The Influence of Publicity and Sales Promotion on Marketing Performance in Nigeria

Sales promotion and publicity are key promotional marketing tools which have assisted organizations to wax stronger in a global competitive environment. This study investigates the significance of publicity and sales promotion in Nigeria. The research design adopted for this study is survey research design while the sampling technique adopted is simple random sampling technique The Chi-square method is used to test the hypothesis based on the responses from the five-point Likert rating scale of the structured questionnaire. The findings reveal that publicity and sales promotion are veritable tools for achieving organizational marketing goals in a competitive marketing environment. It is recommended that publicity and sales promotion should be well utilized to stimulate customers demand, boost organizational reputation without detriment to product quality and performance. JEL Codes: M31, M37 Keywords: publicity, sales promotion, digital marketing era, promotion mix, marketing tools, marketing performance

Exchange Rate and Trade in Services Nexus in Nigeria: A Non-Linear ARDL Approach

A nonlinear ARDL model is employed to investigate the asymmetric drivers of non-oil trade in services between Nigeria and Netherlands. A significant number of past studies have concentrated their attention on the elasticity of trade in services to real exchange rates and income as well as on non-oil export, total export trade or import, yet none have delve into asymmetric relationship. This study aims to fills this void. Our result shows that the effects of exchange rate variations have both positive and negative displays with more negative asymmetry. This provides further insights in the nature of service asymmetries. (JEL Codes: C22, D43, E31, L71, Q41) Keywords: asymmetric cointegration, exchange rate adjustment, disaggregated, services

Introduction to the Themed collection: Public sector employment relations in turbulent times

We introduce a themed collection of articles examining how the public sector has responded to, and been impacted by, the COVID-19 crisis. Although the pandemic has affected the roles, functions, economies, governance and structures of public sectors, this themed collection focuses on public sector employment relations. Authors examine significant areas which have been subject to accelerated change stemming from the pandemic. Building on decades of public sector reform, these changes impact public sector enterprise bargaining, terms and conditions of employment, working arrangements and practices, and the relationship between public servants and their employer. The articles in this collection provide important insights into the longer-term influences of the COVID-19 pandemic for public sector workforces. The collection also raises questions around whether the positive lessons from this crisis can be sustained to help manage serious crises in the future, or whether the public sector will slip back into a state of unpreparedness. JEL Codes: J45, J5, J81

The Effect of COVID-19 Pandemic on the Global Supply Chain Operations: A System Dynamics Approach

Epidemic outbreaks are one of the important sources of the risk in the global supply chains. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, global industries that were unprepared for disruptions experienced a decline due to the pandemic. A global supply chain is a complex system set of dynamics that could be analyzed by the system dynamics approach. In this article, the impact of the recent pandemic on the global supply chain is simulated in different scenarios. A system dynamic model is developed to carry out the simulations. In order to consider the impact of the pandemic on the exogenous and endogenous variables, a force majeure factor is defined in the model. Global features considered in this article are the export and import operations, the exchange rate and the rate of tariff. In this article, a scenario analysis is performed to analyze two important factors of the global supply chain: force majeure factor and delivery delay. Results showed that improving the flexibility of production capacity is one of the important strategies that global supply chain managers should pursue. JEL Codes: F23, P45, C15, C63, E37, F17

Mine or ours? Unintended framing effects in dictator games

This paper reports results from a classroom dictator game comparing the effects of three different sets of standard instructions. The results show that seemingly small and typically unreported differences in standard instructions induce different perceptions regarding entitlement and ownership of the money to be distributed, and that these perceptions influence behaviour. Less is given when the task is described as a task of generosity and more when the task is a task of distribution (average 35 % vs. 52 %). The results can contribute to explaining the large variation in dictator game giving reported in the literature and show that even small and unreported differences in instructions change how the game is perceived. JEL codes: C70; C91; D63

The Response of Creative Class Members to Regions Vying to Attract Them With Subsidies

