Towards an Ecosystem of Hospitality: The Dynamic Future of Destinations

Digitalization, new work and leisure concepts and global challenges are transforming the way we live. More stakeholders, including residents and entrepreneurs, actively participate in the implementation of alternative socio-economic concepts; as such, entrepreneurial ecosystems are seen as drivers of regional development. The research still lacks holistic approaches to the application of ecosystems in tourism destinations. Hence, the objectives of this article are to capture research on entrepreneurial ecosystems in tourism and, specifically, to derive a holistic model that integrates destination and location management across stakeholders. This research utilizes the method of a systematic literature review, starting with 597 articles on ecosystems. Following four stages of exploring the literature, the results show that most articles have been published in rather isolated fields of smart tourism or quality of life aspects. Based on the rather qualitative review that reveals specific ecosystem components, we propose a model of an “Ecosystem of Hospitality” (EoH). Focusing on stakeholder interaction and encounters, the EoH fosters the adoption of the entrepreneurial ecosystem to destinations in a dynamic approach. The practical implications are, for example, a broader consideration of various stakeholders, including the local population, and a switch in typical destination management tasks from mere tourism service production to regional development and living space management.

The Perception of the Market and Operational Area of Business by Service Sector and Tourism Companies in terms of CSR implementation

Our research examined the attitudes of owners and managers of small and medium-sized enterprises in the V4 countries, who behave responsibly - they use corporate social responsibility in their managerial practice on issues focused on the market and operational area of business. The paper is based on a questionnaire survey with data collection from September 2019 to January 2020. Statistical methods of Pearson's chi-square and z-score were used to assess the hypotheses. The results proved that there are significant differences in companies in services and tourism in the context of implementing the CSR concept. Entrepreneurs who implement social responsibility with a significant positive difference agree that a company places great emphasis on the innovation of its products and services. Researchers found that the sector has an impact on the perception of decreasing customers' requests on specific products/services. We found that corporate social responsibility and its implementation in corporate practice positively affects the relationship of V4's small and medium enterprises in the services and tourism sector to service production innovation issues, which helps increase business performance and decline customer complaints.

Local Government's Resource Commitment to Environmental Sustainability: Capacity, Conservatism, and Contractual Dynamics

Local governments are leading sustainability efforts through a range of initiatives, often voluntarily. While a spate of research exists to explain what drives these voluntary decisions, we are still limited in understanding how localities follow through with the resources to implement their adopted plans. This is particularly the case for environment and climate protection programs that are transboundary in nature and thus require more innovative and longer-term approaches than those that are relatively low-cost and easier to implement with future savings. This research examines local investment in promoting three of these program areas: air quality, biodiversity preservation, and ecological restoration. It investigates how local governments vary according to resource commitment and what factors explain those variations. We find several factors significant, including community capacity, political ideology, and institutional arrangements for service production and delivery. Variations are, however, found across different types of resource commitment, suggesting a more complex picture of local resource availability for advancing sustainability efforts.

The Role of Crowdfunding for New Funding Challenges in Public Universities: An Italian Case Study

This article aims to understand how the public higher education sector is dealing with new challenges, like sustainability in services provision and delivery, which means to fulfil all the functions of a university. In order to fulfil their mission and be sustainable, the public higher education sector should start an innovation process, through which they can improve their resilience to socio-economic changes. Obviously, this involves new conditions in terms of service production, which can turn into co-production, collaboration within and outside the university’s organizational borders, and, eventually, partnerships with other organizations. This research studies in deep all these topics by investigating the case study of an Italian university, which has developed its own crowdfunding platform in order to sustain its functions. The results show some of the changes within the public universities’ fundraising culture. Moreover, though the results relate to the context of analysis, it would be interesting to develop this study by comparing public universities located in different countries.

