before the introduction of today's social media platforms, the book is today a topic du jour. Secondly, we put the analysis from the review in the context of today's social media proliferations. The originality of this review is that it describes the impact of consuming technology without questioning it and that what we are witnessing is a shift from word-centered typography to image-centered social media. Postman calls this era "the age of exposition ", which gradually intoxicates academia and political discourses, thereby losing seriousness, clarity and value within public discourse.
This paper suggests that the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war and existing rivalries among future global leaders, such as the USA vs. China, NATO vs. Russia, and China vs. India, may result in a second Cold War. A new global order and an emerging second Cold War will have many impacts on global, regional, national, and political economies and sectors, as well as commercial and business activities. This paper elaborates on the new (de)globalization, diminishing national and regional economic powers, and environmental challenges. Nations will develop new industrial policies and try to secure global supply chains and material flow. At the same time, it is expected that investment in defense, energy, and food sectors will increase to shore up national and regional security. Tourism and other travel-based sectors, such as sports events, might degrow. These wars might deinternationalize the activities of corporations who would need to develop new business processes, organizational forms, and technological capabilities to protect their existing markets and businesses. Based on these arguments and discussions, the paper calls for studies to examine new research ideas and suggest empirical research to expand our understanding and support the informed decision-making of policymakers and managers.
The link between international trade and employment has become more important today. In this context, especially women's labor force participation (FLFP) attracts a lot of attention and is discussed. Emphasis is placed on supporting the FLFP. There is a large literature examining factors affecting FLFP. This article explores the effects of international trade, political stability and some other parameters on the female labor force participation rate (FLFP). It is widely accepted that increasing and supporting FLFP leads to a higher level of well-being. There is a large literature analyzing low FLFP. Making panel data estimation using FE, RE, Driscol-Kraay standard errors regressions and CCE standard errors, this article explores the effects of foreign trade, unemployment and political stability on female labor force participation FLFP rates. The sample consists of nine Black Sea Cooperation Organization (BSEC) member countries for the period (1999-2021). The findings of the three models applied, 1)FGLS (heteroskedastic), 2)FGLS (homoskedastic) AR(1) and no autocorrelation, and 3)Prais Winsten results are consistent with each other. The findings show that exports have a positive effect, while ICt-based exports and political stability have a negative effect on FLFP. The findings of the article show that foreign trade variables and political stability have a negative effect on women's labor force participation rates.
The aim of the study is to examine the relationship between the COVID-19 pandemic and stock market performance under the structural break in case of Turkey for the period from April 10, 2020 to March 19, 2021. Here, the confirmed cases, deaths, tests and recoveries during COVID-19 pandemic were carried out as the COVID-19 pandemic variables. The obtained empirical findings indicated that i) the series were integrated at I(1), ii) the series were cointegrated in the presence of structural break, iii) the confirmed number of cases and deaths reduced the stock market performance, while the confirmed number of tests and recoveries enhanced the performance of the stock market under the structural break, and iv) in the long run the bidirectional causality among the confirmed number of cases, deaths and recoveries with stock market performance and the unidirectional causality running from the confirmed number of tests to stock market performance were found. In brief, the study's empirical results could provide several policy suggestions to governments, policy makers, investors and risk managers to take several precautions that decreased the negative effects of the epidemics on the Turkish stock market performance.
The confidence is a belief and has a psychological origin but investigated interactively within the framework of behavioral analysis. Banking sector transactions are also based on the confidence and has consequences over the economy. Therefore, there is a need for objectifying the concept; especially, measuring it is not easy and requires a specific work. Gallup Confidence in Banking Index just in case aims to measure and quantify this belief. This paper tries to analyze the effects of the confidence in the banking sector on the economic growth for the US which has an open economy and a low share of banking sector within the financial market by utilizing that index. Its contribution to the existing literature is applying the smooth local projection method for estimating the parameters. This method has several advantages over the other methods such as vector autoregressive model and local projection method. Findings reveal that a positive confidence shock increases the economic growth in the US economy. Due to its binding role for the economy, the governmental authorities and the banking sector should take precautions such as improving regulations, enrichen education and designing seminar programmes by focusing on moral values and constructive communication channels to increase the confidence level. Banks should also find new ways to increase their confidence scale such as environment friendly banking, safe technology and employing highly educated workers.
