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Although small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are highly important for producing highvalue-added innovative and intermediary goods and play a crucial role in being suppliers of large enterprises, their financial restraints cause them to encounter problems regarding their internationalization process and financial performance. As a dynamic capability of Resourcebased View theory (RBV), the usage of marketing communication tools (MCTs) by SMEs, such as social media (SM), websites, telemarketing, direct mail, SMS campaigns, and Google Adwords, increases the competitiveness of SMEs and might enable them to reduce their financial performance and export concerns. However, the usage of these tools can differ depending on the firm's country of origin since countries have various socio-economic and cultural conditions that affect the competitiveness of firms and their marketing communication approaches to their export and financial performance. In this regard, this paper aims to find international differences in the impact of the usage of MCTs on export and financial performance. This paper examines 1221 SMEs from Czechia, Slovakia, and Hungary for this aim. The researchers created an online questionnaire to collect data from randomly selected respondents in the research sample. The researchers also ran Binary Logistic Regression analyses for analysis purposes. Although this paper confirms international differences in the impact of MCTs on the export of SMEs, the effect of SM usage on the financial performance of SMEs does not differ depending on the SMEs' country of origin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses how political discourse reaches different audiences through neurocommunication. The specific case studied is the speech delivered by Donald J. Trump to announce his candidacy for the 2024 U.S. presidential election. A review of concepts such as neurocommunication, neuropolitics and sociolinguistics is carried out. All of these are key elements in understanding how the public perceives leaders' speeches, especially in a competitive environment where leaders are trying to reach as many people as possible. The audiovisual material of the speech is used to investigate, through a codebook, the interaction between the ideas of the speaker and the audience, the way of speaking and the tone used by the leader to convince the different audiences or the deliberate use of certain words to achieve the intended purpose, in this case, to secure votes. With these codes, results are achieved that indicate that many of the registers used in Trump's speech influence the psychology of voters when making their decisions, again in an environment where there is a large number of offers. These are factors that serve to convince and persuade the public. This paper offers, through innovative approaches and methods, an analysis of how political discourse can be competitive in the current international context. The main advantage of using these codes is that they make speeches more efficient for different audiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Firms have considered intellectual capital (IC) as a key factor improving their competitiveness and performance. They can optimize their performance by maximizing resource utilization through examining the IC and physical capital. Therefore, in order to improve their competitiveness, this paper examines the impact of IC and its components on Vietnamese listed firm performance with a comparison among industry types over the period 2008-2021. The value added intellectual coefficient (VAIC) model is employed to measure IC. The system generalized method of moments (SGMM) and structural equation model (SEM) are used to identify the factors affecting firm performance. Our findings are that IC and its components play an important role in firm performance. VAIC, human capital efficiency (HCE), and capital employed efficiency (CEE) contribute to firm performance. Structural capital efficiency (SCE) positively influences firm performance for all combined firms and manufacturing companies, while it has a negative effect on firm performance in the service sector. The financial crisis played an important role, but the COVID-19 pandemic eroded firm performance. The financial crisis had a moderating effect on IC. This research expands the understanding of IC by analyzing the impact of IC and its components on firm performance with consideration of global crises and industry comparison. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Journal of Competitiveness has published its first special issue on "Sustainability and Competitiveness." The issue includes articles on various topics such as the role of marketing tools in SMEs' internationalization, the impact of intellectual capital on Vietnamese firm performance, innovation cooperation in Central and North-Eastern Europe, financial reporting quality and investment efficiency in emerging markets, and more. The articles cover a range of countries including Vietnam, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, China, Poland, Romania, Spain, and Taiwan. The journal aims to provide multidisciplinary perspectives and contribute to the existing literature on competitiveness. [Extracted from the article]

