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The purpose of this paper is to provide an analysis of the Institutional Framework and Governance in Latin America, which aims at detecting similarities or differences among the countries of the region.

The objective of the research will be achieved through the application of multivariate factor analysis and cluster analysis techniques.

The paper shows the importance of the institutional framework and governance for the countries of Latin America and demonstrates the heterogeneity in the areas of institutions and governance in the region. The paper also confirms the presence of differentiated groups of countries that can and should collaborate with each other to enhance the socio-economic development of the region in a globalized context.

Due to the limited Latin America countries example in this paper, the authors consider for future studies would be to enlarge the number of countries and to implement same study to Asian countries.

The main contribution of this study in practice is that by classifying countries into clusters with similarities and differences, this study allows politicians and the institutional leaders to redesign current and/or formulate new policies aimed at institutional quality and good governance. In addition, results of the study should be taken into account by institutions such as the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank when deciding on multilateral support or when taking financing decisions as the type of support and the conditions applied should be differentiated according to the cluster in question. Also, in the context of academic research, the clusters will allow comparative studies that can assess the impact of the institutional framework and other variables on indicators such as direct foreign investment, economic growth or sociological ones, such as poverty, the distribution of income, etc.

This paper provides the analysis of the Institutional Framework and Governance in Latin America under the multivariate analysis approach.

The purpose of this paper is to develop an overview of the phenomenon of corruption in Latin America and to propose a synthetic aggregate indicator to compress most of the statistical information available on corruption for Latin American countries.

The indicator of corruption has been obtained through factor analysis by applying the principal component methodology.

The authors have managed to obtain a single component that reproduces and synthesizes 86 per cent of all the information about corruption in Latin America gathered by prestigious institutions.

The authors are aware that their study is not free from limitations. The first limitation is associated with the impossibility of incorporating information related to the phenomenon of corruption from the indicator called Latinobarómetro, as the economies of Cuba and Haiti (included in this research) are not part of the sample analyzed by that indicator. Second, this study reproduces and synthesizes 86 per cent of all available information by prestigious institutions about corruption in Latin America, and although this percentage is significant, it does not constitute 100 per cent.

This study has created a new indicator that gathers methodologies to measure corruption in Latin American countries.

The purpose of this article is to determine the influence of the tax system on the location of holding companies in Spain.

To achieve this purpose, we have used an analysis of cointegration in time series. The independent variable used was the number of holding companies under Régimen de Entidades de Tenencia de Valores Extranjeros Spanish regime. The dependent variables were divided into two groups: fiscal and non-fiscal variables. The dependent fiscal variables are effective tax rate and double taxation convention, whereas the non-fiscal dependent variables are government effectiveness and business freedom.

The study concludes that the fiscal variables are relevant to establish a holding company in Spain, but there are other variables such as government effectiveness and business freedom that show as well as influence on the location of holding companies.

In the year 2015, the article The influence of the tax system on the location of holding companies in Switzerland was published in the Competitiveness Review. In this article, the influence of taxation on the decision to locate a holding company in Switzerland was analyzed. Now that the Spanish holding regime is consolidated, thanks to more than twenty years of application in our tax legislation, we consider it important to carry out an analysis of the influence of taxation in the decision to locate a holding company in our country. As already mentioned in the article published in 2015, the study of the taxation of holding companies is a topic related more to law firms and/or tax advisors than to academic research, and it is for this reason that there are few empirical studies on this topic. Hence, the research developed in this paper is important.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between transformational leadership (TFL), organizational learning capability (OLC) and happiness at work (HAW), and offers a new measure for HAW.

The authors used confirmatory factor analysis to test the theoretical model in order to check the psychometric properties of HAW. They examined a sample of 167 medical staff working in allergy units, which represents a response rate of 25 per cent.

The research showed that HAW can be measured using the proposed new measurement scale, and that TFL predicts HAW through the mediating role of OLC.

The results suggest that hospital managers and heads of allergy services should consider the effects of TFL, under certain learning conditions, to enhance HAW.

This research is the first that examines the effects of TFL and OLC on HAW, a higher order construct that has been implemented closely following previous research.

This research analyses the solvency behaviour of systemically important (or systemic) Spanish banks, focusing on their credit risk management during the subprime mortgage crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic.

The top three Spanish banks (BBVA, Banco Santander and Caixabank) were selected as a representative sample. Key indicators, such as the volume of assets, amount of financing or loans to clients, non-performing loan (NPL) ratio, reported volume of write-offs, equity and share capital, were analysed to assess their solvency and credit risk management. Furthermore, from the variables evaluated, a structural equation model has been proposed to evaluate the structural relationships among the variables.

The results indicate a significant reorganisation of these institutions after the subprime crisis. This reorganisation was crucial for providing the necessary room to manoeuvre to overcome the challenges posed by the COVID-19 crisis. However, the study highlights the importance of implementing preventive management policies to handle future crises effectively.

