Digitalization is the core component of future development in the 4.0 industrial era. It represents a powerful mechanism for enhancing the sustainable competitiveness of economies worldwide. Diverse triggering effects shape future digitalization trends. Thus, the main research goal in this study is to use sustainable competitiveness pillars (such as social, economic, environmental and energy) to evaluate international digitalization development. The proposed empirical model generates comprehensive knowledge of the sustainable competitiveness-digitalization nexus. For that purpose, a nonlinear regression has been applied on gathered annual data that consist of 33 European countries, ranging from 2010 to 2016. The dataset has been deployed using Bernoulli’s binominal distribution to derive training and testing samples and the entire analysis has been adjusted in that context. The empirical findings of artificial neural networks (ANN) suggest strong effects of the economic and energy use indicators on the digitalization progress. Nonlinear regression and ANN model summary report valuable results with a high degree of coefficient of determination (R2>0.9 for all models). Research findings state that the digitalization process is multidimensional and cannot be evaluated as an isolated phenomenon without incorporating other relevant factors that emerge in the environment. Indicators report the consumption of electrical energy in industry and households and GDP per capita to achieve the strongest effect.
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In this critical review article an adopted framework from critical theorists will be introduced in order to question the alleged neutral objectivity in social scientific discussion. This old discussion-on value free science-becomes increasingly evident through the illustration of the relevant example of how academics concealed their positions of neutrality just before the 86th annual tourism conference of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), October 2010 in Jerusalem. This critical review article continues by analyzing the relatively high amount of email reactions to a Palestinian tourism scholar who called for support from the tourism academic community for the rejection of Jerusalem as the place where the conference will be held. On the basis of this material, three categories of reactions will be introduced and organized as a normative, critical discussion. In this discourse, an emancipatory perspective on this topic will be presented. This emancipatory knowledge will give voice to the marginalized and less heard voices in this region. With these voices a counterdiscourse can be organized in this region in which Arendt's "agora" will be introduced as a place of plural discussions. The intention of this revitalized critical discussion is to create a climate of broader enlightenment that ultimately goes beyond the perspectives of individual parties.
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In the recent ‘Regional outlook’, the OECD (2014) convincingly argues that cities can be the drivers of national growth and recovery: in principle, their diversity and density makes people and companies more productive and innovative. This is not only a tale of large cities: over the last decade, as recent studies demonstrate (e.g. Dijkstra, 2013) many smaller and medium-sized cities across Europe were important economic engines. But this did not happen automatically: to make that happen, ‘getting cities right’ is the key challenge, and action on the city level matters! As demonstrated by recent OECD data (OECD, 2014), poorly organised cities fail to reap their economic potential.
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