This paper proposes and to empirically tests an alternative method of measuring credit cycle fluctuations with a "nominalized" state of the population used as a denominator to the sum of the credit in the economy. It is a response to the often-quoted disadvantage of the baseline approach that estimates the credit gap with HP-filtered credit-to-GDP time, which distorts information on the state of the credit cycle in periods of significant declines in nominal GDP. The COVID-19 pandemic caused an economic shock that created ideal conditions for another practical manifestation of this weakness almost on a global scale. In the proposed alternative method, the cyclical component from the adjusted credit per capita time series is obtained through HP filter, i.e., similarly as in the baseline approach. Although the "credit per capita" approach is not completely new in this research subject, we use some important innovative features, such as quarterly state of population and its "nominalisation" with the use of a GDP deflator. Our empirical results show that the proposed credit per capita approach proved to be more appropriate compared to the baseline credit-to-GDP approach, at least in periods of large swings in economic activity. This feature of the proposed innovative approach can be valuable in the sense of eliminating false signals to countercyclical regulation and assessment of a country's competitiveness to enhance the credibility and validity of the findings, adding value to the overall research outcome using data reliability validation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the dynamic capabilities of exporters during the pandemic, specifically on export adaptability - since it is core to responding to and enduring the pandemic's turmoil. COVID-19 manifested sudden enduring uncertainty with severe implications for international operations, disrupting global value-chains and impacting world trade with devastating effect - crucially requiring exporting firms to swiftly adapt to cope and surmount havoc. The objectives of the research are twofold: to explore the combined impact of firms' export adaptability dynamic capabilities, together with specific exporter characteristics, on export customer satisfaction in COVID-19 times; to analyse the moderating effect of the firms' competitive advantage on this relationship. Our study investigates agri-food exporting companies in Chile, an export-oriented country in this sector. We adopt a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) methodology. This approach offers ideal causality identification, as it is based on the premise that outcomes of interest usually have multiple interdependent causes. We conclude that the presence of exporting firms' adaptability capability, together with characteristics typically inherent in being a small and medium-sized enterprise (SME), and a permanent exporter, significantly favour export customer satisfaction, and that having a strong competitive advantage intensifies this relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At present, with the increasing digital competition among enterprises, it is of great importance for enterprises to promote digital transformation and achieve sustainable development. Taking China's A-share listed companies from 2007 to 2021 as samples, this paper performs empirical tests in order to explore the impact of enterprise digital transformation on the comparability of accounting information and its mechanism. The results show that digital transformation has significantly enhanced accounting information comparability, which is still significant after a series of robustness tests. The mechanism test shows that the improvement of the comparability of accounting information by the digital transformation is mainly achieved by alleviating earnings management and agency problem. Further research shows that when the degree of market competition or transparency is high, the role of enterprise digital transformation in enhancing the comparability is more significant. This paper enriches the literature on the economic consequences of digital transformation and the factors affecting the comparability of accounting information. At the same time, the conclusions of this paper confirm the governance effect of enterprise digital transformation, provide evidential support for investors to improve decision-making efficiency, and urge enterprises to accelerate digital transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Change has become a necessary condition for any organisation to operate successfully in the market while meeting the ever-changing demands of all stakeholders. There is simply no other way to survive the intense competition and frequent changes that occur in the market. Only organizations that are able to respond to change, learn faster and move forward gain more expertise to better face the challenges brought about by changes in the business environment. The aim of this paper is to identify what changes organisations have made in recent years and how they manage these changes. To achieve this aim, five research questions are formulated in the area of change management in the business environment of the Czech Republic. Despite progress in implementing change, some companies are still reluctant to consider strategic changes and pursue only process improvements such as performance management, restructuring or process redesign of functional areas instead. The results also indicate that some companies are rather slow to implement change, starting with planning and attempting to change the management of the company. