Search results

Welding is a widely used manufacturing process in many industries. The process consumes a lot of energy and resources, pollutes the environment, and emits gases and fumes into the atmosphere that are dangerous to human health. There are various welding processes, and the suitable welding process is usually chosen based on cost, material, and conditions. Subjectivity is the most significant impediment to selecting an optimal process. As a result, it is critical to develop the appropriate set of criteria, use the best tool and methodology, and collect sufficient data. This study examines the sustainability of welding processes and their environmental impact.

The welding process’s sustainability was examined and discussed in general, considering the technological specifics of each welding process, physical performance, and environmental, economic, and social effects. The study investigates the environmental impact of MMAW, GMAW, and GTAW/GMAW processes through experimental work and LCA methodology.

MMAW is the most environmentally harmful technology, whereas GMAW has the least impact. The GTAW/GMAW process outperformed the other processes in terms of yield stress, but the analyses revealed that it had a greater environmental impact than GMAW.

The study provides an environmental impact summary and demonstrates the effects of welding parameters and processes. This gives users an understanding of choosing the best welding technique or making the process more environmentally friendly. These recommendations help policymakers identify hot spots and implement the right plans to achieve more sustainable manufacturing.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate if public provision of employment support services to youth leads to reduced informality and increased wages in transition economies.

The author uses the school-to-work transition data sets of the International Labor Organization for seven transition economies of Southeast Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States. The author focuses on two econometric issues: the selectivity into informal employment and the endogeneity of the public employment support service provision with respect to informal employment and wages. The authors achieves identification by employing internal regressors which are uncorrelated with the product of heteroskedastic errors, a-la Lewbel (2012), as the author could not prove the external validity of the commonly used external instruments in similar contexts.

Results suggest that the public provision of employment support services matters for relegating informal employment, but not for wages, in general. Placement in education or training programs is most powerful in reducing informal employment among the four different employment support services, while only advice for job search works positively for wages probably through enabling better match.

Increasing budget allocations, varying the array of public employment support measures, enhanced targeting, and advancement of the profiling system may significantly contribute to strengthening the public employment support service effect on youth employment in transition economies.

The paper brings a couple of novelties to the current literature. First, it is among the early papers dealing with the issue of informality, public employment support service and labor market prospects of youth in general in a rigorous manner. Second, it fills an important gap for transition economies which were less researched due to the long-lasting transition process as well due to data scarcity. Third, it utilizes the recently collected School-to-Work Transition Surveys (SWTS). Finally, and likely most importantly, it thoroughly addresses the issues of selectivity bias and endogeneity of PESS by utilizing a recent approach of Lewbel (2012) whereby internally generated variables are used as instruments. Hence, the paper accounts for the endogeneity stemming from unobservables in a novel manner, contrary to the common approaches in the literature based either on propensity score matching addressing selectivity on observables only, or relying on commonly used instruments in the labor market literature – mainly regional employment variables – whose external validity is easily disputed.

This paper aims to contribute to the understanding of the effects of active political engagement in port-of-entry jobs and employment pathways for graduate students in a post-communist context which is characterized by clientelism. The data are derived from a structured survey of a small local labour market where political clientelism is pronounced due to the strong network ties. Controlling for both demand and supply factors, the authors identify a profile for those who are more prone to engage politically in exchange for public sector jobs, which are in turn vulnerable to regime changes.

The authors use data from a sample of 191 students that records month-to-month employment states for three consecutive years (2012–2014). The method attempts to replicate an experimental design with repeated measures before and after the June 2013 government elections. The data is analysed using sequence analysis with optimal matching and difference-in-difference methods.

The analysis provides evidence of links between political engagement and selection onto different employment pathways under conditions of political clientelism. The pathways themselves are also shown to be differentially impacted by the 2013 election (positively or negatively). Together, these results are supportive of claims that jobs in Albania, particularly those in the public sector, are linked to the short-term presence of vote-buying. This is shown to be the case even for this sample of educated members of the labour force (i.e. university graduates). The analysis also finds evidence of accumulative disadvantages over time, in relation to subjective perceptions of life satisfaction, migration intentions, employability and success in life, as a result of active political engagement.

The study uses a unique data set and a novel methodological approach, sequence analysis. Occupational history calendars were used to capture quantitative information recording detailed work histories. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this innovative method has not been used before to measure the temporal effects of political engagement on employment pathways.

The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, it analyses the relationship between educational level, the school-to-work transition period for youth and positions which suffer from an education-job mismatch in Kyrgyzstan; and second, it investigates the effect of the education-job mismatch on the wages of youth in Kyrgyzstan.

The study uses the International Labor Organization 2013 data from the school-to-work transition survey for Kyrgyzstan. The Kaplan–Meier failure analysis is employed to demonstrate the relationship between school-to-work transition and mismatch status. To investigate the effect of an education-job mismatch on wages, a Mincer-type equation with OLS estimations is used. Along with this, taking into consideration potential unobserved heterogeneity issue, a propensity score matching method is applied.

