Infectious diseases and social distancing under state-dependent probabilities.

We analyze the implications of infectious diseases and social distancing in an extended SIS framework to allow for the presence of stochastic shocks with state dependent probabilities. Random shocks give rise to the diffusion of a new strain of the disease which affects both the number of infectives and the average biological characteristics of the pathogen causing the disease. The probability of such shock realizations changes with the level of disease prevalence and we analyze how the properties of the state-dependent probability function affect the long run epidemiological outcome which is characterized by an invariant probability distribution supported on a range of positive prevalence levels. We show that social distancing reduces the size of the support of the steady state distribution decreasing thus the variability of disease prevalence, but in so doing it also shifts the support rightward allowing eventually for more infectives than in an uncontrolled framework. Nevertheless, social distancing is an effective control measure since it concentrates most of the mass of the distribution toward the lower extreme of its support.

A retrospective study of knowledge management for integrated resorts (IRs) crisis preparedness

PurposeThis study aims to propose a systematic knowledge management model to explore the causal links leading to the organizational crisis preparedness (OCP) level of integrated resorts (IRs) during the COVID-19 pandemic based on the intangible capital of organizational climate, dynamic capability, substantive capability and commitment.Design/methodology/approachThe authors use data obtained from IRs in Macau. The Wuli–Shili–Renli (WSR) approach underpins the study. Structural equation modeling following fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) was used for data processing.FindingsThe results showed that organizational climate has an essential role in IRs preparedness for crises and affects their dynamic capacity, substantive capacity and commitment. The fsQCA results revealed that the relationships between conditions with a higher level of dynamic and substantive capability lead to higher OCP scores.Practical implicationsExecutives should develop systemic thinking regarding organization preparedness in IRs for crisis management. A comprehensive understanding of the IRs' business environment and crises is necessary, as they will require different factor constellations to allow the organization to perform well in a crisis. Financial support for employees could ensure their assistance when dealing with such situations. Rapid response teams should be set up for daily operations and marketing implementation of each level of the IRs management systems.Originality/valueThis study contributes to the extant literature on IRs crisis management in the OCP aspect. The authors constructed a systematic composite picture of organization executives' knowledge management through the three layers of intangible capitals in WSR. Moreover, the authors explored causal links of WSR from symmetric and asymmetric perspectives.

Path planning research for mobile robots in dynamic environments

At present, due to the COVID-19, China's social and economic development has slowed down. Some life service e-commerce platforms have successively launched "contactless delivery" services, which can effectively curb the spread of the epidemic. Robot distribution is the current mainstream, but robots are different from people and need to have accurate program settings. Both path planning and obstacle avoidance are currently top issues. This requires the mobile robot to successfully arrive at the destination while minimizing the impact on the surrounding environment and pedestrians, and avoiding encroachment on the movement space of pedestrians. Therefore, the mobile robot needs to be able to actively avoid moving pedestrians in a dynamic environment, in addition to avoiding static obstacles, and safely and efficiently integrate into the pedestrian movement environment. In this paper, the path planning problem of unmanned delivery robot is studied, and the path of mobile robot in the crowd is determined by global planning and local planning, and the matlab simulation is used for verification. © The Authors. Published under a Creative Commons Attribution CC-BY 3.0 License.

METHODOLOGY for ASSESSING the FINANCIAL SECURITY of ENTERPRISES in the POST-PANDEMIC PERIOD of DIGITAL ECONOMY

The article considers the approaches to assessing the financial security of enterprises presented in the literature, determines the rsistance of the textile industry of Uzbekistan to the negative impact of the coronavirus pandemic on the basis of statistical data, and reveals a significant differentiation of textile industry enterprises in terms of financial stability. Based on data on small enterprises in the textile industry of Uzbekistan, a method for assessing the financial security of an enterprise in the post-pandemic period is proposed and tested, taking into account the complex influence of non-financial parameters of economic security and assessing the deviations of the economic situation at a given enterprise from the patterns emerging in the relevant segment of the economy. In this research an econometric model was developed to determine the factors affecting the chemical industry and express their interrelationship, based on the conducted econometric analysis, the directions of development in our country were determined. According to the authors, it is necessary to continue these directions in order to ensure the economic security of industry enterprises in the country. © 2022 ACM.