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transparency of public finances plays a crucial role in making local governments more competitive and their management more efficient. In order to increase the competitiveness and development of local governments, this paper investigates the relationship between expenditure, revenues, and the transparency index in Spanish municipalities. The period analyzed includes all those years in which data on municipal transparency was collected by Transparency International (2008-2017). The findings from the panel data technique (Juodis, Karavias, and Sarafidis causality test; mean group and common correlated effects mean group estimators) and the ANOVA/linear dependent Dirichlet process mixture are useful for local policies. The results obtained show that there is interdependence in the actions of political managers and the characteristics of municipalities that have an impact on fiscal outcomes. The empirical results show that direct taxes and the transparency index are causally related in both directions. Transparency has a direct impact on direct taxes and an indirect impact on indirect taxes. Fiscal synchronization for direct taxes, indirect taxes and expenditure and spend-and-tax assumption for total revenues are supported. Transparency has a positive effect on deficit and debt, and political party exerts a causal effect on debt in municipalities governed by male mayors, while the unemployment rate is a cause for deficit in the case of mayors that are males. From the findings of this study, several important policy implications can be derived. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) is a tactical concern for managers seeking a longterm result. Different managers are attempting to apply SSCM in order to get a competitive advantage. One of the critical processes is the identification of strategy implementation hurdles, which has been a research focus. As a result, this paper identifies these obstacles and analyzes their interrelationships. A list of obstacles was initially established by a survey of the literature and expert judgment in the form of the fuzzy Delphi approach. Next, an investigation was designed to collect expert opinions on the interrelationships between these obstacles. The fuzzy DEMATEL (FDEMATEL) approach was employed for examining the causal linkages and interdependencies of these obstacles. Subsequently, the interpretative structural modeling (ISM) technique was utilized to create a classified structure and to identify the driving and dependent connections. A fuzzy MICMAC analysis was applied for categorizing the obstacles based on driving and dependent power. The results reveal that barriers, "cost of implementation sustainability (B1)", "lack of financial resources (B2)", "institutional complexity (B3)", "complexity in measuring and monitoring sustainability practices (B4)", "lack of effective regulations (B5)", "lack of a proper evaluation system for suppliers (B6)", "lack of sustainability knowledge (B7)", and "strategic and structural restraints (B8)", are the influence-forwarding obstacles. These obstacles influence "inadequate government support (B9)", "high investments for sustainability and less return-oninvestments (B10)", "old equipment and machinery (B11)", and "lack of management commitment (B12)", which are the greatest influences on SSCM practices. Identifying the important obstacles and their interdependences can help policymakers in the manufacturing sector minimize or overcome them, boosting the possibilities of effectively incorporating sustainable principles into these projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper determines the profile of a family business that ensures the greatest engagement of family members in running a family business and has the strongest impact on the competitiveness of such an enterprise and its organisational effectiveness. The theoretical part addresses organisational effectiveness. It emphasises the variety of criteria and areas of its assessment and the relationships between organisational effectiveness and competitiveness. It discusses familiness as a unique resource and competitive advantage of family businesses. The analytical part presents the research methodology, including the authors' formula for calculating the measure of familiness and the procedure for identifying the profile of a family business, ensuring the greatest familiness engagement in business activities, which affects the organisational effectiveness and competitiveness of family businesses. This procedure was based on applying the gray system theory (GST). The research was based on the incomplete numerical induction method on a targeted sample of 200 family businesses operating in Poland that met the research criteria. The results show that the features most responsible for the highest engagement of familiness in the family enterprise are the territorial scope and size of the company, and the age of the family member involved in the activities of the enterprise. Small and medium-sized enterprises operating on the domestic market, in which a family member aged 36-45 is involved, generate the highest level of familiness in all seven researched areas of organisational effectiveness, including in the area of goals, and also generate the highest level of competitiveness of family businesses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Online social environments provide attractive platforms for firms to connect and engage with consumers. The objective of this paper is to optimize marketing efforts by brands to improve engagement and market share in social media. To this end, we define and conceptualize the digital social media space using the concepts of homophily and social distance. For quantification purposes and a more tangible practical implementation we build on Huff's retail gravity model, which is transposed to the social media space. The model allows the calculation of the expected engagement and social media market participation at the brand level, based on the positioning of the brand and its' competitors and the distribution of consumer activity in different social media, thus enabling the optimization of marketing efforts through digital (re-)location. The model is applied to leading brands in the athletic footwear market to test its robustness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the hitherto less explored issue regarding the nature of the relationship between firms' green mode (including