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This article analyzes financing alternatives for SMEs in El Salvador (Central America) that operate in the context of high levels of crime. SMEs represent 9.0% of the country's business sector, and together with micro-enterprises they account for 99.6%. Likewise, both participate with 35% of GDP and 67% of employment. The loans from the financial system, as of December 31, 2020, amounted to $3,107.22 million, which covered 60% of SMEs’ demand. Four hypotheses are proposed and tested using Multiple Indicators Multiple Causes (MIMIC), a structural equation model (SEM). The model revealed that the Salvadoran banking system has low confidence in the country's SMEs, which makes it extremely difficult for these companies to obtain loans. Some structural changes in the country's financial sector are urgently needed, but the state of violence and degree of mistrust in financial and social institutions are difficulties that only a real state of law and order can overcome. This, in turn, can act as a catalyst for sustainable economic progress. The sample includes 405 cases obtained from the surveys of managers in various companies. They were carried out during the months of March, April, May and June in 2019.

Using funded and unfunded pillars, the optimal pension structure is estimated using an over-lapping generation model, calibrated to the average OECD countries. While simulating different pillar sizes, a socio-economic characteristic was revealed in which low-earning groups are prone to unexpected market risks than high-earning cohorts and support a larger contribution than better-off individuals. This led to high contribution rates for funded pillars and low contributions rates for social security pillars. This suboptimal allocation leads to inefficient hedging capability for the pension portfolio. An alternative is a minimum pension guarantee as an efficient system stabilizer as it rebalances the economic cost among different earning cohorts. However, the guarantee might be expensive to implement if not capitalized early in the working phases in an era of aging populations, low birth rates, and deep financial crisis.

Due to COVID-19, there has been a paradigm shift in the labor market. This problem is accentuated in professions directly linked to human resources, as is the case in the health sector, education, and tourism. The main objective of this research is to analyze how these factors lead to a greater or lesser degree of job satisfaction. The research proposes a binary logistic regression model, which was built with a sample of 24,376 professionals from these intensive sectors of living, working, and COVID-19. The results obtained confirm, on the one hand, that there is a significant effect of burnout, efficacy, resources, and support about job satisfaction. In conclusion, this research shows that the job satisfaction of workers in intensive sectors is lower than that of other sectors, and that the factors that most influence the low job satisfaction of these workers are related to institutional, individual, and the increase in tax demands due to the pandemic.

This research aims to analyze the perception, motivation and behavior of tourists attending the Fiesta de los Patios in the city of Córdoba (Spain), declared an Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) by UNESCO in 2012. This research has categorized tourists based on two different models: the model developed by Poria et al. (2003) and the one developed by McKercher (2002). Four different tourist groups were obtained: alternative, cultural, emotional and heritage. The main result of this research is that the behavior of different types of tourists can be determined depending on the perception that the ICH tourist has. The main practical application of this research is to provide public administration and management companies with tourism tools that allow sustainable management of this ICH event.

The present work aims to analyze the properties of the working conditions recorded in the Sixth European Working Conditions Survey (EWCS); with it, it has being built seven independent indexes about different aspects of work’ quality in the health sector, and these constructs are used to evaluate their effects on work engagement (WE). In this sense, the originality of incorporating teamwork as a modulating variable is included. To analyze the effects of the job quality index (JQI) on the WE, a logistic regression model is proposed for a total of 3044 workers within the health sector, differentiating between those who work or not in a team; in a first stage and these estimates are compared with those obtained using an artificial neural network model, and both are used for the consideration of the research hypotheses about several causal factor. An important contributions of the study, it is related to how work commitment is mainly influenced by prospects, social environment, intensity and earnings, all of them related to job performance. Therefore, knowledge of the determinants of work commitment and the ability to modulate its effects in teamwork environments is necessary for the development of truly sustainable Human Resources policies.

In this study, we derive the financial position of pension actors in the market during pension system transition toward more funded capitalized scheme, mainly via an option benefit model. This is enabled by not considering the economy as a single earning cohort. We analytically demonstrate a socio-economic anomaly in funded pension system, which is in favor of high earning cohorts on the expense of low earning cohorts. This anomaly is realized by lack of insurance and exposure to financial and systemic risks. Furthermore, the anomaly might lead to pension re-reform back to unfunded scheme, mostly due to political pressure. We find that minimum pension guarantee is a rebalance mechanism to this anomaly, which increases the probability to sustainable pension scheme. Specifically, we argue that implementing the guarantee with an intra-generational, risk-sharing mechanism is the most efficient way to reduce the effect of this abnormality. Moreover, we exhibit the convergence process toward implementing minimum pension guarantee in many countries, which have capitalized their pension systems during the last three decades, particularly among Latin America and Central East Europe (CEE) countries. Received: 11 December 2020 / Accepted: 5 August 2021 / Published: 5 September 2021