Contemporary Economic Issues Research Articles

Introduction to the special issue on “Analysis of contemporary economic issues”

Introduction to the special issue on “Analysis of contemporary economic issues”

Editorial of the special issue on contemporary issues in tourism economics

Editorial of the special issue on contemporary issues in tourism economics

Contemporary Issues in Defense and Peace Economics: An Introduction to the Symposium

Contemporary Issues in Defense and Peace Economics: An Introduction to the Symposium

Who accepts Savage’s axiom now?

We report the results of an experimental test of whether preaching the normative appeal of the sure-thing principle leads decision-makers to make choices that satisfy it. We use Allais-type decision problems to observe the incentive-compatible choices of 147 subjects, which either violate the sure-thing principle or adhere to it. Subjects are presented with normative arguments that support the counterfactual behaviour and then repeat their decisions. We observe violations of the sure-thing principle are robust to its normative justification. This result replicates a famous small-sample observation using hypothetical tasks that was published by Paul Slovic and Amos Tversky almost half a century ago. We argue that this finding is as relevant now as it was then and that their design can be usefully applied to address contemporary issues in behavioural economics.

Communicating Friedrich Engels's return to Manchester: Arts and cultural event, history lesson, or call to action?

There is increasing interest by academics and mainstream media in the relevance of Friedrich Engels's writings for understanding contemporary economic and political issues. Still, Engels's writing about the adverse effects of the capitalist economic system on the health and well-being of workers, the environment, and society in general remains marginalized. Two recent art projects which saw the installation of statues of Engels in Manchester, the city in which he lived and wrote The Condition of the Working Class in England, have created avenues by which Engels and his writings can be communicated to a larger audience. In this paper, we explore how filmmaker Phil Collins's finding and placement of a Soviet-era statue of Engels in Manchester has been communicated as an arts and cultural event, a history lesson, and a call to action to right the injustices generated by the capitalist economic system. The greatest number of communications were reviews and notices of the installation or documentary as arts and cultural events. The arts and cultural and historical aspects of Engels's return to Manchester were dominant across all communications while calls for action were common in the mainstream news reports and blogs. References to capitalism and its effects were seen in mainstream news reports and reviews and arts notices. We conclude that the involvement of the arts and cultural community in political work may be an important means of promoting responses to increasingly intolerable economic, political, and social environments.

Transformation of Energy Markets: Description, Modeling of Functioning Mechanisms and Determining Development Trends

One of the key contemporary economic and social issues today is the global energy transition [...]

ECURITIZATION OF INTERNAL DEBTS WITH REFERENCE TO SAUDI ARABIA

Securitization of debts is considered as a modern financial instrument and one of the activities which is closely linked to the stock market. This activity has become especially prominent as a phenomenon in the 1980s of last century in the United States as several US banks have endeavored and tended to securitize their debts. Although securitization is a modern idea in the international financing economies, it has become a phenomenon imposing itself on the stock markets and its effects spread over the fiscal and monetary policies either at the domestic level or the international one, a matter which pays the attention to investigate into this phenomenon and define its advantages and disadvantages. The research aims to determine and define the concept of securitization as a modern phenomenon through an overview of its development, motivations, techniques and types. In addition, the research shows the main steps in the path of securitizing debts and clarifies the advantages and disadvantages resulted from the process of securitization. The research is based on the essential hypothesis that securitization is a modern phenomenon requires a long period of time for its possible implementation in the Arab banks. The research adopts the descriptive and analytical technique by describing and analyzing the securitization phenomenon as it is considered as one of the contemporary economic issues, which has a great importance at the levels of governments, companies and individuals? The research includes six parts besides the introduction. Finally, the research draws a number of concluded results and policy implications.

Higher Education Challenges: Developing Skills to Address Contemporary Economic and Sustainability Issues

This paper aims to provide brief insight into the economic and sustainability challenges that higher education institutions are facing today globally. It provides a theoretical overview of key trends and challenges of higher education, relevant for the development of a sustainable and resilient European economy and society. We support our theoretical proposition by a bibliometric analysis of previous studies dealing with the 21st-century business skills and the sustainability outlook to be produced by the higher education sector. Our main findings are related to a significant rise of researchers’ interest in the topic, along with the multi-disciplinary approach being emphasized, as the academic community seeks how to contribute to the pressing issues of ensuring the integration of sustainability with employers’ requirements, related to new skill profiles, relevant for the European transformation toward a more resilient, digital, green economy and society. We evaluate the proposed course of research and provide recommendations to researchers and other higher education stakeholders interested in promoting this educational sector’s sustainability and relevance in the 21st century.

