Search Results (2,689)

Sustainable environmental performance (SEP) among small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) has attracted researchers and practitioners’ attention. The achievement of sustainable environmental performance has been largely dependent on the prevailing external ecosystem conditions. Yet in emerging economies such as Ghana, there is limited research and evidence on the extent to which external ecosystem resources influence sustainable environmental performance. This study aims to investigate how external entrepreneurial ecosystem resources including policy, access to finance, market availability, institutional support, human capital and culture influence the sustainable environmental performance (SEP) of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) using sample data from Ghana. A total of 386 SME manufacturing and service firms were sampled to participate. Structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) tested a multi-theory framework grounded in the Resource-based View (RBV), Resource Dependency Theory (RDT) and Stakeholder Theory. The results indicate that policy, finance, institutional support, and markets exert significant positive effects on SMEs’ SEP. Culture and human capital were found to have a weaker contribution to SMEs’ SEP. The novelty of this study lies in empirically demonstrating the primacy of ecosystem structural levers over softer ecosystem factors in driving SME sustainable environmental performance, thereby offering a new explanatory hierarchy of ecosystem drivers for sustainability in developing economies. We advance the RBV, RDT and the Stakeholder Theory by showing that external ecosystem resources act as critical environmental enablers for SMEs in developing economies. The findings offer globally relevant policy insights for advancing SDGs 12 (Responsible Consumption and Production) and 13 (Climate Action) through targeted ecosystem interventions. Full article

Background: Sustainability-oriented higher education research has increasingly foregrounded staff wellbeing, motivational practice, and instructional continuity as central to long-term educational effectiveness. However, empirical evidence remains limited for university English language teaching (ELT) instructors operating within fragile, post-conflict, and regionally uneven systems such as Libya. In particular, little is known about whether job satisfaction is translated into motivational teaching behaviour through teacher self-efficacy, or how such relationships vary across demographic and institutional contexts. Addressing this gap is critical for understanding human-capital sustainability in higher education systems facing structural instability. Methods: A quantitative cross-sectional online survey was conducted using Google Forms and regionally stratified convenience sampling across Libya’s Western, Eastern, Central, and Southern regions. The final sample comprised 385 eligible university ELT instructors, including both full-time and part-time staff. Data were collected using three validated instruments: an adapted Teacher Job Satisfaction Questionnaire (21 items), a teacher self-efficacy scale (12 items), and a motivational teaching strategies scale (18 items). All measures demonstrated satisfactory internal consistency. Data analysis was performed using IBM SPSS Statistics v29, applying descriptive statistics, Pearson correlation analysis, regression-based mediation analysis with bootstrapping, and group comparisons using independent-samples t-tests and one-way ANOVA. Results: The sample included 57.14% male and 42.86% female instructors, with 62.86% employed full-time and the majority reporting 6–10 years of teaching experience (51.95%). Mean scores indicated moderate levels of job satisfaction (M = 3.32, SD = 0.94) and teacher self-efficacy (M = 3.03, SD = 0.68), alongside high levels of motivational teaching strategies (M = 4.15, SD = 0.87). Job satisfaction was positively associated with motivational teaching strategies (r = 0.61, p < 0.001) and teacher self-efficacy (r = 0.49, p < 0.001), while teacher self-efficacy was also positively related to motivational strategies (r = 0.53, p < 0.001). Mediation analysis revealed a significant partial mediating effect of teacher self-efficacy (indirect effect = 0.19, 95% CI [0.12, 0.28]). Significant differences were observed across demographic variables (age, gender, teaching experience) and institutional characteristics (employment status and university region). Conclusions: The findings indicate that sustainable teaching practice in Libyan higher education has been jointly shaped by organisational satisfaction and teachers’ capability beliefs. These results underscore the importance of context-sensitive institutional policies that support both structural working conditions and psychological resources. Future research could extend this evidence through longitudinal and mixed-methods designs to deepen understanding of sustainability-oriented teaching dynamics in fragile higher education systems. Full article

