Abstract: This review paper examines the rising influence of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) in the field of marketing,focusing on how these unique digital assets are changing brand strategies and consumer interactions. Businesses are increasingly using NFTs to offer exclusive experiences, strengthen customer loyalty, and promote ownership of digital products like virtual collectibles, art, and branded content.The paper provides a comprehensive overview of the current applications of NFTs in marketing, including digital collectibles, virtual real estate, branded content, and customer incentives. It also addresses the challenges and risks, such as market volatility, environmental concerns, regulatory uncertainties, and the evolving consumer perception of digital ownership. Additionally, the study explores future developments, such as the convergence of NFTs with the metaverse and social platforms, and the growing importance of gamification in brand storytelling. By synthesizing existing researchand how marketers can effectively use NFTs while managing risks in this rapidly changing digital environment.
Автор статьи обсуждает распространение электронных платежей, рост интереса к криптовалютам и внедрение блокчейн-технологий, рассматривается влияние мобильных технологий, таких как Apple Pay и Google Wallet, на удобство платежей. В статье проводится сравнение традиционных платежных систем (Visa, MasterCard) с инновационными (PayPal, Skrill), рассматриваются их различия в услугах, комиссиях, технологиях, безопасности и удобстве использования. Статья освещает текущие тенденции в платежных системах на 2023 год, в том числе развитие цифровых финансовых активов (ЦФА), децентрализованных финансов (DeFi), альтернативных механизмов трансграничных платежей и расширение присутствия кредитных карт в развивающихся странах, внедрение открытых API и применение биометрии для усиления безопасности платежных операций. The author of the article discusses the spread of electronic payments, the growing interest in cryptocurrencies and the introduction of blockchain technologies, and the impact of mobile technologies such as Apple Pay and Google Wallet on the convenience of payments is considered. The article compares traditional payment systems (Visa, MasterCard) with innovative ones (PayPal, Skrill), examining their differences in services, fees, technologies, security and ease of use. The article highlights current trends in payment systems for 2023, including the development of digital financial assets (DFAs), decentralized finance (DeFi), alternative cross-border payment mechanisms and the expansion of credit cards in developing countries, the introduction of open APIs and the use of biometrics to enhance security payment transactions.
Cryptocurrencies are becoming increasingly popular among the investors. The surveys show that the investors in emerging markets are more inclined to invest in cryptocurrencies (Statista, 2022). Bitcoin has a market cap of around 50% of the total cryptocurrencies which led us to base our study on it. Turkish investors new to the financial markets are specifically interested in new initial public offering (IPO) and Bitcoin. The underlying drive for this new investor type is to have quick and high returns from their investments. In 2020 IPO’s provided high and fast returns but they were limited in terms of investment size. Bitcoin on the other hand is accessible for the average investor. This study analysed the position of Bitcoin as an investment tool in Turkey between 2014-2021 and tried to find out the interaction between the Bitcoin and the possible substitutive investment tools like BIST100 Index, USDTRY, Interest rate, and Gold. According to our findings, there is a trade-off between interest rate and Bitcoin in the long-run, but in the short-term there is causality between BIST100 and Bitcoin.
Globalized delivery of manufacturing and agricultural production offer renewed attention to the health, efficiency, and validation of many vital criteria in the food and agricultural supply chain. That numbers of food safety and corruption hazards have generated an enormous need of an efficient traceability solutions which acts as an essential quality managements tools ensuring to enough product's safety within the agriculture supply chain. Block chain is the revolutionary technological method, which provides the ground breaking result for commodity traceableness in agriculture and in food supply chains. Today's agricultural supplying chains are complicated ecosystems mixing several stakeholders making it difficult to validate several significant requirements mainly towards nation of first origin, crop growth phases, quality standards compliance, and yield monitoring. This paper proposes a strategy that levitates the block chain and conducts business operations effectively across the agricultural supply chain for tracking crop prices and traceability. The proposed framework solution discards the need for trusted centralized authority, intermediaries and offers records of the transactions, improving efficient science and safety with high integrity and reliability. All transactions are registered and then stored in block chain's unchangeable ledger with linkages to a decentralized le network, thereby ensuring vary high degree of traceability and transparency in the supply chain ecosystem in a stable, reliable and in efficient manner.
