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This paper examines the time-varying efficiency of nine major Middle East and North Africa (MENA) stock markets namely Egypt, Bahrain, UAE, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar, Morocco and Tunisia during times of COVID-19 pandemic outbreak and vaccines.

The authors use two econometric approaches: (1) autocorrelation tests including the wild bootstrap automatic variance ratio test, the automatic portmanteau test and the Generalized spectral test, and (2) a non-Bayesian generalized least squares-based time-varying model with statistical inferences.

The results show that the degree of stock market efficiency of Egyptian, Bahraini, Saudi, Moroccan and Tunisian stock markets is influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic crisis. Furthermore, the authors find a tendency toward efficiency in most of the MENA markets after the announcement of the COVID-19's vaccine approval. Finally, the Jordanian, Omani, Qatari and UAE stock markets remain globally efficient during the three sub-periods of the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak.

The results have important implications for asset allocations and financial risk management. Portfolio managers may maximize the benefit of arbitrage opportunities by taking strategic long and short positions in these markets during downward trend periods. Policymakers should implement the action plans and reforms to protect the stock markets from global shocks and ensure the stability of the stock markets.

Purpose: Preserving a country’s culture is crucial for its sustainability. Handicraft is a key draw for tourism destinations; it protects any civilisation’s indigenous knowledge and culture by managing the historical, economic, and ecological ecosystems and perfectly aligns with sustainable development. It has a significant role in creating employment, especially in rural regions and is an essential contributor to the export economy, mainly in developing nations. The study focuses on the skills required and existing gaps in the handicraft industry, its development and prospects by considering women and their role in preserving and embodying the traditional art of making handicrafts.

Approach: A framework has been developed for mapping and analysing the skills required in the handicraft sector using econometric modelling; an enormous number of skills have been crowdsourced from the respondents, and machine learning techniques have been used.

Findings: The findings of the study revealed that employment in this area is dependent not only on general or specialised skills but also on complex matrix skills ranging from punctuality to working in unclean and unsafe environments, along with a set of personal qualities, such as taking initiatives and specific skills, for example polishing and colour coding.

Implications: The skills mapping technique utilised in this study is applicable globally, particularly for women indulged in casual work in developing nations’ handicrafts industry. The sustainable development goals, tourism, and handicrafts are all interconnected. The research includes understanding skills mapping, which provides insights into efficient job matching by incorporating preferences and studying the demand side of casual working by women in the handicraft sector from a skills perspective.

Increased competition and the constant need for companies to differentiate make markets more competitive and consumers more demanding when making purchasing decisions. Consequently, companies recognized the importance of marketing and economics, which has gradually replaced its transactional practices, focused essentially on a single transaction, with relational practices, in which the customer is considered an integral part of the process. Creating long and profitable relationships has become a business priority and the use of tools such as customer relationship marketing (CRM) has become crucial. With the increasing importance of health and wellness tourism, thermalism has become a very competitive product wanted by tourists who need treatments that are not available in their country due to lack of availability or because they are quite expensive. Since tourism is integrated in the services sector, a set of relational marketing strategies can be applied to establish and maintain relationships with tourists. Therefore, it is important to understand how relational marketing can improve health and wellness tourism. Based on a combination of theoretical and practical research, this chapter explores the dynamic system and mechanism of innovation and development of relational marketing strategies in specific contexts of tourism (i.e. health and wellness tourism) considering cross-border (i.e. Northern Euroregion of Portugal and Galicia). From an interdisciplinary perspective, the chapter presents insights for marketing and tourism (health and well-being) and for the economic development of territories (i.e. cross-border regions).

This essay examines how two Marxist anti-colonial intellectuals from Portuguese India and French India – Aquino de Bragança and V Subbiah – differentially theorized movements for independence from colonial rule. Through the analysis of primary source documents in French, Portuguese, Italian and English, I compare V Subbiah's Dalit, anti-fascist anti-colonial Marxism to Aquino de Bragança's internationalist anti-colonial Marxism. Both theorists' approaches have similarities in (1) theorizing the relationship between fascism and colonialism given that the Portuguese Empire was administered by Salazar's Estado Novo and the French Empire was under Vichy rule, (2) rethinking Marxism to better fit the Global South context and (3) intellectual and political connections to Algeria were critically important for theory and praxis. Despite the distinct geographic and social spaces in which they lived and worked, both produced remarkably similar theories of anti-imperialism.

The visible ill-effects of the developmental enterprises in the ex-colonies and the tendency towards technocratic totalitarianism, in many ways, have altered the way modern humans perceived the idea of “progress” and “development” historically since the Cold War. This paper presents a deconstructive-transdisciplinary critique of the pervasive ideology by focusing on three nodal points in the stages of “development”: (1) the rise of technocratic modern science; (2) the making of the Third World; and (3) de-legitimisation of its indigenous knowledge paradigms.