There are no theoretical studies in regional science that examine which region to locate in from the standpoint of a creative class member, given that the pertinent regional authorities (RAs) are competing among themselves to attract the creative class using subsidies. This gap provides the motivation for our paper. This paper’s contribution is that it is the first to theoretically study the regional location choice of creative class members when the RAs of the locations in which they might locate are using subsidies to attract them. Specifically, a knowledge good producing creative class member must decide which of two regions ( A or B) to locate his plant in. This good is produced using a Cobb–Douglas function with creative and physical capital. We analyze plant location in four cases. In the benchmark case, we show that the representative creative class member ought to locate his plant in the less expensive region B. Next, we show that a small subsidy to creative capital by region A switches the plant location decision from region B to A. Finally, when both regions grant identical subsidies to creative capital, the representative creative class member is indifferent between locating in regions A and B. So, for identical subsidies to affect the plant location decision, they are better targeted to physical and not to creative capital. JEL Codes: R11, R58

Public servants working from home: Exploring managers’ changing allowance decisions in a COVID-19 context

Before the COVID-19 pandemic forced large sections of the workforce to work from home, the uptake of working from home in the public sector had been limited and subject to the discretion or ‘allowance decisions’ of individual managers. Allowance decisions are influenced by factors at the organisational, group and individual levels. This research examines managers’ allowance decisions on working from home at each of these levels. It compares two qualitative datasets: one exploring managerial attitudes to working from home in 2018 and another dataset collected in mid-2020, as Australia transitioned out of the initial pandemic lockdown. The findings suggest a change in the factors influencing managers’ allowance decisions. We have identified a new factor at the organisational level, in the form of local organisational criteria. At the group level, previous concerns about employee productivity largely vanished, and managers experienced an epiphany that working from home could be productive. At the individual level, a new form of managerial discretion emerged as managers attempted to reassert authority over employees working remotely. These levels intersect, and we conclude that allowance decisions are fluid and not made solely by managers but are the result of the interactions between the organisational, group and individual levels. JEL Codes J81, J32

Identifying the research advances on COVID-19, the economy and the environment: network- bibliometric analysis and statistical validation

The COVID-19 outbreak dictates urgent research responses. The corpus of scientific publications on COVID- 19 is rapidly growing. Differently from health and technical sciences, social and environmental sciences risk to be neglected in this process. Similarly, Environmental Economics falls behind in terms of COVID-19 scholarship. The research note in hand examines and maps up-to-date research progress on the occurring Coronavirus disease, the economy and the environment. To this end, a bibliometric analysis of these three intertwined areas is performed. We constructed a database of the key publications and extracted the keywords co-occurrence network characterising each work. Thus, we studied the structural characteristics – i.e. the density and the centre – sorting from the co-occurrence network. This exercise identifies four communities of relevant keywords, including environmental health, economic impact and lifestyle, which present the maximal mutual interconnection. It is discovered that relevant possibilities and urgency to examine the relationship between the Coronavirus, the economy and the environment exist on the issues and, broadly, in the field of Environmental Economics. The study of environmental facets and environment-economy interplay within the current Coronavirus pandemic claims a larger academic production, resulting not yet relevant and scarcely explored and signals the need to boost public and environmental health scholarship response.JEL codes: C02, I15, I18, O13, Q56

Economic Growth and Electricity Consumption in India: An Econometric Analysis

The purpose of this study is to analyse the long-run causal relationship among the per capita electricity consumption ( PCEC) and per capita gross domestic product ( PCGDP), urban population ( UP) and employment ( EMP) pattern in India over the period of 1991–2018. To analyse the long-run association Johansen co-integration test has been used. The results of the Granger-causality test imply that there exists a bidirectional causal relationship between the PCEC and PCGDP whereas there exist unidirectional causality from EMP and UP to PCGDP. Jel Codes: L52, C53, P1

How Does Innovation Affect Economic Growth? Evidence from G20 Countries

We study the interactions between innovation and economic growth in G20 countries over 1961–2019. We establish whether there is a temporal causality between these two variables. Employing the autoregressive distributive lag framework, our results expose a grid of short-run and long-run causal relationships between innovation and growth, including long-run unidirectional causality from innovation to economic growth. Overall, our findings shed light on the real effects of innovation on economic growth. JEL Codes: O38, O31, O32