New Approaches to the Economic Security of Russian Regions in Terms of the COVID-19 Pandemic

The study aims to identify the problems of economic security of the Russian regions under the influence of force majeure caused by the pandemic COVID-19 and their assessment, as well as to determine ways to stabilize the socio-economic situation. The authors conducted a grouping of the economic security indicators of the federal districts and proposed a methodology for its assessment in terms of the coronavirus pandemic. The authors identified the problem areas of socio-economic development of the Russian regions and also proved the decline in their economic security during the pandemic. The authors evaluated the effectiveness of the internal state administration of the federal districts according to the anti-crisis measures adopted in 2020 (maintaining turnover in the main regional segments of the economy, avoiding tax debt on regional fees, increasing the profitability of the real business, raising the level of digital development), as well as measures to preserve employment and solvency of the population of each region. The authors justified the directions of normalization of the socio-economic development of the federal districts of Russia by eliminating the economic security problems. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.

Detection of Multiple Structural Breaks in Large Covariance Matrices

This article studies multiple structural breaks in large contemporaneous covariance matrices of high-dimensional time series satisfying an approximate factor model. The breaks in the second-order moment structure of the common components are due to sudden changes in either factor loadings or covariance of latent factors, requiring appropriate transformation of the factor models to facilitate estimation of the (transformed) common factors and factor loadings via the classical principal component analysis. With the estimated factors and idiosyncratic errors, an easy-to-implement CUSUM-based detection technique is introduced to consistently estimate the location and number of breaks and correctly identify whether they originate in the common or idiosyncratic error components. The algorithms of Wild Binary Segmentation for Covariance (WBS-Cov) and Wild Sparsified Binary Segmentation for Covariance (WSBS-Cov) are used to estimate breaks in the common and idiosyncratic error components, respectively. Under some technical conditions, the asymptotic properties of the proposed methodology are derived with near-optimal rates (up to a logarithmic factor) achieved for the estimated breaks. Monte Carlo simulation studies are conducted to examine the finite-sample performance of the developed method and its comparison with other existing approaches. We finally apply our method to study the contemporaneous covariance structure of daily returns of S&P 500 constituents and identify a few breaks including those occurring during the 2007–2008 financial crisis and the recent coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak. An package "” is provided to implement the proposed algorithms.

The spread of COVID-19 in stock returns along global value chains

This paper examines the performance of industries in the trade network in international stock markets during the onset of COVID-19. In general, the value of all industries in G20 countries declines significantly in the pandemic. Stock returns of industries in the central positions of global value chains exhibit remarkable resilience despite the economic hardship caused by COVID-19. This pattern is more pronounced when the disruptions caused by social distancing requirements are considered. We postulate that this is related to the essential services provided by the central industries.

Effect of marine economic development pilot policies on regional economic resilience: Based on quasi-natural experiments from coastal areas in China

China began to implement marine economic development pilot policies from 2011 in order to promote land and marine development in a coordinated way, transform and optimize marine industrial layout, formulate and improve the policy and institutional construction of ocean development, promote marine economic power strategy, and improve the level of regional economic resilience in coastal area. Tourism industry is an important part of regional economy of coastal areas. Taking the marine economic development pilot policies as a quasi-natural experiment and based on the panel data of cities in coastal areas of China from 2007 to 2020, a multi-period difference-in-differences (DID) model was used to assess the impact of these pilot policies on regional economic resilience and tourism economic resilience. The results show that the implementation of marine economic development pilot policies can significantly promote regional economic resilience and tourism economic resilience. COVID-19, as a moderating variable, has significantly weakened the effect of marine economic development pilot policies on regional economic resilience. In terms of regional heterogeneity, the establishment of marine economic development pilots has a more significant policy effect on regional economic resilience in the central and southern coastal areas, while the policy effect on tourism economic resilience is more significant in the eastern coastal areas. In view of these findings, it is of great significance for cities to prevent systemic risks and improve regional economic resilience, by means of reasonably expanding marine economic development pilots and planning coastal regional economic systems according to local conditions. © 2023, Editorial office of PROGRESS IN GEOGRAPHY. All rights reserved.