This paper investigates how climate shelter initiatives implemented in European cities interact with National Adaptation Strategies (NAS) and National Adaptation Plans (NAP), assessing the degree of vertical integration between local practices and national climate adaptation frameworks. As urban heat increasingly threatens public health and exacerbates socio-spatial inequalities, climate shelters, conceived as networks of safe, accessible public spaces providing thermal comfort and social support, have emerged as innovative adaptation tools; however, their recognition within national policy architectures remains uneven across the EU. This study adopts a qualitative–comparative design structured in three phases: (i) a systematic review of NAS and NAP in the 27 EU Member States through keyword screening and classification of references as explicit, implicit, or absent; (ii) a mapping of climate shelter initiatives across 244 NUTS-2 capital cities; and (iii) an integrative cross-analysis of national frameworks and local implementation patterns. According to our results, only 4 Member States explicitly refer to climate shelters, 11 include implicit references, and 12 show no recognition, while 88 cities implement 97 initiatives, predominantly based on Nature-based Solutions and schoolyard transformations; 5 recurring governance configurations reveal bottom-up, top-down, and hybrid dynamics, demonstrating that local experimentation can anticipate, complement, and potentially reshape national adaptation policies. Full article

Corporate sustainability programs in agri-food systems have expanded dramatically, yet emissions, deforestation, hunger, and land concentration intensify. Why does corporate sustainability systematically fail to deliver transformation? This paper applies Commonist Value Theory (CVT) to show that this failure is structural, not contingent. CVT distinguishes between True Value, the life-supporting qualities that sustain human and more-than-human flourishing, and Fetish Value, abstracted forms oriented toward capital accumulation. CVT traces how corporate sustainability programs convert the former into the latter through ‘decommonization’: the perversion and enclosure of shared life-supporting relations. Drawing on investor analyses, carbon market assessments, and critical scholarship, this paper demonstrates that corporate sustainability programs function as civilizing meta-mechanisms. Rather than transforming food systems, they stabilize existing arrangements by absorbing critique and redirecting transformative energies into regime-compatible forms. Farmers’ knowledge is captured as proprietary data, living ecosystems are reduced to tradeable metrics, collaborative relationships are fragmented by corporate platforms, and movements for genuine alternatives are channeled into supply chain optimization. The analysis concludes that corporate sustainability cannot deliver genuine transformation because its structural function is to stabilize rather than supersede the current value regime. Genuine transformation requires commons-based alternatives from below and political–legislative shifts from above that structurally constrain decommonization. Full article

In the digital economy era, how to effectively leverage data elements to promote green productivity has become a critical issue. The Big Data Comprehensive Pilot Zone (BDCPZ) serves as an institutional arrangement to promote data circulation, governance, and efficient allocation. Utilizing panel data from Chinese A-share listed firms spanning 2012–2023, this study treats the 2016 establishment of BDCPZ as a quasi-natural experiment and employs a difference-in-differences (DID) model to investigate how improvements in the data institutional environment induced by BDCPZ affect enterprise green total factor productivity (GTFP). Empirical results indicate that the establishment of BDCPZ significantly enhances GTFP, with results remaining robust across specification tests. Heterogeneity analyses demonstrate that these positive effects are more pronounced among non-heavily polluting enterprises, high-technology enterprises, and enterprises in less competitive markets. Mechanism analyses suggest that data-oriented institutional reforms primarily enhance GTFP through innovation incentives, human capital accumulation, and industrial structure upgrading. Furthermore, superior managerial efficiency and stronger managerial equity ownership amplify these positive effects. This study provides firm-level empirical evidence on the relationship between data-oriented institutional reforms and GTFP enhancement, contributing to the literature on data-driven institutional reforms and green productivity, and policy implications for optimizing data element utilization and promoting sustainable development. Full article

This paper introduces Historical State Reconstruction, a novel framework for low-latency financial decision-making using Large Language Models. While agentic systems have demonstrated potential in synthesizing complex financial narratives, they typically rely on Retrieval-Augmented Generation or memory-based architectures. These paradigms introduce significant latency and risk look-ahead bias during real-time inference, rendering them unsuitable for high-frequency trading environments where milliseconds determine profitability. This proposed framework resolves this bottleneck by decoupling the heavy computational cost of context acquisition from the latency-sensitive critical path of decision-making. We propose a system that proactively compiles unstructured regulatory filings (10-K, 10-Q, 8-K) into a structured, bitemporal database. By pre-computing complex state facets, such as financial health ratios, governance structures, and insider trading signals offline, the system allows trading agents to “time travel” to a reconstructed state at any historical moment t with $O(1)$ snapshot retrieval plus $O(k)$ delta application complexity. We implement this approach on the top 50 companies in the S&P 500 ranked by market capitalization, processing over 12,000 filings to demonstrate a pipeline that transforms high-dimensional financial narratives into compact, prompt-ready context. Our evaluation shows that the system reduces context retrieval latency by over 97% compared to traditional baselines while achieving a 300:1 compression ratio for financial health data. Furthermore, the bitemporal architecture guarantees strict temporal integrity, eliminating the risk of data leakage in backtesting and satisfying the reproducibility requirements of regulatory frameworks like SR 11-7. Full article