Abstract Subject and purpose of work: The aim of this work is to present the application possibilities of ECONOMIC AND REGIONAL STUDIES STUDIA EKONOMICZNE I REGIONALNE ISSN 2083-3725 Volume 14, No. 2, 2021 ECREG STUDIES Vol. 14, No. 2, 2021 the weights of criteria is proposed, which maximizes the similarity of the final ranking to the other ones. Materials and methods: PROMETHEE II method and taxonomic measure were used to create rankings of exchanges. Hierarchical clustering combined with the k-means algorithm www.ers.edu.pl PDF OPEN ACCESS eISSN 2451-182X available data published on the Internet were analysed. Results: There was a high consistency in the ordering of exchanges when a multi-criteria and a multi-dimensional approach were used. Four groups of exchanges with a similar level of the values of net flows were identified. Exchanges in group one were characterized by the highest average net flows. Conclusions: The multi-criteria approach can be used as an alternative to the multi-dimensional assessment of cryptocurrency exchanges. The proposed simulation method for determining the weights of criteria can be helpful in case the researcher has no information about the importance of the criteria.
Digital technologies are rapidly changing every aspect of our societies, and especially international trade where all these technologies are converging. From artificial intelligence (AI) and distributed ledger technology (DLT)* to 3D printing and 5G networks, emerging technologies are no longer abstract ideas but daily realities of international trade.
The paper focuses on the complex dialectics between endogenous and exogenous components of local and territorial economic development, emphasizing the idea of the particular consistency of internal growth factors and the importance, in this context, of financial means for activating the endogenous potential in the case of Romania. The county was considered as statistical observation unit for the period of analysis 2007-2013 and the data were disaggregated on bank loans, FDI, research and development expenditures, European structural and cohesion funds, local budgets expenditures. It was found that the more developed counties have better chances to achieve higher performances of endogenous development. The study highlighted the need of a policy mix that would support the development of counties with a relatively low development level, actually most of them, under the circumstances of a polycentric regional development. An optimal combination between top-down and bottom-up interventions may prove to be the most successful, offering an effective compatibility of decentralization with the coordination and monitoring requirements, supporting the smart specialization at county level, not excluding spillover effects at community and national levels.
This study features an analysis of the regionalization – decentralization process, on three dimensions: public policy, the relationship over time between decentralization and the development gap between the different areas of Romania, and the public opinion on this issue. The public policy dimension focuses on the content of the regionalization – decentralization process through the analysis of social documents, in this case, the three official documents issued by the Cabinet and parliament. The aim of the decentralization process is a substantial transfer of public services, areas of responsibility and funds from the central Government to the local government – regional, county and local councils. A secondary objective, but with maximum visibility, emerges through the regionalization component: the creation of administrative regions. This entails a change of the territorial administrative structure of Romania and requires a revision of the Constitution. The second dimension of decentralization deals with the results up to this point, as revealed by a longitudinal analysis over more than a 15-year period public financing and development indicators, at national and administrative unit level. During this timeframe, development gaps increased dramatically. Through the mechanism governing local budgets, decentralization acted as a accelerator for increasing inequality. Public opinion represents a third dimension on decentralization. The secondary analysis of a nationwide opinion poll on this issue focused on its notoriety, the general attitude of the population and the public opinion depth of the support for decentralization. The general attitude regarding the decentralization bill could be summed up as conformist and positive. The vulnerability of the support for decentralization comes from several sources, such as: the association with the corruption and “local barrons” metaphor, its lack of priority on the public agenda, and the polarization potential of regionalization.
The analysis of the administrative capacity of institutions in the regional development starts from the analysis of the existing framework for the implementation of regional politics in Romania and studies the extent to what the structures and competencies were regionally enlarged as to contribute in the regional development. The basic hypothesis considered for such analysis had in view the fact that the differences recorded with respect to the implementation capacity of the regional development policy are caused by the various levels of the administrative capacity of the national, regional and local institutions existent in Romania. Although the regional development activity is, both centrally and regionally, dominated by the Regional Operational Programmme 2007-2013 (ROP) implementation, significant activity also exists outside the ROP, but only regionally. The regional strategies incorporate to a great extent the strategic objectives established nationally, being coordinated with the national financing instruments for economic, social and territorial development. The undertaking degree of responsibilities regarding the objectives fulfillment of the regional development policy is relatively low both regionally and locally, and the main indicator which contributes in sustaining this conclusion is the absence of an adequate level regarding the property holding on certain strategies and also the methodological lack of strategies. Nationally, the current activity of Ministry of Regional Development and Tourism in the field of regional development totally overlaps the management activity of ROP. The management of structural funds 2007-2013 granted through ROP deals with various situations in which, due to the fact that the Law of regional development remained behind the legislation for the structural instruments implementation in Romania, additional resources are necessary to be granted in order to be found solutions through other types of regulations. The Romanian legal and institutional setting allowed a centralized top-down approach for the regional development process and brought forward the approach of the type â€Å"local development which falls among certain priorities of regional development established nationally†. Definitely, the local development is important for the regional development, but it is not self-sufficient in this respect. Therefore, the centralized approach should be completed by a decentralized approach, as a natural next phase.