This study provides valuable insights into the solvency and credit risk management of systemic Spanish banks during two major financial crises. The evidence presented is particularly relevant for bank managers and policymakers, offering guidance on effective credit risk treatment and crisis management strategies.

The aim of this study was to analyse the influence of different employment relationships (ERs) on the sustainability results of cooperatives. The authors approached the type of ER comparing the inducements offered by the firm with the contributions that the manager expects from employees. In this way, the authors study how the orientation toward the employment relationship influences the economic, social and environmental sustainability of the firm.

This article presents a theoretical and empirical research model about the relationship between ERs and sustainability. The necessary information was obtained through a questionnaire that was completed by the human resource (HR) managers and chief executive officers (CEOs) of 124 cooperative companies, and structural equation modelling was applied to evaluate the relationships between the proposed constructs, using the partial least squares technique (PLS-SEM).

The obtained results suggest that mutual investment and overinvestment ERs favour economic, social and environmental sustainability, whereas quasi spot contract and underinvestment ERs have a negative influence on all three types of sustainability. Therefore, it is confirmed that the type of ER adopted can condition the sustainability of the company, either favouring or worsening it.

This work contributes to covering the lack of studies about which ERs impact the sustainability of organisations, and it provides information on the role of ERs in the search for a more sustainable organisation, demonstrating that the type of employment relationship developed by the firm has a relevant impact on its sustainability.

Up until the late eighties, there were few information systems in Spanish universities that offered the user online access to databases. Reasons for this were the high cost of the telecommunications and the lack of a sufficiently developed infrastructure. In some cases, the personnel in charge of these systems and, above all, potential users were not acquainted with the services of companies like Red INCA, about which more will be mentioned later.

In today's ever-evolving digital job market, soft skills are increasingly important for university students to succeed in their future careers. This study identifies the soft skills that universities should prioritize the most due to their significance in the digital employment market.

Using natural language processing (NLP) techniques, this study analyzed 226 student writings that described their experiences of failure in academic, personal and professional settings. Zero-shot classification was utilized to identify the presence of soft skills and sentiment analysis was used to determine the expressed sentiment toward these skills.

The findings suggest that students are most deficient in social intelligence, stress management and self-intelligence skills, which are essential soft skills for success in academic and professional environments and for the transition to the digital employment market.

The article acknowledges limitations related to the writing proficiency of resumes from a few non-English speaking students and the potential influence of students' emotional states on the content of their writings.

The study provides valuable insights into the soft skills that are mostly lacking among university students and their significance in the digital employment market.

The study highlights the importance of universities in promoting and practicing essential soft skills and sheds light on the issue of soft skill deficiency among university students. Educators can use these insights to develop strategic proposals aimed at promoting the acquisition of key soft skills among students. The study provides valuable insights into the soft skills that are mostly lacking among university students and their significance in the digital employment market.

The development of smart cities (SCs) is a costly process as it requires the implementation of physical infrastructure to meet the demand for data collection. On the other hand, there are open government data (OGD) that are open and free, and can be a first step from the current city evolution to SCs at a more affordable cost. However, these data are available in a decentralized way, in different formats and granularities. To date, the authors have not found any literature work that performs the centralization of OGDs on a single platform. The purpose of this paper is provide a centralized OGD platform.

This work investigates the state-of-the-art literature from the OGD, establishes the research question, design and develop the platform for OGD and accomplish the validation of the platform.

Through the validations of the platform, advantages were observed in relation to productivity gain for the development of solutions, in the SC context, using the proposed platform.

The data have been collected in a manual way but for future works, the authors will use the web-crawler for the collection of data.

One town hall (Sorocaba) is interested in using the platform to analyze the data usage in the simple way and compare with the other nearby towns.

It is a recent work in literature using OGD, and there is no work that centralizes the information about several town halls to provide comparison between them and improve the decision-making.

The purpose of this study is to address the challenges of teaching sustainable development to computer engineering students. Part of the problem is that they perceive the topic as irrelevant for their future profession.

To address this challenge, we introduced a project element into a course on sustainable development where the students developed applications for sustainable mobility together with the local public transport authority, an academic institution and a multinational telecom company.

The findings conclude that the course changes improved the overall student satisfaction while succeeding in anchoring sustainable development in a context which the students can relate to. The collaboration was also perceived as fruitful by the external stakeholders who encouraged the students to stay in touch for their bachelor theses and internships.

The theoretical implication is a first attempt in integrating sustainable development education with entrepreneurial experiences, whereas the practical implication is a description of how the integration can be realized.

The contribution is therefore of value for both educational researchers to open novel research opportunities and for teachers to describe new possibilities for sustainable development education.

The contribution describes how entrepreneurial experiences can be used to motivate engineering students in mandatory courses on sustainable development and ethics. The approach is novel in that the approach has not been described earlier in this context.