This study investigates the determinants of capital structure in Moroccan agricultural SMEs, with particular emphasis on the distinction between interest-bearing debt and non-interest-bearing liabilities in a context characterized by persistent credit constraints. While traditional capital structure theories typically treat debt as a homogeneous aggregate, such an approach may obscure important financing dynamics in financially constrained environments. Using a panel dataset of 52 agricultural SMEs observed over the period 2017–2022, the analysis employs a correlated random effects model to control for unobserved heterogeneity. The results indicate a negative relationship between profitability and both total and short-term debt, consistent with the predictions of the Pecking Order Theory. Liquidity, asset tangibility, and firm size are negatively associated with non-interest-bearing current liabilities, suggesting that trade-based financing may serve as an adjustment mechanism when access to formal credit is limited. In contrast, long-term debt is only weakly explained by firm-level characteristics, pointing to potential supply-side constraints in agricultural credit markets. Overall, the findings suggest that financing patterns in agricultural SMEs appear to be more closely associated with credit market imperfections than with optimal trade-off considerations. By distinguishing between different debt components, this study contributes to the literature by highlighting the importance of debt composition when analyzing capital structure in emerging and financially constrained economies. Full article

Digital transformation reshapes firms into more digital, data-driven, and customer-centric organizations. Because it often supports innovation, firms are widely expected to benefit from higher performance and productivity. However, it remains unclear whether higher national levels of digital integration translate into higher aggregate enterprise productivity. This study adopts a socio-technical and ecosystem perspective to examine the relationship between digital technology integration and enterprise labor productivity across the 27 EU member states, while also considering the role of key ecosystem enablers. A balanced country-year panel of data (N = 162) was constructed from Eurostat Structural Business Statistics on the apparent labor productivity of total enterprises, together with Digital Economy and Society Index (DESI) indicators on the integration of digital technology, human capital, connectivity, and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita, covering the period from 2017 to 2022. To this end, fixed-effects regression models were estimated using robust standard errors clustered by country and combined with correlated random effects (CRE/Mundlak) decomposition. This methodological approach was adopted to distinguish short-run within-country dynamics from persistent between-country differences. The study contributes to ecosystem-level DESI research by using this distinction to assess how country-level digital integration is associated with enterprise productivity. The fixed-effects results provide no evidence that year-to-year changes in digital technology integration, on their own, are associated with higher enterprise productivity. Additionally, no statistically significant interaction effect was observed with either human capital or digital connectivity. By contrast, GDP per capita was found to be a robust positive predictor of enterprise productivity. The CRE/Mundlak results indicate that the majority of between-country productivity differences are attributable to differences in economic development. Furthermore, there is evidence of a positive association between the average level of digital technology integration and human capital. Taken together, these findings suggest that national digital technology integration reflects business environment conditions at the ecosystem level. While it may create opportunities for enterprise business model innovation, its productivity implications are more likely to emerge gradually through stronger absorptive capacity and complementary capabilities. Consequently, the study suggests that enterprise digital transformation policies should be aligned with investments in digital skills and broadband infrastructure. These policies should also support process redesign, greater interoperability, and the implementation of AI-enabled technologies. Full article

Against the backdrop of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), innovation-driven development serves as the core engine of long-term sustainable economic development, while resource misallocation has emerged as a critical bottleneck constraining sustainable innovation and coordinated regional development. Grounded in the neoclassical theory of factor allocation, this paper incorporates capital misallocation, labor misallocation and the digital economy into a unified analytical framework. Using China’s provincial panel data spanning 2001 to 2024, we systematically investigate the impact effects, underlying transmission mechanisms and regional heterogeneity of resource misallocation and the digital economy on scientific and technological innovation through benchmark regression, robustness tests and heterogeneity analysis. The results show that resource misallocation exerts a significant and robust inhibitory effect on technological innovation, with the inhibitory effect of capital misallocation being more pronounced than that of labor misallocation. The digital economy has a significant positive driving effect on technological innovation, and it can also indirectly boost technological innovation by alleviating resource misallocation, with its mitigating effect on resource misallocation presenting obvious structural differences and a stronger correction effect on capital misallocation than on labor misallocation. Economic growth and technological innovation form a mutually reinforcing “growth-innovation” virtuous cycle. In addition, the innovation effects of both resource misallocation and the digital economy exhibit significant regional heterogeneity, where the digital economy’s innovation-driven effect and misallocation-mitigating effect are notably stronger in eastern China than in the central and western regions. The theoretical contribution of this paper lies in constructing a transmission mechanism framework of “digital economy to resource misallocation to technological innovation”, which enriches the connotations of factor allocation and innovation theories. Its practical value is to provide policymakers with differentiated development paths for the digital economy and optimization strategies for factor allocation, thus facilitating the effective implementation of the innovation-driven development strategy. Full article

