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This paper aims to identify the essential skills required by Human Resource Development (HRD) professionals to effectively respond to the various modes of labour organisation implemented due to the mandatory lockdown imposed by the Portuguese government in March 2020 as well as implications for learning and development (L&D) issues.

Data is based on 34 semi-structured interviews with HRD professionals from companies in different activity sectors.

The results reveal that the COVID-19 pandemic has brought out the development of socio-emotional skills among HRD professionals such as creativity, improvisation, self-exploration, innovation, collaboration, team spirit, resilience, flexibility, problem-solving, adaptability, priority management, emotional intelligence, social influence, social contact, interpersonal relationships, communication and online learning development.

It will be interesting for future research to explore “what” and “how” HRD managers are planning, organising and implementing training and development plans to improve the skills of remote workers, which tend to grow in a post-pandemic COVID-19 phase.

This research emphasises the importance of HRD managers’ role in better coordinating the work of employees who are physically distant from the company. It also highlights the need for different skills required for effective digital HRD, support and monitoring of remote employees. The results provide important inputs to design and implement effective L&D programs for professionals working remotely and to reinforce the HRD role in organisations.

The research is original for twofold reasons: 1) HRD professionals are usually not trained to manage remote workers, which also means that they probably lack the skills to take the most out of remote working models; and 2) HRD professionals and the HRD function need to address the skills required to successfully implement flexible forms of work organisation as well as to implement adequate L&D policies to answer remote work practices.

The argument whether gold is a hedge or haven is a debatable issue. Mainly, hedge is a class of asset that is negatively correlated with another asset or portfolio on average. On the other hand, a safe haven is an asset or portfolio which is negatively correlated with another asset or portfolio at the time of market turmoil. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to take Saudi Arabia as an example to examine the relationship of gold price in Saudi Arabia with key determinants such as the stock market index, oil prices, exchange rate, interest rate and consumer price index (CPI) by application of the autoregressive distributed lag model (ARDL).

The ARDL analysis was employed by using six variables based on the application of monthly time series data that were collected from 2011 to 2015.

From the present analysis, it has been discovered that gold is useful as a portfolio hedge and as a hedge against inflation because it is not affected by the CPI. External factors, for example, financial crisis, may be harmful to the CPI, thus adding a certain percentage of gold in the investment portfolio may assist in decreasing the level of risk at the time of financial turmoil.

Because gold seems to be a useful portfolio hedge, as well as an inflation hedge, government policies to curb the import of gold may be futile. The present research suggests that policies that directly address the causes of inflation and provide alternative investment opportunities for retail investors may better serve the objective of decreasing gold imports.

This systematic review of literature purposes to explore the impact of climate change on Mexico's water resources, exploring the impacts and efforts to address the problem as well as their effectiveness.

The researcher relied on several tools to obtain scholarly articles. The primary approach was using preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses. The Journal Impact Factor was an important consideration for the inclusion and exclusion criteria. The work also excluded all journals predating 2009. The work emphasized using journal articles. However, it consulted textbooks and documents from the government and water conservation sources. Contextually the sources with the highest Journal Impact Factor index were selected, paying heed to their relevance to the topic under investigation. Fifty sources out of seventy were included in the systematic review.

Mexico's already strained water resources have been negatively impacted by climate change, behooving the Mexican government to implement various mitigative strategies. However, scholars reported mixed results on the effectiveness of the various policies and programs implemented by the Mexican government. Key impediments to sustainable implementations entailed the political and social contexts surrounding the conservation policies in Mexico.

Numerous articles have explored the impact of climate change on Mexico's water resources, but many focus on a specific aspect. This work took a holistic approach, synthesizing multiple impacts and providing a sociological perspective on the effects, mitigation efforts, and implementation challenges.

This paper aims to analyze how emerging market firms upgrade their capabilities by focusing on “uncommoditizing strategies” that enable them to achieve levels of international competitiveness beyond the comparative advantages of their home countries and serve markets with premium pricing, quality and reputation of products.

In this paper, the authors studied 18 Latin American companies across six countries. Latin America represents an ideal setting because many of these countries have traditionally developed using natural resource endowments, and their firms have tended to rely on these in their internationalization. To facilitate the analysis of each case and the comparisons across cases, the authors used the same analytical framework for the companies, identifying the sources of differentiation and cost efficiency strategies that enabled these firms to upgrade their capabilities and compete on the basis of premium pricing, quality and reputation.

The analysis identified a general framework that represents an abstraction of the actions taken by these companies over time. The proposed model consists of three main elements used to pursue uncommoditizing strategies: tropicalized innovation, global efficiency and coordinated control.

Recent research on emerging market firms has shown interest in how these firms upgrade their capabilities. This paper contributes to this stream of research by providing an overarching framework that not only bridged previous narrower studies but also explained how firms can develop uncommoditizing strategies to upgrade their capabilities. Further, this paper helps managers by providing a comprehensive yet succinct overview of the main strategies that they can use to help their firms to achieve international competitiveness.

This paper aims to investigate the divestment behavior of emerging market multinationals from Latin America – multilatinas – by examining how their foreign market entry decision impacts the likelihood of subsidiary divestment.

The hypotheses are tested using Cox’s proportional hazard rate model in a longitudinal database of Brazilian multinational companies established in 43 countries.

Results indicate that these subsidiaries can thrive in environments that bear similarities to their home country, being less likely to divest in institutionally weak countries. Contrary to developed country multinationals, these firms benefit from foreign entry decisions that entail handling partnerships abroad; thus, wholly-owned greenfield (WOGF) investments have a higher likelihood of being divested.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first to analyze foreign divestment from multilatinas, accounting for how entry mode strategy and host country institutions may impact these firms’ de-internationalization.