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Throughout the 21st century, urban reports demand solutions to the obsolescence and aging process suffered by the existing buildings, due to the growth and expansion of cities that took place in the second half of the 20th century [...]

Management of natural resources is pivotal for sustained economic growth—the increasing ecological footprints causing biocapacity deficit threaten the resource conversation agenda. The study identified the potential causes and consequences of natural resource depletion in a broad cross-section of 138 countries. Ecological footprints, international migrant stocks, industrial value-added, and population growth influenced natural resource capital across countries. The results show that ecological footprints, industrial value-added, and population growth are the detrimental factors of resource capital. In contrast, continued economic growth is helpful to conserve natural resources for future generations. The rise and fall in the natural resource degradation are evident in the wake of international migrants’ stocks to support an inverted U-shaped relationship between them. The Granger causality inferences confirmed the one-way linkages, running from international migrant stocks, economic growth, and population growth to natural resource degradation. It verifies migrants-led, affluence-led, and population-led resource degradation. Ecological footprints Granger causes industrial value-added across countries. The forecasting estimates suggested that economic growth would likely to influenced greater in magnitude to resource degradation by its innovation shocks of 4.791%, followed by international migrant stocks, population growth, ecological footprints, and industrial value added by their innovation shocks of 4.709%, 1.829%, 1.247%, and 0.700%, respectively. The study concludes that international migrant stocks should manage smartly, causing more resource degradation via a channel of increasing biocapacity deficit across countries.

The measurement of sustainability is complex due to its multiple dimensions of different relative importance and different natures. From the perspective of sustainability, three types of tourism can be established: traditional tourism, sustainable tourism, and sustainable impact tourism. In the context of multiple-criteria decision analysis, this paper presents a flexible method for assess and rank decision alternatives based on their sustainability. The proposal does not require the relative importance of each criterion to be precisely assigned beforehand, which reduces the subjectivity of the decision making and yields results that can be of interest for decision makers. To show the difference between these three sustainability options in tourism and the benefits of the method, the proposal is applied to public and private tourism management in Spain—in particular, to hotel booking and the evaluation and management of sustainability in the autonomous regions.

The Human Mobility Transition model describes shifts in mobility dynamics and transport systems. The aspirational stage, ‘human urbanism’, is characterised by high active travel, universal public transport, low private vehicle use and equitable access to transport. We explored factors associated with travel behaviour in Africa and the Caribbean, investigating the potential to realise ‘human urbanism’ in this context. We conducted a mixed-methods systematic review of ten databases and grey literature for articles published between January 2008 and February 2019. We appraised study quality using Critical Appraisal Skills Programme checklists. We narratively synthesized qualitative and quantitative data, using meta-study principles to integrate the findings. We identified 39,404 studies through database searching, mining reviews, reference screening, and topic experts’ consultation. We included 129 studies (78 quantitative, 28 mixed-methods, 23 qualitative) and 33 grey literature documents. In marginalised groups, including the poor, people living rurally or peripheral to cities, women and girls, and the elderly, transport was poorly accessible, travel was characterised by high levels of walking and paratransit (informal public transport) use, and low private vehicle use. Poorly controlled urban growth (density) and sprawl (expansion), with associated informality, was a salient aspect of this context, resulting in long travel distances and the necessity of motorised transportation. There were existing population-level assets in relation to ‘human urbanism’ (high levels of active travel, good paratransit coverage, low private vehicle use) as well as core challenges (urban sprawl and informality, socioeconomic and gendered barriers to travel, poor transport accessibility). Ineffective mobility systems were a product of uncoordinated urban planning, unregulated land use and subsequent land use conflict. To realise ‘human urbanism’, integrated planning policies recognising the linkages between health, transport and equity are needed. A shift in priority from economic growth to a focus on broader population needs and the rights and wellbeing of ordinary people is required. Policymakers should focus attention on transport accessibility for the most vulnerable.

EntREsilience, a five-country longitudinal qualitative study, was launched in 2020 in China, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and the UK to understand how entrepreneurs manifested resilience in response to the COVID-19 pandemic crisis events from March 2020 to February 2022. EntREsilience proposed a resilience-manifestation process model describing how entrepreneurs responded to the COVID-19 disruption, aided by external and internal enablers, adjusting their businesses to stabilise and even hunting for opportunities to grow their businesses. The present research adds to the findings of EntREsilience by analysing the strategies applied by entrepreneurs in their response to the crisis. This exploratory study focused on the entrepreneurs’ community interactions and studied the effects of these interactions on the response measures adopted by the entrepreneurs. The results describe how the awareness of their stakeholder challenges shaped the entrepreneurial response. Realising the importance of stakeholder well-being to the sustainability of their enterprise motivated the entrepreneurs to develop sustainability competencies towards their stakeholder challenges, innovating solutions for their mutual well-being. By extending the resilience-manifestation process model, this paper proposes a transformation model depicting the process of entrepreneurs transforming into sustainable leaders triggered by stakeholder challenge awareness and moderated by contextual factors.

Sustainable public procurement plays an important role in addressing not only environmental but also economic and social issues through government acquisitions from technology-based small suppliers. In this context, the objective of this study is to better understand the holistic public procurement process by assessing the operational efficiency of technology-based small suppliers and associating the economic aspect of public procurement with the social aspect, such as women-owned businesses. To this end, we analyzed U.S. Department of Defense Small Business Innovation Research grantees by combining network data envelopment analysis with bootstrap truncated regression analysis. Drawing on the analysis results, we found that (1) there is heterogeneity in the performance of research and development, network building, and commercialization sub-processes, and (2) there is a positive relationship between the overall performance and women-owned small suppliers who excel particularly in network building. The former implies that small suppliers may have different expertise in the chain of public procurement; the latter suggests that woman entrepreneurs with a business network may be able to outperform their counterparts in the public procurement market.

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has faced a persistent fiscal deficit for the last three decades. In the vast literature, a question is still arising: is ASEAN’s fiscal deficit alarming? This study explores the fiscal deficit with different perspectives to provide guidelines for policymakers to answer this question. For this purpose, we offer fiscal causal hypotheses estimates, including the contribution of Government expenditures (GEs) and Government revenues (GRs) towards sustainable economic growth; we then evaluated two additional deficit hypotheses, the impact of fiscal deficit and deficit financing on inflation. This empirical analysis covered annual financial data for the years 1990 to 2019 of ten member countries of ASEAN by applying panel econometric techniques, which include unit root Levin, Lin, and Chu (LLC) and Im, Pesaran, and Shin (IPS) tests; the panel autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model for cointegration; and the Dumitrescu–Hurlin (DH) test for causality. The findings revealed that government expenditures contribute more towards sustainable economic growth while government revenues are inversely related to growth in the long run. The DH causality test supported the fiscal synchronization hypothesis and current account targeting hypothesis in ASEAN. The interest rate is found as a moderator between fiscal and current account deficits. Furthermore, the findings showed that the fiscal deficit of ASEAN could generate inflation while relying on outstanding debt. Overall, our findings concluded that the fiscal deficit of ASEAN is alarming based on the behavior of government revenues, interest rate dynamics, political stability, and outstanding debt in deficit financing.