Net energy—defined as the energy remaining after accounting for the energy required for resource extraction and processing—shapes the fundamental physical constraints of energy systems. Although the extended Energy Return on Investment (EROIext) incorporates extraction, refining, transportation, and end-use infrastructure, its long-term structural dynamics remain underexplored. This study applies a Single-Cycle Lotka–Volterra (SCLV) model to examine interactions between resource stock, capital accumulation, and EROIext in the global petroleum system. The model is calibrated using historical data from 1965 to 2012 to explore structural trajectories under simplified assumptions. Results indicate that production peaks endogenously around 2041 within the model framework, while EROIext declines and falls below unity by 2081 under the assumed structural relationships. These years represent model-derived structural outcomes rather than deterministic forecasts. Capital stock reaches its maximum at the same energetic threshold (EROIext = 1), marking an internally generated transition in the resource–capital system. An entropy-based indicator is introduced as a thermodynamic proxy mirroring the decline in energetic efficiency within the modeled subsystem. These findings show how energetic reinvestment constraints generate endogenous peak and threshold behavior in resource-dependent systems. The analysis offers a structural perspective on interactions between depletion, capital accumulation, and net energy under simplified thermodynamic assumptions. These results provide insights into long-term structural constraints of the oil system, which may inform energy planning and policy discussions under conditions of declining net energy availability. Full article

The article examines the persistent stability of the weighted average cost of capital (WACC) disclosed by German DAX40 companies despite substantial declines in risk-free interest rates between 2004 and 2021. While theory suggests that WACC should reflect lower risk-free interest rates and decline as well with falling government bond yields, empirical evidence reveals minimal adjustment in reported WACC figures. Disclosed WACC of DAX40 companies remains between 7% and 8% as the yield of the ten-year German government bond fell from 4.1% to −0.2%. This study employs quantitative analyses to investigate whether systematic increases in risk exposure can explain this phenomenon. Using capital market data spanning from 2000 to 2023, we analyze five risk dimensions: systematic risk (beta factors), overall market volatility, risk aversion (lambda factors), earnings risk, and financial structure risk. Bootstrap analyses reveal a 41.5% reduction in beta factor variance, while volatility analyses demonstrate declining market risk exposure. The market price of risk analysis does not reveal definite findings. Earnings risk measures indicate improved financial stability, and debt ratios show modest declines. These findings suggest that observable risk parameters cannot explain persistent WACC levels, indicating a disconnect between theoretical WACC calculations and practitioner applications in investment project decision-making following value-based management principles. Full article

Emotional labor is inherently intensive in preschool teaching, and it is often conceptualized as resource loss, which may heighten burnout and hinder early childhood education quality-improvement initiatives. Accordingly, this study shifts attention to the resource-enhancing potential of authentic emotional displays and examines the mechanisms linking authentic displays to preschool teachers’ burnout, with psychological capital and family–work conflict as key mediators. Using cross-sectional survey data from 234 preschool teachers in Jiangxi Province, China, and structural equation modeling, we observed that authentic emotional displays were associated with lower burnout primarily through psychological capital, with an additional sequential association via psychological capital and family–work conflict, whereas the pathway through family–work conflict alone was not supported. These findings suggest a potential role of authentic emotional displays in relation to psychological resources and family-to-work spillover, extending emotional labor research and providing insights for interventions aimed at reducing preschool teacher burnout. The study challenges the prevailing resource loss perspective of emotional labor, clarifies psychological capital as a central mechanism linking authenticity to cross-domain strain and teacher well-being, and emphasizes the importance of interventions that strengthen psychological resources and boundary management. Full article