setting environmental targets, monitoring environmental burden, and adopting measures against environmental burden) and the production of process innovations. For these purposes, we focus on the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, which, together with their eastern neighbors, have historically represented the main polluters of the European environment. By using the World Bank Enterprise Survey and data from 3,299 firms in the Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Slovakia and the binary logistic regression, we provide evidence that a firm's green mode expressed, for example, by its monitoring of energy consumption or adoption of measures of environmental burden, can significantly trigger its introduction of process innovations. Moreover, we show that a firm's membership in firm groups increases its chances to introduce process innovations. In contrast, we show that firm age does not play a role in our analyses. Our results contribute to the innovation and sustainability literature, especially to the ongoing discussion regarding the innovation and environmental performance of Central and Eastern European countries. In addition, we note several practical implications of our research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the impact of company size on the application of human resources (HR) investments. Data were collected through a questionnaire distributed to 610 SMEs in the Czech Republic. Properly completed questionnaires were obtained from 581 enterprises. The data were evaluated using the Chi-square test of independence, Kolmogorov-Smirnov normality test, Kruskal-Wallis test, and analysis of variance. Research questions were divided into four groups. The first group examined the application of HR investments as a reward, and the second group as a tool for increasing the interest in employment with the company. Another group focused on human capital management (HCM) and its impact on corporate financial performance. The last group dealt with HCM to improve the competitive advantage and the market position of the company. The results show that company size has a significant impact on the application of HC investments. In all groups, large enterprises (150+ employees) make investments to a greater extent than smaller companies. As for sector, the highest rating was recorded for companies operating in logistics and transport. The overall evaluation shows that large companies use the items more often, and no significant differences were recorded between different sectors. The findings may help large enterprises to realize that investment in human capital is long-term, increases competitiveness, and generates indirect returns. Small enterprises can also make investments in human capital, although to a limited extent, and it is not advisable to totally avoid such investments. The limitations are in the selected research method, the number of questions and respondents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Companies' green competitive advantages result from the high coordination of economic, ecological, social and corporate subsystems. Thus, it is important to investigate the influence and coupling coordination degree (CCD) of the relevant components of green competitiveness. This paper justifies the relationship between green competitiveness and the coupling degree of its components. It hypothesizes that the increasing integrated index of companies' green competitiveness was determined by levels of coordination and communication between its components. The study applies the CCD model and correlation analysis to test the hypothesis. The objects of analysis were enterprises represented by three economic sectors: agro-industrial, mechanical engineering and food. The findings show that the highest coupling coordination degree among all components is represented by the companies with the highest green competitive index. These companies are characterized by the dominance of corporate components, which can increase the general level of green competitive advantages in various combinations with other determinants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though innovation cooperation was rather out of business interest even almost a hundred years ago, uncertain economic conditions and crises, competitive struggle and globalisation now make it a necessity for firms to survive. Since the first systemic theories in the 1980s, scholars have developed several policy models covering innovation-focused relations of firms with researchers, institutions and other actors to spur their competitive advantages. One of them, quadruple helix, covers also societal impacts. This paper presents the results of the empirical research of such relations - the effects of five cooperation levels on five innovation forms in Slovakia, Czechia, Hungary, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia. Applying a propensity score matching pairing method with probit model and nearest neighbour setting, a caliper of 0.2 and common support to the Eurostat's CIS microdata from 2012, 2014 and 2016 (a total of 63,615 observations), I identified that the majority of cooperation positively affected innovation processes and competitiveness. More specifically, Slovak firms benefited mainly from firmpublic sector cooperation and Czech firms from the cooperation of firms with both research entities and public institutions. While Hungarian, Estonian and Lithuanian results vary by innovation form, Latvian firms got the best results from the last three cooperation levels. In general, the strongest positive effects were measured for goods innovation, while cooperation in the innovation of logistics processes had a rather negative effect in most selected countries. Finally, the research confirmed that cooperation is essential for the