Drawing on the first-hand accounts of the researchers, social scientists, activists and environmentalists, this paper presents an extensive critique of the violence involved in the development enterprises and recommends possible ways to move beyond the developmental hegemony. This paper is a theoretical investigation that adopts an interpretative, pluralistic, transdisciplinary approach, in order to deconstruct the development ideology and analyse the ramifications of the developmental propaganda and practice as they unfolded in the Global South.

This paper highlights the need to decondition the social imaginary from the hegemony of developmentalism and its by-product scientism and “technological rationality” for an inclusive, pluralistic, democratic social order.

The focal area of this work is India in particular and Global South in general. It studies the era between the 1950s and 1980s when the major development enterprises took place and studies the consequences they entailed.

The scope of this paper encompasses every socio-economic, ecological and epistemological domain affected by the detrimental effects of the developmental enterprises in the Global South.

The originality of this work lies in its transdisciplinary approach. The scope of this paper is extensive and covers nearly every domain of human existence that has been affected by the development debacle and technocratic totalitarianism in the post-War era.

This article presents two Brazilian Portuguese corpora collected from different media concerning public security issues in a specific location. The primary motivation is supporting analyses, so security authorities can make appropriate decisions about their actions.

The corpora were obtained through web scraping from a newspaper's website and tweets from a Brazilian metropolitan region. Natural language processing was applied considering: text cleaning, lemmatization, summarization, part-of-speech and dependencies parsing, named entities recognition, and topic modeling.

Several results were obtained based on the methodology used, highlighting some: an example of a summarization using an automated process; dependency parsing; the most common topics in each corpus; the forty named entities and the most common slogans were extracted, highlighting those linked to public security.

Some critical tasks were identified for the research perspective, related to the applied methodology: the treatment of noise from obtaining news on their source websites, passing through textual elements quite present in social network posts such as abbreviations, emojis/emoticons, and even writing errors; the treatment of subjectivity, to eliminate noise from irony and sarcasm; the search for authentic news of issues within the target domain. All these tasks aim to improve the process to enable interested authorities to perform accurate analyses.

The corpora dedicated to the public security domain enable several analyses, such as mining public opinion on security actions in a given location; understanding criminals' behaviors reported in the news or even on social networks and drawing their attitudes timeline; detecting movements that may cause damage to public property and people welfare through texts from social networks; extracting the history and repercussions of police actions, crossing news with records on social networks; among many other possibilities.

The work on behalf of the corpora reported in this text represents one of the first initiatives to create textual bases in Portuguese, dedicated to Brazil's specific public security domain.

This study investigates the various themes around the demand-driven approach of vocational education and training (VET). The study focuses on investigating two major aspects of VET. Firstly, the extant literature has been systematically classified based on seven parameters: Geography, Focus on Vocational Education, Research Methods, Economic Sector, Origin of Study, Type of Training and Level of Skill. Secondly, this study has explored various themes around the VET implementation, performance gaps and road ahead.

Thematic analysis with the systematic literature review (SLR) method is applied to 50 research papers on VET, published between 2011 and 2022.

This systematic review has found that experiential compliments VET and VET is the medium of skill development. Further, it was extracted through themes that VET may help ensure alternate employment in rural areas and contribute to micro- and macro-level economic development. Also, there is a requirement to adopt a demand-driven approach to VET by localizing VT content and delivery.

The study's findings are directed towards the need for demand-driven and customized VET. This study also explores many potential areas for further empirical research through various themes.

This study is a novel effort that extracts the themes constituting the effect of VETs along with the descriptive analysis of the extant literature using the SLR approach. The study has rationalized the findings by providing due coding to various parameters in the previous studies under investigation.

The data monetization market is valued at $1.5 billion, with an expected annual growth rate of 25%. This growth presents significant opportunities for companies to expand their revenue streams. However, many companies struggle to extract value from their data due to existing challenges and need for more knowledge. While existing studies describe and classify dimensions of the phenomenon, there is a need to explore causality relations that can help the structuring of data monetization processes. This study aimed to support the structuring of the data monetization process.

Proposing causality relations is important to explore the data monetization phenomenon. Therefore, empirical knowledge about data monetization was organized into design patterns using the context-intervention-mechanism-outcome (CIMO) logic. The effectiveness of these patterns was then assessed through an exploratory case study conducted at a leading Brazilian academic institution where data monetization is central to its business model.

The study yields six design patterns that address various aspects such as data pricing, data-driven business models and best practices for data monetization. Additionally, it presents a comprehensive understanding of the data monetization process through a value-added chain framework.

The findings contribute to the advancement of knowledge in the field, the proposition of causality, and offer valuable insights into organizations that wish to structure their resources and capabilities and leverage data.