Disaster resilience has become a key focus of risk reduction efforts, but measuring it remains complex due to differences in hazards, development paths, and data systems. This study modifies the Baseline Resilience Indicators for Communities (BRIC) approach, based on the Disaster Resilience of Place (DROP) framework, to evaluate community resilience in Serbia and highlight regional differences. An initial list of 186 indicators was created from international BRIC studies and resilience research, then tailored to Serbian conditions through contextual review and data checks. Indicators were normalized using min–max scaling (0–1), and indicators with negative orientation were inverted to ensure that higher values indicate greater resilience. Scores for each dimension were calculated as equally weighted averages across six areas: social, economic, social capital, institutional, infrastructural, and environmental. The overall BRIC index was derived as the average of these dimension scores. Z-scores facilitated the classification of resilience levels and the comparison between regions. The results show clear regional disparities: in the complete model, Belgrade has the highest resilience (BRIC = 0.557), while Southern and Eastern Serbia have the lowest (BRIC = 0.414). Patterns across dimensions show that Belgrade excels in social and economic capacity but lags in environmental indicators; Vojvodina has the strongest institutional and infrastructural capacity; and Šumadija and Western Serbia perform best in environmental indicators. Correlation analysis revealed multicollinearity, leading to the removal of 14 redundant indicators and the refinement to a set of 57. After this reduction, regional rankings change, with Vojvodina (BRIC = 0.530) and Šumadija and Western Serbia (BRIC = 0.522) emerging as higher-resilience regions, while Southern and Eastern Serbia remain the least resilient (BRIC = 0.456). The adapted BRIC-DROP model offers a clear, locally relevant tool for mapping resilience and guiding targeted policies in Serbia, enabling region-specific efforts to address structural resilience gaps. Full article

Smallholder farming remains a critical livelihood source for rural communities in South Africa, particularly in the Eastern Cape Province. However, cropland abandonment has become an escalating concern, undermining food security, household incomes, and the long-term sustainability of agricultural systems. This study assessed the socio-economic and climate-related factors influencing cropland abandonment in the former homelands of Transkei. A mixed-methods approach was used, combining a quantitative survey, a qualitative focus group discussion, and a key informant interview. Data were analysed using descriptive statistics, a double-hurdle model, and thematic analysis. The descriptive results revealed that the average respondent was 57 years, with a predominantly male majority (57.47%), a primary education (40.27%), and a mean average household size of 5.4. About 51.58% of household heads were married and 48.42% were single, with a mean household income of R63 155 (3680.26 USD). The econometric results from the first hurdle model indicated that education level, farming experience, rainfall variability, access to irrigation, and off-farm income significantly influenced the decision to abandon cropland. The second hurdle model demonstrated that the extent of cropland abandonment was shaped by labour availability, access to credit, rainfall patterns, cooperative membership, and farming experience. The study concluded that cropland abandonment in the former Transkei was influenced by different factors. Therefore, the study would recommend targeted policy interventions that strengthen human capital, improve access to agricultural support services, and promote youth participation and collective farming structures to revitalise smallholder agriculture and enhance rural food security. Full article

High-quality agricultural development (HQAD) in China is essential to achieving Chinese-style modernization, which represents a uniquely Chinese path to modernization characterized by coordinated development across economic, political, cultural, social, and ecological dimensions. Against the backdrop of accelerating digitalization in global value chains (GVCs), exploring how it influences China’s HQAD carries significant theoretical value and policy implications. This study, for the first time, integrates GVC digitalization and HQAD into a unified analytical framework. Utilizing panel data from 30 Chinese provinces from 2009 to 2020, it empirically examines the relationship between them and the underlying mechanisms. GVC digitalization is measured with the interaction term between provincial digital GVC participation and global digitalization level, while HQAD is comprehensively assessed using a multi-dimensional evaluation indicator system constructed based on the new development philosophy, employing the entropy weight TOPSIS method. The findings reveal that GVC digitalization significantly promotes HQAD in China. For every one-standard-deviation increase in the degree of digitalization, the level of HQAD increases by an average of approximately 0.02 percentage points. Mechanism analysis further identifies industrial structure upgrading and rural integration of primary, secondary, and tertiary industries as two crucial transmission pathways. Heterogeneity analysis indicates that this promoting effect is more pronounced in major grain-marketing regions, provinces with better digital infrastructure, and those with higher levels of human capital. This research provides new empirical evidence for understanding agricultural transformation in the digital era and offers policy insights for leveraging GVC digitalization to advance HQAD. Full article