Global Governance in the New Era: Concepts and Approaches

This book mainly introduces the concepts and approaches of global governance from the viewpoints of Chinese and Russian scholars and is divided into four parts. The first one deals with the concept of a new type of global governance, namely "Globalization 2.0". The second one is dedicated to institutions and multilateralism, including the importance and effectiveness of international institutions. The third part focuses on the important countries and regions in the new era, as well as such issues as the current global status quo, processes in Eurasia, the prospects of the U.S.-China-Russia trilateral relationship. The last part analyzes the future development of global governance and possible solutions of how it might be improved. Climate change, digital era, cyber security, financial and economic regimes, COVID-19 are all involved in this part. In short, this book is a profound and cutting-edge research on global governance. © China Social Sciences Press 2023.

Can tourism development and economic growth mutually reinforce in small countries? Evidence from Singapore

This study investigates the causal relationships between international tourism development and the economic growth of a global city-state - Singapore - drilling into the temporal details of the tourism-economy nexus in small countries. Many studies have examined whether the tourism-led growth hypothesis or the economy driven-tourism growth hypothesis holds in large developed and emerging countries. Still, relatively few studies examine small countries' tourism-economy nexus, and the temporal details of the nexus have not been adequately examined. We examine the tourism-economy nexus in Singapore using quarterly data from 1991Q1 to 2020Q4 and the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) Model, with the long- and short-run dynamics and the feedback loop of the nexus considered. Our statistical findings show that international tourism development leads economic growth by two quarters in Singapore. Also, there are both 'consistent' and 'contemporaneous' positive feedback loops between tourism development and economic growth, but those loops cannot last for more than a quarter. From the economic perspective, our study reveals that improving tourism activities may accelerate the post-Covid economic recovery of some small countries that rely on tourism. Yet, continuous input is required to sustain the tourism-economy synergy.

Telecommuting and Teleworking (Teleportability): A Sustainable Socio-Economic Transformation Mechanism in the Post COVID-19 Era

Organizations, societies, and economies are the scope of sustainability in every community. The growing realization of electronically-enabled business as critical drivers of sustainable economic growth and development especially during crisis is no doubt propelling nations into harnessing the benefits of enterpreneural transformation in the 21st century and post covid-19 era. Teleworking and Telecommuting are technologies that have the ability to enable ubiquitous digital service transmissions needed to combat and curtail the prevalence of pandemics such as Covid-19. Capabilities of telecommuting can be effectively utilized to address the challenges associated with Covid-19 presently and in the post covid-19 era including threats in war-turned geographical spaces. However, there is the paucity of such knowledge, orientation and awareness amongst entrepreneurs, industries and companies in developing countries like Nigeria. This lacuna, if properly bridged will help unpack the link between production, consumption and service delivery in an emerging economy. This paper examines the notional impact of the concept of telecommuting and teleworking as a mechanism for a sustainable economic transformation and global repositioning of the work force beyond the covid crisis. Furthermore, it analyzes and juxtaposes the readibility of business environments to ensure their employee's safety in the work place and remote working, thus providing continuity to economic, productive and business activity. This conceptual study uses the interpretive paradigm, through deductive analysis to draw the conclusion that there is a very poor level of deployment of telecommuting and teleworking models in countries like Nigeria during crisis and pandemics and therefore recommends that organizations adopt this mechanism to propel safety of the workforce and reduce cost. With the approval for the operation of the 5G network in the Nigerian telecommunications space, entrepreneurs can explore the gains to sustain remote working or working from home in the post-covid-19 era.