Reviewed by: Assessing the Extent of China's Marketization, and: The Revival of Private Enterprise in China, and: Entrepreneurship in China Kun-Chin Lin (bio) Xiaoxi Li , editor. Assessing the Extent of China's Marketization. The Chinese Trade and Industry Series. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006. xix, 330 pp. Hardcover $114.95, ISBN 978-0-7546-4878-9. Shuanglin Lin and Shunfeng Song, editors. The Revival of Private Enterprise in China. China Trade and Industry Series. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007. Hardcover $114.95, ISBN 978-0-7546-4892-5. Keming Yang . Entrepreneurship in China. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007. Hardcover $114.95, ISBN 978-0-7546-4668-6. These three volumes signal the sustained commitment of Ashgate Publishing to contemporary Chinese political economy—the first two titles belong to a handful of edited volumes published in the past three years under the Chinese Trade and Industry Series; the latter is a monograph not classified under any Ashgate series.1 Series editors for the said series—Aimin Chen (Sichuan University) and Shunfeng Song (University of Nevada, Reno)—are well-respected economists with decades of experience in research and teaching in the United States and in China. Most volumes appear to be collections of conference papers by scholars from both sides of the Pacific, presented at symposiums supported by international funding agencies, corporate donations, and Chinese academic institutions. Previous volumes in the series have received scant attention in major journals of economics and China studies.2 I suspect this neglect reflects the relative abundance of edited volumes on various aspects of the Chinese economy as well as inconsistencies within the series. Reviewers of earlier volumes have voiced concerns with the following problems: numerous editorial errors; outdated data, in particular pertaining to "post-WTO" discussions; context-insensitive applications of econometrics models; and inconsistent efforts at theory building and comparative analysis across sectors and countries.3 To varying degrees, these problems resurfaced in the two edited volumes under consideration here. All three books address head-on the two most fundamental structural changes in the Chinese economy since the mid 1990s—the historic shift from a socialist economy of chronic shortage to one of overall oversupply, and the diminishing importance of the state and collective forms of ownership in face of various property right reforms and the surging private sector. These trends have fairly overtaken and made unfashionable earlier scholarly attention on the reform of state-owned enterprises and debates over soft-budget constraints. However, a close reading of these volumes strongly suggests that the evolving [End Page 330] complexities in state-nonstate relationships remain the central institutional variables for economic growth and system transformation. The earlier debate over whether ownership form and corporate governance or market competition and the overall external environment (including financing options and regulatory risks) matter more for improving the performance and governance of state-owned enterprise finds new relevance in application to the analysis of private enterprises. In addition, central and local governmental relations over the process of decentralization enter into discussion but do not receive systematic attention and theorization in these volumes. It is almost as if, after lavishing praises for the entrepreneurial local state in the 1990s, scholars have decided that the private firms and entrepreneurs are the central, autonomous agents for China's present dynamism. There is certainly a need to rethink the research agenda in light of structural changes in favor of the private sector, but one should keep in mind necessary continuities and comparisons with the earlier scholarship. Assessing the Extent of China's Marketization, edited by Xiaoxi Li of Beijing Normal University and with twenty-eight of twenty-nine chapter contributors sourced from that university, is best read as issue-specific summaries of regulatory and institutional changes since 2000. Whether these changes actually translate into the development of robust political and institutional foundations for the market economy is largely implied through correlations to aggregate economic outcomes rather than through rigorous analyses. Anthropologists, sociologists, and political scientists would look in vain for relevant qualitative research such as in-depth case studies, contextualized narratives, or historical-institutional analysis of long-term trends. The underlying perspective of this volume assumes a congruence of state-building and market-building projects...
