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COVID-19 caused a worldwide paralysis. An asynchronous study among executive officers was developed, using the qualitative Delphi method, during the confinement stage, by a couple of companies, one from Colombia, another from Spain. Participants were human resources and marketing managers (some of them working in both areas) of large companies, SMEs, non-profit organizations, and professional unions, located in both countries. A forecast of expected changes in interpersonal relationships was the main objective of the study; however, as participants broadened the debate, topics related to administrative functions emerged. This paper focuses in the latter. Administrative planning was the most affected function by the pandemic. Organizational arranges like telecommuting became more common, their interaction and control difficulties raise concerns among directors. Strengthening trust and communication bonds is important. Decision making process was faster during the quarantine period, it is a lesson learned by the participants. Increased empathy to the personal necessities and functionality prevalence in the performance of administrative tasks are both in the future expected by participants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper starts from a basic premise: During the last years, there have been multiple corruption cases that affected public administrations credibility, but also the one of the private sectors of the economy. Areas such as urban planning or public contracting have been prolix regarding the occurrence of criminal activities that undermine the proper functioning of the Public Administration and business activity based on ethics and legality. Consequently, it is very important to implement internal complaint mechanisms to improve organizations (public and private ones) by prematurely discovering illicit conduct and, in turn, identifying the individuals responsible for such acts. In the same way, for some companies, the verification of the effectiveness of the complaint channels in court contributes to corporate defenses and in achieving exemption from criminal responsibility. Therefore, from a technical perspective, guidelines and recommendations are offered from different regulations point of view to increase the effectiveness of these channels and to reduce the legal uncertainty that occurs in Spain, given the limited drafting of the Penal Code. Likewise, anonymity, paid denunciation and the protection of the complainant against retaliation are addressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a new version of the Spain-STING (Spain, Short-Term INdicator of Growth), a dynamic factor model used by the Banco de España for the short-term forecasting of the Spanish economy. The extended and revised version of the Spain-STING presented in this document includes a forecast for each of the demand components of the National Accounts. In order to select the indicators that best estimate the Spanish GDP and its demand components, several models are considered. Following this strategy, the selected models are those in which the common factor explains the highest proportion of the variance of the GDP. These models allow us to forecast GDP, private consumption, public expenditure, investment in capital goods, construction investment, exports and imports in a consistent way. We assess the predictive power of the models for GDP and its demand components for the period 2005-2017. With regard to the GDP forecast, we find some improvement of the predictive power compared to the previous version of Spain-STING. As for the demand components, we show that our proposal has better predictive power than other possible time series models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]