Adaptation against Myth: Gary Owen’s Iphigenia in Splott and the Violence of Austerity

This article explores, from the standpoint of socio-political myth-criticism, the processes of revision and adaptation carried out in Gary Owen’s 2015 play Iphigenia in Splott. The play, a dramatic monologue composed in the rhythms of slam poetry, rewrites the classical Greek myth of Iphigenia in order to denounce the profound injustice of the sacrifices demanded by austerity policies in Europe—and more specifically, in Britain—in the recession following the financial crash of 2008. Reassessing contemporary social, economic and political issues that have resulted in the marginalisation and dehumanisation of the British working class, this study probes the dramatic and mythical artefacts in Owen’s harrowing monologue by looking back to Euripides’s Iphigenia in Aulis, the classical play which inspires the title of Owen’s piece and which serves as the mythical and literary background for the story of Effie. The aim is to demonstrate how Owen’s innovative adaptation of the sacrifice of Iphigenia, slurred out in verse, resentful and agonising, speaks out a desperate plea against myth, that is, against a dominant social ethos that legitimises its own violence against the most vulnerable—those who, as in the classical myth, suffer the losses that keep our boats afloat.

Sustainability of Household Food Waste Reduction: A Fresh Insight on Youth's Emotional and Cognitive Behaviors.

The sustainability of food waste is one of the most important contemporary economic, social, and environmental issues that encompasses useful academic, practical, and policymaking implications. Under the domain of sustainability, food waste is a serious global challenge with a growing public, political, and corporate concern. Existing literature regarding the sensitization of consumers and the promotion of waste cautious behaviors still has much room for improvement in household waste. To bridge the gap in the literature, this study identifies and examines determinants of young consumers’ food waste reduction behavior in households. Using a sample size of 391 young consumers of household food products from Pakistan, a full-scaled administrative survey is conducted, and our hypotheses are empirically tested by using the PLS structural modeling equation. Our findings reveal significant impacts from both cognitive and emotional aspects on sustainable food waste reduction behavior. Our results have several important implications for policymakers and all the stakeholders, especially for marketers, including advertising strategies, policies to mitigate the impact of food waste, and the development of educational programs related to food waste.

Stochastic and club convergence of ecological footprint: An empirical analysis for different income group of countries

The convergence of environmental pollution is one of the contemporary issues in economics. Indeed, most of the long-run climate projections and future predictions of environmental conditions are based on convergence presumption. The pioneer studies initially focused on the convergence of carbon emission per capita, yet convergence of ecological footprint per capita, accepted as a more comprehensive environmental degradation indicator than carbon emission per capita, has been begun to examine by researchers as well. The main point of this paper is to examine the stochastic and club convergence of ecological footprint among different income groups of countries from 1961 to 2016 by a panel stationarity test with smooth shifts and log-t methods. According to the empirical findings, (a) cross-section dependence exists in all income groups, (b) the findings of the panel stationarity test with smooth shifts favored divergence, (c) there are several convergent clubs among different income groups. The existence of club convergence proposes that environmental policies should consider the different convergence paths associated with club membership.

Georgescu-Roegen's Flow-Fund Theory of Production in Retrospect

This paper provides a synthetic account of Georgescu-Roegen's flow-fund theory, as a contribution to the history of ecological economics. It reconstitutes Georgescu-Roegen's perspective on production, and its relationships with other frameworks, such as the neoclassical production function and input-output tables. The overall purpose is to clearly establish the foundations of the flow-fund theory, and to introduce the research perspectives it opens for ecological economics. The paper puts particular emphasis on the relationships between the flow-fund framework and two other aspects of Georgescu-Roegen's thought. First, his methodological perspective on economics, and the role of mathematical models, allows for a better understanding of the foundations of the flow-fund theory. Second, this framework incorporates Georgescu-Roegen's interest in the physical dimension of the economic process and the implications of the laws of thermodynamics. Overall, the paper concludes that the flow-fund theory has solid foundations, and thus represents a credible alternative to standard theories of production. However, in order to show how this framework can shed light on contemporary issues in ecological economics, more applications are needed, especially at the theoretical level. The main challenge for future research is to develop such applications while trying to be faithful to the foundations of the flow-fund theory.