majority of firm innovation activities, stimulating competitiveness and business performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The personality of the investor has a significant role in determining investment decisions. Investors' personality traits and financial literacy determine their ability to understand investment risks. This capability enables investors to make appropriate investment decisions and enhances the competitiveness of the investors and the organization for which they work. This study examines the impact of personality traits on financial decisions mediated by financial literacy and investment risk. Data was collected from stock investors (individuals or organizations) in Indonesia, with as many as 455 respondents. The proposed hypotheses were tested and verified using the partial least squares approach using SmartPLS software version 4.0. The results indicated that personality traits composed of openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism affect financial literacy, investment risk, and financial decisions. Financial literacy positively and significantly impacts investment risk and financial decisions. The ability of investors to pay attention to risks in investing can provide many alternatives to increase the influence on financial decisions. This research makes a theoretical contribution to enriching the theory of finance behavior in making investments that provide profits. The practical implication is to provide insights for financial consultants to improve competitiveness through financial understanding, especially adjusting to personality in determining appropriate investment decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the influence of transformational leadership on corporate entrepreneurship, and analyzes the impact of the different dimensions of both constructs on each other. A quantitative research method was employed, and data was collected via a questionnaire. The participants of this study were 300 employees working in private hospitals in Pakistan. The findings revealed that intellectual stimulation, idealized influence, inspirational motivation and individual consideration have substantially significant and insignificant impact on new business ventures, self-renewal and innovativeness. Transformational leadership dimensions seem to exist within the corporate entity, which need to be synergized with new business ventures, innovativeness, and selfrenewal to enhance corporate entrepreneurship. Thus, we examine the relationship between transformational leadership and corporate entrepreneurship in private hospitals in Pakistan, which has implications for current leadership issues such as diversity and competitiveness in the workplace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Employees' affective well-being may be negatively affected by situations in which there is a lack of information on their job future. Yet, further knowledge is needed regarding the mechanisms that underlie this relationship, as it could help managers to counteract the pernicious effects of the emergence of uncertainty situations in firms. One potential underlying mechanism could be the level of anxiety experienced by employees in uncertainty situations, especially when these situations are perceived as threats to their immediate job future. Structural equation modelling, specifically through partial least squares -Smart PLS 4.0-, was used to test this point, and responses from a sample of 205 hotel employees in Spain after the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic were statistically analysed for such a purpose. The findings revealed that, as expected, job-related uncertainty perceptions reduce the affective well-being of employees not directly but rather indirectly by increasing their level of anxiety, which reveals that the predicted full mediating effect of employee anxiety was, therefore confirmed. This study thus demonstrates that job anxiety is increased by job-related uncertainty perceptions, and that job anxiety reduces the affective well-being of the employees, which could be dangerous for the competitiveness of firms. Managers should therefore activate policies and systems that reduce the level of anxiety of employees, so that the well-being of employees will not be reduced when uncertainty arises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study observes Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs) digital internationalization and determines of online comments influences customer purchase behavior, whether different product types (utilitarian and hedonic products) would moderate the relationships among online comments and customer purchase behavior. Objective data collected by Amazon platforms and SMEs transactions of 1,366 customer orders from 2019 to 2022. We collect online ratings and open-ended comments, adopting Python package of Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) for Natural language processing (NLP) to define a score of each comment based on a database of natural human language. Regression results reveal that customer purchasing behavior was influenced by both title and content of others' comments, the negative content has a greater negative effect than the negative title. Product types play a moderate role. Specifically, the negative contents of utilitarian goods have a stronger negative effect on customer purchase behavior. For theoretical contributions, we found that the negative comments of utilitarian products are viewed as the most influencing cues for customers purchase behavior. Furthermore, the neutral score of both title and content has a tendency to express negative emotion and attitude. The neutral comments and ratings are valuable for exploring more in future works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]