The results indicate a large difference between those with tertiary education and those with non-tertiary education in terms of the probability of being employed with a wrong match. Young individuals without tertiary education are more likely to be employed with a right match. Analysis of the impact of overeducation on wages shows that the impact of overeducation depends on how it is measured. According to the objective approach, overeducated male individuals receive low wages compared to well matched, but estimation results based on the total sample of subjective approach indicate the positive effects of overeducation on wage.

This paper contributes to the existing literature on the school-to-work transition and overeducation by focusing on one of the transition economies, which has been largely neglected by the literature.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the prevalence and drivers of employment vulnerability among youth in Egypt, Jordan and Tunisia, and their propensity to transition to better jobs over time.

The analysis is based on longitudinal data from Labor Market Panel Surveys spanning 6–20 years. The authors use transition matrices to examine the prevalence of transitions between labor market statuses for the same individuals over time, distinguishing between youth and non-youth, and men and women, as well as multinomial logistic regressions that control for individual and family background, including previous labor market status, family wealth and parental education.

The paper finds that youth in all three countries were disadvantaged in terms of labor market outcomes with most young men in particular ending up in vulnerable jobs while women of all ages were most likely to exit the labor market all together, unless they had formal jobs. Moreover, youth who started out in the labor market in a vulnerable job were unlikely to move to a better-quality job over time. Family wealth, parental education and father's occupation were found to be important determinants of labor market outcomes and vulnerability, even after a long period of work experience.

The paper finds that wealth effects, parental education and occupation effects follow workers throughout their careers, implying low equality of opportunity and inter-generational and lifetime mobility.

The findings indicate worsening labor market outcomes over time, heavily influenced by family background. High levels of vulnerable employment persistence, regardless of skill and experience, reinforce the importance of initial labor market outcome on the quality of lifetime employment prospects.

The global financial crisis hit the economy of the Kyrgyz Republic by the third wave of its transmission in early 2009. The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of the global financial economic crisis on the transition economy of the Kyrgyz Republic. As there is a low level of the Kyrgyz Republic’s integration into the global financial and economic processes, it is obvious that channels of transmissions are different.

The empirical model is the vector autoregression approach. The quarterly data from 2005 to 2013 of the remittances from abroad, trade volumes, exchange rates, credits, deposits and liquidity of the banking system, gross domestic product (GDP) and foreign direct investment (FDI) were used in the empirical analysis.

The authors found a significant positive relation between transmission channels such as remittances flow, banking sector, international trade and GDP within the first six months. Thus, a decline in the aforementioned variables has a significant affirmative effect on the country’s GDP. Notwithstanding, the exchange-rate channel adversely influences GDP. Thereby, the depreciation of the national currency leads to an increase in GDP.

The study findings allow the Kyrgyz policymakers to foresee the global crisis transmission through the primary channels of transmission mechanism. Nevertheless, a decrease of the deposit level by 1 per cent leads to 2.91 per cent decline in FDI inflows. On the contrary, an increase of the exchange rate by 1 per cent leads to 1.54 per cent decrease in imports.

This paper aims to summarize the literature (journal articles and book chapters) on Central and Eastern European (CEE) firms’ outward internationalization failures: definitions and understandings of “failure”, “failed” firms’ internationalization processes, causes of “failed” initial and subsequent foreign activities and consequences of “failed” internationalization.

This systematic-narrative hybrid literature review article focuses on CEE firms’ outward internationalization failures.

The paper demonstrates that different objective and subjective measures were used for defining and measuring “failure”. Consensus regarding which firms (from slow internationalizers to born globals) can be considered “failed” is lacking. In different studies, internal and external causes of CEE firms’ outward internationalization “failure” and internationalization-related and other consequences of “failed” internationalization also vary considerably. Due to the complexity of the “failure” phenomenon, it is impossible to identify the most characteristic type of “failed” internationalization or offer “optimal” advice for avoiding failures.

The author is not aware of any other literature review articles focused on CEE firms’ outward internationalization failures. This article contributes to the (international) business and (international) entrepreneurship literature focused on failures, exits and institutional and other factors affecting them.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of returnee entrepreneurs’ education and knowledge transfer (KT) on business development (BD) as well as the moderating effect of time living abroad on returnee entrepreneurs.

The quantitative approach was used in this study to grasp and validate the conceptual framework. This research was guided by a positivist survey research technique. A structured questionnaire was used as a data collection tool, and 151 returnee entrepreneurs were involved in the study. SEM with SmartPLS was used as a data analysis tool.

The results of this study show that returnee entrepreneur’s education and KT is positively associated with BD, while the time living abroad was not proved to have a moderation effect on BD.

This study has academic and practical relevance, as it adds new knowledge and a better understanding of the role of returnee entrepreneurs in BD and expands research on returnee entrepreneurs. In terms of practical contributions, this research offers suggestions to governments, policymakers and the business community about the impact of returnee entrepreneurs in the entrepreneurial ecosystems of their home countries.

This study is one of the few studies that have analysed the impact of returnee entrepreneurs’ education and KT on BD by using the survey technique. The results of this empirical research are based on primary data collected via a questionnaire.