NAČINI VREDNOVANjA OSTVARENIH PERFORMANSI U SISTEMU PRODUKCIJE JAVNIH USLUGA

In this paper, the author's attention is focused on the problem of performance evaluation in modern systems of public service production, which is a special and very important structural segment of the application of financial management concept of performance - based budgeting. The paper will point out the aspects of researching the goals of the process of evaluation of effects in relation to the process of their simple quantification (measurement). The author will also analyze the individual ranges of different forms of performance evaluation in modern management systems

Valuation of carbon services produced by wild animals finances conservation

Filling the global biodiversity financing gap will require significant investments from financial markets, which demand credible valuations of ecosystem services and natural capital. However, current valuation approaches discourage investment in conservation because their results cannot be verified using market-determined prices. Here, we bridge the gap between finance and conservation by valuing only wild animals carbon services for which market prices exist. By projecting the future path of carbon service production using a spatially-explicit demographic model, we place a credible value on the carbon-capture services produced by African forest elephants. If elephants were protected, their services would be worth $35.9 billion (24.3-41.2) and store 377 MtC (318-388) across tropical Africa. Our methodology can also place lower bounds on the social cost of nature degradation. Poaching would result in $10-14 billion of lost carbon services. Our methodology enables the integration of animal services into global financial markets with major implications for conservation, local socio-economies, and conservation.

An Analysis of the Time-Driven Activity-Based Costing System in Foundation Higher Education Organizations

Changes in globalization and technology have made the competition in the education sector more in-tense. This change in competition has reduced the profit margins of educational organizations. In order to maintain their market share and maintain their assets under these conditions, organizations have had to put greater stress on cost management. Today, cost management has moved beyond simply being a sub-system of accounting and has become one of the main tasks of business management. Higher education organizations need to use scarce resources effectively and efficiently to achieve their goals, develop long-term strategies, and maintain their existence. The extent to which resources are used by whom and for what time should be determined correctly. The outputs obtained during this process should be checked and interpreted correctly. This study was designed as a case study and conducted in a vocational school of a foundation university in Istanbul. The aim of this study is to examine the service production process in foundation vocational school with different costing methods and to compare the results. For this purpose, the costs of the vocational school for the 2016-2017 accounting period were calculated by using both the traditional costing method and the time-driven activity-based cost-ing method. These two methods were then compared to find out their degree of accuracy in calculating the program costs.

Managing the Dollar Over Its Cycles

The United States has ceded to the rest of the world managing the dollar’s value. For a generation, the U.S. authorities have all but withdrawn from the foreign exchange market. Yet the dollar does not float freely as a result of this hands-off U.S. policy. Instead, other authorities manage the dollar exchange rates, albeit separately. These authorities make heavier purchases of dollars in its downswings than in the upswings, damping its decline. Thus, the Fed finds that accommodative monetary policy transmits less to U.S. manufacturing and traded services, and relies on still lower rates to stimulate interest-sensitive housing and auto demand. The current U.S. dollar policy of naming and shaming surplus-running countries accumulating foreign exchange reserves does not seem to work. Three alternatives warrant consideration. First, the U.S. could reinstate its withholding tax on interest income received by non-residents and even add policy criteria to bilateral tax treaties. Second, the U.S. authorities could retaliate by selling dollars against the currencies of dollar-buying jurisdictions running chronic surpluses. However, either the withholding tax or such retaliatory foreign exchange intervention pose huge practical challenges. Third, the U.S. authorities could re-enter the foreign exchange market, making large-scale asset purchases in foreign currency when the dollar rises sharply against its average value. Such a policy would encourage private investment in U.S. traded goods and service production. The challenge is to set ex ante foreign exchange intervention rules to guide market participants’ expectations, even positioning them to do the authorities’ work.

A Comparative Analysis of Co-Production in Public Services

This study investigates current research trends in co-production studies and discusses conceptual approaches. The conceptual paper contains studies on co-production in the field of public administration. This study identifies significant gaps in the field of study by systematically examining 32 co-production research works. The study’s contributions include (1) defining two common characteristics of co-production, (2) classifying three forms of co-production by end-users, and (3) discovering that the aims and performance of co-production are more effective for service providers when the strategy is citizen-centric. Future research should (1) concentrate on the reasons for co-production failures or successes, (2) identify additional barriers to co-production in service production, (3) investigate influences on service providers as well as structural impacts on the co-production process, and (4) provide practical assessments of co-production research.