Economic and social cohesion between the EU Member States is one of the explicitly stated goals in the Treaty on European Union. The EU's Structural Funds as a part of the Union's regional policies are a mechanism of conditional grants that provides co-financing for growth enhancing investments. Evidence on the effectiveness of the Structural Funds is mixed. While Boldrin and Canova (2001) find no sign of a catch-up effect of regions receiving aid for the period of 1980-1996, Beugelsdijk and Eijffinger (2005) find a positive relationship between (lagged) Structural Funds expenditure and GDP growth at the national level covering 1995-2001. De La Fuente (2002) points to the fact that the inclusion of conditioning variables might also play a crucial role for the results. Ederveen, deGroot and Nahuis (2002) find that Structural Funds themselves have a negative impact on growth. However, the impact turns out to be significantly positive, when interacting variables measuring institutional quality are taken into account. Similarly, Esposti (2005) shows that additional policy measures (spending on CAP) can have significant counter-effects on the effectiveness of Structural Funds expenditure. So far the federal structure of the EU Member States did not attract much attention when the effectiveness of the Structural Funds is considered. Although the EU Commission requires the inclusion of regional authorities and stakeholders in the planning and implementation procedure of programs funded by Structural Funds, one should expect that the performance is better, where the sub-national authorities are more accustomed to pursuing economic policy and implementing programs. This should be the case in states with a higher degree of sub-national autonomy. Using panel-data for a sample of 13 EU Member States from 1960-1995 the effects of Structural Funds on growth are analysed. Then a decentralization index by Stegarescu (2004) is introduced as an interacting variable in order to measure the degree of sub-national autonomy. This paper shows that increasing sub-national autonomy has a significantly positive impact on the effectiveness of the Union's Structural Funds expenditure.
Regional policy has – in general – the intention to supporting the efforts of regions with development problems to overcome their current problems and to stimulate an increase in regional economic growth. If the regional policy measures by a jurisdiction are successful, there will be a tendency towards more economic convergence between the various regions within that jurisdiction, with the result of a higher degree of cohesion between these regions, than in a state without regional policy. There are many studies on evaluating the impact of different instruments of regional policy on cohesion. But there are only few investigations so far into the institutional framework of these instruments. One institutional aspect has become more and more relevant in public discussions during the last few years: In federations (e. g. in the EU), there is in general not only one jurisdiction responsible for regional policy, but two, three or even more levels of government; the responsibilities (or: competences) are fragmentated between these levels. The paper presents a theoretical analysis of the impact of the allocation of competences in the field of regional policy on the outcome (interregional cohesion) and on the costs (economic efficiency) of regional policy. The analysis is based on the Theory of Fiscal Federalism, including the Economic Theory of Intergovernmental Grants. All the possible more central or more decentral arrangements of regional policy are located between two polar cases: At one pole, we have an arrangement where only the central level of government (e. g. the EU level) is responsible for regional policy; neither any subcentral unit of government (e. g. at the member state level in the EU), nor the regions which are to be supported (the less developed regions) have any influence for deciding on the implementation of regional policy instruments, and only the central government has to finance regional policy with its own resources. At the other pole, we find an arrangement where only the subcentral units of government and the less developed regions themselves are deciding on regional policy and are responsible for financing. In connection with financing, different categories of grants in aid may be applied. In addition, the arrangements may differ from each other because of different institutions for controlling the activities of the lower levels. The main hypothesis is, that a more decentralized institutional arrangement is not in general more efficient and effective than a more centralized arrangement; but – as compared to the status quo in Europe – a more decentralized arrangement for some public responsibilities would lead to better results in the field of regional policy. Central questions to be answered are: Have subcentral governments (as compared to central units of government) a tendency for neglecting their subregions with development problems' What is the impact of information costs and asymmetrical information on the choice of the level of government for certain (sub-) responsibilities' To which degree is the central influence stimulating – or: paralyzing – the initiative of the regions which are to be supported?
In the 1980's, in the US across the board, domestic manufacturers have have faced foreign competition with an increased disadvantage with imports. Domestic businesses, including those in rural areas, have had to struggle with restructuring their businesses, decentralizing them, outsourcing, relocating overseas, go out of business altogether or to reduce their business size or workforce numbers. Economic initiatives like 'Growing North Dakota' attempted to educate North Dakota citizens to the necessity of their state increasing it's growth in manufacturing and in ways they could help these industries grow such as financing these industries at favorable terms, aiding in the transfer of technology commercialization or assisting such technologies. By aiding the manufacturing sector this was deemed as aiding in the diversification of the North Dakota economy.