Introduction

This chapter is contextual in nature. It provides an overview of the impact of COVID-19, highlighting both the significant number of deaths caused by the pandemic as well as the economic disruption that occurred. Particular attention is paid to the role of digital technologies during the pandemic, which enabled a wide range of activities (e.g. work, education and shopping) to go online. The disruptive impact of COVID-19 is widespread and far-reaching, with the pandemic acting as a 'change agent' expanding and encouraging the greater use of digital technologies. The second half of the chapter presents summaries of the other chapters in the book. In doing so, it illustrates the scope and scale of the impact of COVID-19, the multitude of different challenges it has caused, and how these varied across different regions and contexts, as well as the diversity of reactions to the pandemic. Some of these reactions are technical in nature, while others are commercial and political. The summaries also draw attention to ongoing policy debates, the significance of which has been heightened by the pandemic. © 2023 the authors.

Economic development in a pandemic: Reflections from Melbourne, ‘the world's most locked-down city'

This paper explores the key principles of economic development in a pandemic. It does so by drawing on the lessons learned through the economic response to the COVID-19 pandemic in the Australian city of Melbourne. Melburnians experienced 263 days largely confined to their homes, one of the longest lockdown periods in the world, resulting in deserted city streets and a devastated central city economy. The experience forced the City of Melbourne to adopt a range of unique and innovative responses, first to keep businesses afloat during lockdown, and then to reactivate the city. Melbourne did this while keeping a focus on longer-term economic development. This somewhat unique experience makes Melbourne a useful case study informing best-practice economic development in a pandemic. Key lessons emerging from Melbourne's experience include the need to respond and iterate rapidly, the importance of collaboration with stakeholders and other tiers of government, and the need to maintain a focus on multiple time horizons, even in the midst of the crisis. These insights are potentially transferrable to economic development responses to other crises, including those catalysed by climate change. © 2023, Henry Stewart Publications. All rights reserved.

Blockchain Technology Based Credibility Verification in E-Journal Entities

In the industrial era 4.0, it has surpassed increasingly complex technological advances in the information system that required a very high infrastructure and facilities and prevented fraud. Counterfeiting is a procedure following an entity, statistics, or documents (observe forged documents) with plans to deceive. Falsification of extensive information certificates is exacerbated by the current economic situation in Indonesia, which is currently occurring due to the widespread epidemic, namely COVID-19. The spread of the COVID-19 outbreak has had a significant impact and changes in all sectors, especially certificate forgery in Indonesia. The imitation of busy certificates is the main focus of this journal, focusing on journal publications combined with Blockchain technology. The sophistication of blockchain technology as authentication is comparing two or more items or additional tests to ensure the accuracy, correctness, or correctness of the information. This method uses qualitative methods with data sources based on case studies in controlled supervision with the basic concept of cryptography as the basis of analysis. From the decisions made, it is hoped that this will minimize the level of forgery of certificates widely measured during the COVID-19 era. © 2022 IEEE.

