The business model and balanced scorecard in creative tourism: the ultimate strategy boosters

Despite the various studies on creative tourism, little managerial frameworks such as a business model and a balanced scorecard are investigated for this new phenomenon. The overall image that emerges from the literature is ambiguous and fuzzy. Also, many activities known as creative tourism experiences may provide new participative experiences but rarely include a creative process. This study covers a whole aspect in designing a feasibility test model for creative experiences based on balanced scorecard through qualitative content analysis and as the essence of that, a Business Model by content validity and clustering analysis. Analysis of data by the mentioned methods reveals that four perspectives and 13 critical success factors are essential for the feasibility of a creative tourism experience. In addition, 22 indicators in 3 main dimensions determine the success of a creative tourism business model. This study is part of a growing body of research focused on discovering hidden aspects of creative tourism.     

Are Adjustments in the U.S. Budget Deficit Asymmetric? Another Look at Sustainability

This study examines the sustainability along with the structural stability of the U.S. federal budget deficit over the post World War II period. Allowing for an endogenously determined structural break in 1982:1, tests of unit roots based on Perron's [1997] methodology suggest a stationary and sustainable budget deficit. Moreover, threshold autoregressive and momentum threshold autoregressive models do not detect asymmetries in the response of the budget deficit to deviations from its long-run trend.     

Capital mobility and foreign debt sustainabilty: some evidence from Turkey

This paper address the extent of capital mobility and foreign debt sustainability in Turkey over the 1962–2003 period by examining the relationship between saving and investment, and imports and exports, respectively. The empirical investment is based on cointegration, error correction models, and threshold and momentum threshold autoregressive models. Our findings are consistent with the existence of capital mobility and the ‘Strong’ form of foreign debt sustainability.     

Conflicting perceptions on participation between citizens and members of local government

There is a growing consensus among citizens and members of local government that citizen participation is desirable for local government. However in practice, there are differing perceptions between them regarding the level and extent of citizen participation. As citizen participation is a multi faceted concept, its meaning is construed differently by both the members of local government and the citizen groups. This paper attempts to describe the conflicts that arise from participation. The paper is based on the study of the process of citizen participation in local government carried out in Torbat-Heydarieh city, Iran. A qualitative research method is seen as the most suitable approach of collecting and analyzing the data. The method employed for data collection in this research is in-depth interviews. In-depth interviews were conducted to gauge the existence of conflicts regarding participation. The findings reveal four areas that give rise to conflicts. This study also attempts to highlight two different views regarding citizen participation; the people-centered view and authority-centered view.     

Optimizing transit maintenance and rehabilitation to support human development and sustainability: A case study of Costa Rica’s railroad network

Public transportation plays a critical role in improving human development and consequently the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) set by United Nations. Convenient and efficient transit enable inhabitants to reach labor markets, access social support facilities as well as health and education services. This study develops a decision-making support framework for transit agencies to select optimum maintenance, rehabilitation, and upgrade alternatives to accomplish good levels of service and improve human development and sustainability indexes. A case study of Costa Rica’s great metropolitan area is used to illustrate the study with various budget scenarios. The results show that the proposed system can accomplish significant improvements on both level of service and human development. It is also confirmed that the explicit consideration of human development and sustainability made a significant difference as compared to the classical approach, which only considers the level of service (LOS). The proposed model could be used by other public transit systems.     

Oil prices and exchange rates in oil-exporting countries: evidence from TAR and M-TAR models

The paper studies the long-run relation and short-run dynamics between real oil prices and real exchange rates in a sample of 13 oil-exporting countries. The purpose of the study is to examine the possibility of Dutch disease in these countries. Tests of cointegration using threshold and momentum-threshold autoregressive (TAR and M-TAR) models suggest the possibility of the disease in 3-out-of 13 countries??Bolivia, Mexico and Norway. For these countries, we also find that (a) oil prices have a long-run effect on the exchange rates; and (b) exchange rates adjust faster to positive deviations from the equilibrium; and (c) there is no evidence of short-run causality between real exchange rates and real oil prices in either direction. Over all, these findings suggest a weak link between oil prices and real exchange rates and thus limited evidence in favor of the Dutch disease.     

Budget deficits and the current account balance: New evidence from panel data

This study examines two distinguishing predictions of the finite-horizon open-economy macroeconomic models regarding the effect of fiscal policy on the current account balance: (1) Given the path of government expenditures, a fall in public savings has an adverse effect on the current account balance, and (2) a bond-financed increase in government expenditures exerts a larger adverse effect on the current account balance than a tax-financed alternative. These predictions are vastly different from those of the Ricardian theory. According to this view, (1) lower public savings are met by equal increases in desired private savings, and thus the current account balance does not change, and (2) the response of current account balance to a change in government spending is independent of its financing methods. Empirical analysis of 63 countries is consistent with the conventional theory.     

Workforce Composition and Innovation: How Diversity in Employees’ Ethnic and Educational Backgrounds Facilitates Firm‐Level Innovativeness

This article studies how workforce composition is related to a firm's success in introducing radical innovations. Previous studies have argued that teams composed of individuals with diverse backgrounds are able to perform more information processing and make deeper use of the information, which is important to accomplish complex tasks. We suggest that this argument can be extended to the level of the aggregate workforce of high‐technology firms. In particular, we argue that ethnic and higher education diversity within the workforce is associated with superior performance in radical innovation. Using a sample of 3,888 Swedish firms, this article demonstrates that having greater workforce diversity in terms of both ethnic background and educational disciplinary background is positively correlated to the share of a firm's turnover generated by radical innovation. Having more external collaborations does, however, seem to reduce the importance of educational background diversity. The impact of ethnic diversity is not affected by external collaboration. These findings hold after using alternative measures of dependent and independent variables, alternative sample sizes, and alternative estimation techniques. The research findings presented in this article would seem to have immediate and important practical implications. They would suggest that companies may pursue recruitment policies inspired by greater ethnic and disciplinary diversity as a way to boost the innovativeness of the organization. From a managerial perspective, it may be concluded that workforce disciplinary diversity could be potentially replaced by more external links, while ethnic diversity could not.