Defining Suburbs: An Evaluation and Comparison of Four Methods

Suburbs are currently the focus of much research because they are the arena for many contemporary social, economic, and political issues. Yet definitions of what constitutes a suburb remain elusive, and there is no consensus in the literature on best practice approaches. This article presents a side-by-side comparison of four methods of defining suburbs for quantitative research (Cooke and Marchant 2006; Hanlon and Vicino 2007; Kneebone and Berube 2013; Anacker, Niedt, and Kwon 2017). The comparison was conducted with data from the one hundred largest metropolitan areas in the United States using multivariate analysis of variance. The four methods were evaluated based on how well they capture the racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic variability between urban and suburban areas and within suburban areas themselves. The results indicate that political boundaries of the inner city and regional variation in metropolitan structure are important characteristics that need to be considered when selecting a suburb definition for quantitative, comparative research on suburbs. This article highlights the strength and weaknesses of each method and recommends which method works best in various geographical contexts.

Contemporary Issues in Business and Economics in Vietnam and Other Asian Emerging Markets

This Special Issue publishes high quality papers on contemporary issues in business and economics in Vietnam and other Asian emerging markets. These papers were accepted and presented at the 2019 Vietnam’s Business and Economics Research Conference (VBER2019) organized by Ho Chi Minh City Open University, Vietnam in July 2019. Emerging issues in business and economics from Vietnam and other emerging markets in the Asian region have been addressed from various angles, from economics, finance, and statistics to management science. Five out of the 14 studies in this book were conducted to investigate various issues in relation to the Asian region such as the exchange rate regime in Asia, financial inclusion, and financial development and income inequality in Asian emerging markets. Seven studies were conducted in response to emerging business and economic issues in Vietnam such as fiscal decentralization, urbanization, foreign direct investment, and corporate financial distress. Other papers even considered various relevant aspects from the United States and Europe to the Asian region including double taxation treaties and agricultural shocks to the oil price. The findings from these papers are useful for practitioners, policymakers, and academics.

Fundamental utilitarianism and intergenerational equity with extinction discounting

Ramsey famously condemned discounting “future enjoyments” as “ethically indefensible”. Suppes enunciated an equity criterion which, when social choice is utilitarian, implies giving equal weight to all individuals’ utilities. By contrast, Arrow (Contemporary economic issues. International Economic Association Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London, 1999a; Discounting and Intergenerational Effects, Resources for the Future Press, Washington DC, 1999b) accepted, perhaps reluctantly, what he called Koopmans’ (Econometrica 28(2):287–309, 1960) “strong argument” implying that no equitable preference ordering exists for a sufficiently unrestricted domain of infinite utility streams. Here we derive an equitable utilitarian objective for a finite population based on a version of the Vickrey–Harsanyi original position, where there is an equal probability of becoming each person. For a potentially infinite population facing an exogenous stochastic process of extinction, an equitable extinction biased original position requires equal conditional probabilities, given that the individual’s generation survives the extinction process. Such a position is well-defined if and only if survival probabilities decline fast enough for the expected total number of individuals who can ever live to be finite. Then, provided that each individual’s utility is bounded both above and below, maximizing expected “extinction discounted” total utility—as advocated, inter alia, by the Stern Review on climate change—provides a coherent and dynamically consistent equitable objective, even when the population size of each generation can be chosen.