Developing Business Model Competences in the Enterprise

Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, 2021 saw a growing interest in starting own business: as per the Census Bureau's Business Formation Statistics, the number of applications to form new businesses filed in the U.S. was the highest compared to any other year on record, reaching the total of 5.4 million (Economic Innovation Group, 2022), while in the EU, after an initial downward trend recorded in the first and second quarters of 2020, the number of new business registrations grew again in the third quarter of that year, and this upward trend continued throughout 2021 (Eurostat, 2022). Of course, as a result of Russia's invasion on Ukraine and related economic crisis, a downward tendency could be observed, but business registration levels in the EU in the first quarter of 2022 were still higher than during the pre-COVID 19 pandemic period (2015-2019) (Eurostat, 2022) and online searches indicating and intent to open a business spiked by 76% from 2018 to 2022 (Search Engine Journal, 2022). This shows that despite many external impediments, people are still tempted to start their own business, and many influencers, motivational speakers and coaches, as well as various popular TV shows broadcast worldwide (like the Apprentice, Dragons' Den, Shark Tank or Planet of the Apps) encourage them to do so. Becoming an entrepreneur has become a goal many people, especially 20-, 30- and 40-year-olds, strive to achieve. However, many of those people fail to realise that the very entry in the business register does not automatically make them entrepreneurs or their business successful. Neither does a good (or even excellent and innovative) business idea that attracts customers, as it was in Kodak's, Blockbuster's, or Ask Jeeves' case. What is required, is the ability to stay attractive to existing and prospective customers, i.e., the ability to win and retain customers, and to adapt to the changing demands, trends and economic conditions. All this can be achieved thanks to a meticulously designed and regularly reviewed and updated business model. The aim of this paper is to present and analyse the learning process of acquiring and building competences in the area of business models with the use of different innovative tools. The results presented and discussed in this article come from surveys as well as face-to-face and on-line meetings conducted in the ProBM 2 ERASMUS+ project (Understanding and Developing Business Models in the Era of Globalisation), in which the total of 261 respondents from seven (7) European countries, i.e. Poland, Italy, Greece, Romania, Portugal, Malta, and Switzerland, took part between 2019 and 2022. From the meetings and surveys it follows that much more awareness of business models needs to be encouraged and developed, particularly as regards improving competences helping future business owners and their employees assess profitability and efficiency of their operations and ensure that the business will be a going concern. © 2022 Authors. All rights reserved.

Economic Justice in Post-COVID India: A Macroeconomic Perspective

The COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent lockdown wreaked havoc on substantial segments of the Indian population through unemployment and income loss, only highlighting the lack of institutional structures and policies to protect vulnerable sections of society from aggregate as well as idiosyncratic shocks. This chapter argues that the variations in the capacity to better one's life are conditional on socio-economic divisions a person belongs to and this makes such divisions fault lines. They constitute structural weaknesses in the economy leaving out millions of people without the capability to participate in the economy meaningfully and remuneratively. The author provides evidence of disproportionate impact of the pandemic along these fault lines and provides a policy framework for economic justice and prosperity to all in the post-COVID economy. He also highlights the importance of an interdisciplinary approach to policy-making given the complex nature of the problem. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023.

Competitiveness-the engine that boosts economic growth and revives the economy

Competitiveness is a concept that shows up in all aspects of human life, both at the micro level, in personal, social, and professional life, and at the macro level, linked to organizational and national competitiveness with long-term effects on global competitiveness. In this paper, we aim to address competitiveness in Romania in the current context, before and after the COVID-19 pandemic, highlighting its role in reviving the economy. While until the onset of the pandemic Romania's competitiveness performance was growing, more recently, because of the global health crisis, it dropped a few places, according to the Global Competitiveness Index report. In order to have a clear picture of the degree of competitiveness in Romania, we have presented a series of statistical data for the most relevant macroeconomic indicators for our study for the 2017-2022 timeframe: the global competitiveness index, the minimum wage, labor productivity, the evolution of real labor productivity per employed person, the economic growth rate, the unemployment rate, the inflation rate, the European innovation index, gross domestic expenditure on research and development, export of goods and services as a share of GDP, etc. The methodology used involves the use of quantitative techniques, performing an econometric analysis, and correlating how the most important macroeconomic indicators can influence the degree of competitiveness at both the national and international level. For the post-pandemic timeframe, the analysis switches focus, just as the economic reality did, looking at energy costs and energy use as determinants of competitiveness. Since notions like circular economy and sustainable development correlate being energy-efficient with being competitive, however, at the same time, the high cost of investments necessary for individual businesses and countries to switch from polluting energies to clean energies impedes or at the very least heavily impacts their ability to compete with entities that don't make that same switch, it becomes apparent that the energy market impacts competitiveness metrics. Competitiveness promotes valuable contributors and underpins performance at group and company level, and the effects from the micro level will propagate, with an emission effect, to the entire national economy with obvious implications at the international level, through real growth in macroeconomic indicators, increased labor productivity, increased economic performance (market share, export share, return on capital), raising living standards and economic and social wellbeing (life expectancy index, human development index, poverty rate), education (skills, knowledge, abilities, managerial and marketing skills, corporate culture), competitive potential (innovation, R&D, promotion), and in raising the Global Competitiveness Index by focusing on factors of production, efficiency, and innovation, etc.

