Digital Economy, Sustainable Economic Transformation, and Regional Development

Dear Colleagues,

We are pleased to invite you to this Special Issue centred on digital economy, sustainable economic transformation, and regional development. New technologies and business models of digital economy are currently supporting sustainable transformation in many ways (Zarifis et al. 2024; Zarifis, 2024), with many successes in this area that we can learn from but also many failures. The results are also not uniform across different sectors of the economy and different parts of the world, with some regions doing far better than others (Kozar & Warwas, 2025).

Given this background, the aim of this Special Issue is to bring together the practical lessons of such successes and failures, as well as develop the theory in these and related areas. Research on how new technologies, processes, and business models strengthen economic sustainability and other forms of sustainability are encouraged.

In this Special Issue, original research articles and reviews are welcome. Research areas may include (but are not limited to) how the following relate to sustainability:

• Digital transformation trends;
• Regional differences in the digital economy;
• Specific digital transformation successes;
• Specific digital transformation failures;
• Cross-border e-commerce;
• How Fintech or Insurtech are driving digital transformation;
• How Fintech or Insurtech affect a specific region or sector of the economy.

I look forward to receiving your contributions.

References

Zarifis A. (2024) ‘Leadership in Fintech builds trust and reduces vulnerability more when combined with leadership in sustainability’, Sustainability, 16, 5757, pp.1-13. https://doi.org/10.3390/su16135757

Kozar L.J. & Warwas I. (2025) ‘Green Finance and Digital Transformation: A Bibliometric Analysis of Research Trends’, Procedia Computer Science, vol.270, pp.4353-4362. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.procs.2025.09.560

Zarifis A., Efthymiou L. & Cheng X. (2024) ‘Sustainable digital transformation in finance, tourism, transport, entertainment and social innovation’. In Zarifis A., Ktoridou D., Efthymiou L. & Cheng X. (ed.) Business digital transformation: Selected cases from industry leaders, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp.1-16. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33665-2_1

Dr. Alex Zarifis
Guest Editor

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