ECONOMIC IMPACTS RESULTING FROM THE PROBLEMS OF FOREIGN DIRECT INVESTMENT IN POLLUTING INDUSTRIES - AN EMPIRICAL STUDY

The relationship between foreign direct investment and the environment is one of the most important contemporary economic issues because of its dangerous environmental effects. Despite the positive aspects of this relationship, it is not without the negative impact that causes serious damage at the national level. Although many thinkers consider FDI to be an important factor in economic development, we see it as a phenomenon with negative environmental impacts, sometimes making it a negative factor in the development process. The problem of the study is the contradiction between the process of attracting foreign direct investment and long-term environmental protection policies, because foreign direct investment flows may lead to the depletion of natural resources, the disruption of their balance and the pollution of the environment. The protection of the environment is to rationalize the use of natural resources without pollution and preserve them for future generations This means that there may be a conflict between foreign direct investment flows in terms of the use and conservation of natural resources, on one hand, and higher production costs in the case of environmental conditions, on the other hand. In light of the foregoing, this study examines the problem of the extent of the conflict between the process of attracting foreign direct investment and long-term environmental protection policies, especially in the petroleum sector as the most economic sector in relation to environmental policies. This study examines the impact of environmental pollution on the oil sector within the Arab Republic of Egypt, expressed by the emission of carbon dioxide (CO2) on foreign direct investment flows during the study period (1980/2015). The carbon dioxide emissions variable was used as an indicator of environmental policy and some other independent variables. The linear regression model was used to measure environmental impact. The results of the study showed a positive and significant relationship between carbon dioxide emissions and foreign direct investment. When the CO2 emissions increase by 1%, foreign direct investment increases by 3.39% at a significant level of 10%. The research uses the extrapolation method through the study of previous studies, scientific books and scientific periodicals, in order to identify the problem in question; and analytical method to analyze the data that prove the validity or lack of validity of research hypotheses based on the research. (1980-2015). The tools used are descriptive analysis tools through the theoretical framework of research and quantitative tools through the use of the linear regression model. One of the most important recommendations of the research is that the Egyptian government should work to attract more foreign direct investment instead of relying on loans and aid to fill the deficit in the budget by providing more incentives and facilities that attract investments on scientific bases, To implement them, and in a manner not inconsistent with the national interest. Supporting political and security stability is also an important and vital requirement for establishing a safe environment for investment in political influences that plays an important role in shaping the economic climate in general and investment in particular.

V-ta Međunarodna naučna konferencija: Contemporary issues in economics, business and management - EBM 2018. 9-10. novembar 2018, Ekonomski fakultet Univerziteta u Kragujevcu, Kragujevac

V-ta Međunarodna naučna konferencija: Contemporary issues in economics, business and management - EBM 2018. 9-10. novembar 2018, Ekonomski fakultet Univerziteta u Kragujevcu, Kragujevac

Contemporary issues in economics, business and management: EBM 2018, November 09-10, 2018, Faculty of Economics, University of Kragujevac, Kragujevac, the Republic of Serbia

Contemporary issues in economics, business and management: EBM 2018, November 09-10, 2018, Faculty of Economics, University of Kragujevac, Kragujevac, the Republic of Serbia

Shiro Sugihara, Nature, Human Beings, and Labour

Introduction by Shoichi Hashimoto Shiro Sugiharaʼs “Nature, Human Beings, and Labour,” translated here into Eng-lish, was originally published in Japanese in J. S. Miru to Gendai （J. S. Mill and the Present Day）, 1980, Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, and reprinted in Volume 2, 2003, of The Works of Shiro Sugihara, 4 Volumes, 2003-, Tokyo: Fujiwara Sho-ten. Shiro Sugihara （1920-2009） began his study of the history of economic thought with a comparison of Karl Marx and J. S. Mill. While he does not ex-plicitly mention it in any of his writings, in this he may have been influenced by his mentor, Kei Shibata （1902-1986）. Shibata had been attempting to further develop Marxʼs theory of reproduction using the methods of general equilibrium theory. While carefully tracing the process of development of Marxʼs economic thought, by explicating Marxʼs crit-icism of Mill Sugihara played a major role in the post-war Japanese movement to re-evaluate Mill, who had historically received only low appraisal. Sugihara presented Millʼs stance of engaging with contemporary economic issues in a positive light, an approach that is given full expression in the essay translated here. While Japanese readers would not require any explanation regarding Sawako Ariyoshi （1931-1984）, the novelist who appears at the start of the es-say, she was a writer who raised new social issues such as synthetic pollution, food damage, issues related to the elderly, and so on, that have since become common knowledge, posing them to society in a series of works written in rapid succession that all went on to become bestsellers. As a result of the nature of her writing she was ignored by various literary awards.

Airline Economics: An Introductory Survey

This paper has surveyed the topics in the field of airline economics, including areas such as airline costs and production, airline demand and revenue management, airline financial issues, and airline profitability. The debates in these areas are explored from an economic perspective to help readers understand contemporary economic issues and challenges facing the airline industry, and to provide the airline management with an economic way of thinking in dealing with these issues. This paper also aims to serve a purpose for air transport researchers to consider some under-researched areas where definitive answers to some interesting issues are still lacking. These include, among others, effective ways of reducing fuel cost risks such as fuel hedging and the adoption of new technologies, development of non-price competition strategies that can be used by airlines to differentiate their products, establishing new marketing strategies, and redesigning airline networks when surface transportation modes (e.g., high-speed rail) become a threat.