Development of a Web Application for Telecommuting Capability Assessment Embedded with Fuzzy Model

By early 2020, COVID-19 has caused a global pandemic which led to an enormous number of challenges worldwide in various sectors. The Philippine government has implemented multiple quarantine guidelines and travel restrictions to ensure the people's health and safety. However, the International Labour Organization projected an initial economic and labor market disruption affecting 11 million workers, or about 25% of the Philippine workforce, due to the pandemic. Therefore, the government, thru the concerned agencies continues to encourage employers to implement alternative work plans such as a work-from-home (WFH) operation in compliance with the established regulations in line with existing laws and policies. In line with the telecommuting concept, various research has already been performed, however, some were regarded inconclusive and require further study. Hence, in this study, a Web application was developed along with an embedded fuzzy model to evaluate the telecommuting capability assessment of employees. The proposed web application with embedded fuzzy model is capable of providing capability assessment using the four main input variables which are also relatively characterized for possible telecommuting cost assessment. © 2022 IEEE.

How the COVID-19 Pandemic Changed the Work of Managers: Case Study of Economic Managers

The COVID-19 pandemic has fundamentally changed the business environment in many sectors. This study analyzes how the pandemic and the resulting global economic crisis have influenced changes in management. The aim was to explore changes in the dominance of management functions through the lens of economic managers in various companies. A case study approach was adopted to achieve the research objective. The sample file consisted of 238 managers from various operational fields in the Slovak Republic. A new methodology was created to measure the overall changes. An indicator of the rate of change in the dominance of the management functions was calculated. The index consists of two factors: changes in the time devoted to each management function during the pandemic, and changes in the importance of basic activities performed within the individual management function. This study provides an overview of all industries and describes the changes in the context of a company's revenue development during the pandemic. It was discovered that the centralization of strategic decision making was significantly underestimated. Up to 78.69% of managers working in companies whose revenues decreased during the pandemic increased the time devoted to planning, and 90.98% of them decreased the time devoted to leading people. © 2023 by the authors.

THE IMPACT OF DIGITAL MARKETING ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF TOURISM IN REPUBLIC OF ALBANIA

The tremendous growth of tourism in Albania in recent decades, made important the understanding of the role that digital marketing and mobile technology is playing in this field. Tourism in Albania is one of the most important economic sectors of the country, and is growing year after year. It is emphasized that digitalization is a new form of communication between producers and consumers of tourism services, becoming a source of competitive advantages for tourism organizations. The main goal of the study is to give us a clear overview of the use of the Internet, information technologies and digital marketing in Albania. For the realization of this study, we used a methodology that combines primary data with secondary ones. The research was conducted through questionnaires that were sent to Albanian travel agencies via email. The questionnaire contains 17 questions, and was sent to 150 travel agencies, of which 102 agencies responded. Regarding the study, digital marketing plays an important role in improving the image of Albanian tourism throughout the world. It has created facilities in the way of doing marketing and reducing the costs of businesses. Through digital marketing, travel agencies have managed to promote our country online, personalize services and, above all, be closer to customers. The research found that the most effective digital marketing tools used by the agencies are Instagram and Facebook.