This research probes into the digital transformation shifts in Romania and sets them against a backdrop of certain EU countries. Its primary objective is to spotlight digitalization’s significance and assess its level of integration within the Romanian banking landscape. Our approach relies on a detailed examination of the adoption of digital banking instruments in Romania through correlation and ANOVA assessments. The ANOVA analysis of the DESI index and its associated dimensions reveals how Romania’s digital transformation stands in relation to other EU member states. Our findings emphasize the numerous advantages Romanian banks have garnered from increasingly embracing digital innovations and artificial technologies. These perks span from optimized operations and efficiency to enhanced customer experiences and a sharpened competitive advantage. The research indicates a strong positive correlation between a bank’s return on assets and its liquid assets to deposits and short-term funding ratios. This suggests that as digital integration deepens, there is a marked upturn in financial robustness. Additionally, the study sheds light on the perks of individuals adopting digital banking offerings and delves into factors that propel and impede the digital evolution in the banking arena. Overall, this paper presents valuable insights into Romania’s digital banking trajectory and the sector’s long-term viability.

This study investigates how Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) performance is shaped across 31 countries in the European Union (EU) and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) from 1990 to 2020. To explore these relationships, we employed the Continuously Updated Generalized Method of Moments (CUE-GMM) and the Limited Information Maximum Likelihood (LIML), with additional robustness checks using Instrumental Variables Two-Stage Least Squares (IV-2SLS), Panel-Corrected Standard Errors (PCSE), and Driscoll-Kraay regressions. The results highlight democratic governance as a consistent driver of ESG advancement. Military expenditure can also support sustainability by reinforcing institutional stability, particularly in developing and upper-middle-income countries. Economic factors such as foreign direct investment, industrialization, and human capital show context-dependent effects, whereas globalization and natural resource rents generally enhance ESG performance, and inflation tends to constrain it. Overall, the findings underscore the importance of tailored, context-specific sustainability policies, showing that effective ESG progress depends on the interaction between institutions, economic structures, and global integration.

The rapid digitalization of banking services has transformed consumer interactions, necessitating a deeper understanding of the factors influencing online banking adoption. This research investigates the factors influencing consumer adoption in a country undergoing rapid digital transformation but still facing gaps in digital skills and infrastructure—Romania. The objective of the study is to analyze how key variables such as ease of use, security, speed, usefulness, and social pressure influence online banking behavior of Romanian consumers, especially the most digitally engaged ones. The study utilizes a multi-method empirical approach, hypothesis testing, binary logistic regression for prediction modeling, and segmentation analysis to offer a comprehensive view of customer behavior. The findings identify essential adoption drivers and separate customer profiles, providing useful information for financial organizations aiming to enhance their digital strategy. Perceived ease of use and perceived security are primary factors influencing adoption; nevertheless, decision tree analysis indicates that speed and usefulness have a more significant impact than logistic regression implies, but social pressure unexpectedly serves as an impediment. These results highlight the necessity for banks to customize their digital services, harmonizing security and user-friendliness with improved efficiency and usefulness to promote broader adoption in emerging digital economies like Romania.

This study examines the association between financial development and selected telecommunications infrastructure indicators in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), focusing on mobile cellular subscriptions (MBS) and fixed telephone subscriptions (FTS). It also examines whether urbanization moderates these associations and explores the relationships of trade openness, final consumption expenditure, and economic growth with telecommunications infrastructure. The study is based on an unbalanced panel of 44 SSA countries with data for the period 1981–2021 and includes two-way fixed effects (TWFE) models as the baseline specification, Panel Fully Modified Ordinary Least Squares (FMOLS) to estimate long-run associations within the cointegrating framework, and TWFE models with Driscoll–Kraay standard errors as a robustness procedure. The results indicate that financial development is positively and significantly associated with both FTS and MBS across the main specifications, with a substantially stronger association for MBS. These results validate the hypotheses that financial development has a positive relationship with the fixed and mobile telecommunications infrastructure. The moderation analysis also shows that financial development is positively associated with MBS when the level of urbanization increases, while such a positive moderating relationship is not statistically significant for FTS. Trade openness is generally positively associated with telecommunications infrastructure, while the associations of final consumption expenditure and economic growth vary across the MBS and FTS specifications. Overall, the findings suggest that the association between financial development and telecommunications infrastructure is technology-specific and varies with the level of urbanization. Robustness tests with the balanced panel sample and the post-1990s subsample generally give similar results, but caution should be taken in comparing results across specifications because of the differences in samples. The findings provide evidence relevant to the telecommunications infrastructure dimension of the broader Sustainable Development Goal 9 agenda, but they should not be inferred as evidence of comprehensive SDG 9 progress or causal effects. Future studies should use more comprehensive digital infrastructure indicators, disaggregated data, and better identification strategies to mitigate potential reverse causality and other forms of endogeneity.

Increasingly, hotel guests form expectations about their stay based on content that is available through digital channels before they arrive, while at the same time hotels are incorporating digital technologies into the services they provide on site; however, these two aspects have mostly been examined in isolation, and the combined impact of them on the multisensory impression associated with satisfaction and loyalty has not yet been thoroughly investigated. The present study proposes and tests a structural model in which the influence of digital content is associated with tourists’ sensory expectations prior to their arrival, and this, together with the degree of digital service integration, is associated with the multisensory experience reported during the stay, which in turn is associated with visitor satisfaction and loyalty via both direct and indirect paths. Data from 553 Romanian tourists were analyzed using covariance-based structural equation modeling, and the full and partial mediation models were compared by means of a nested chi-square test. All six hypotheses were confirmed. The partial mediation model provided superior fit (Δχ²(1) = 162.53, p < 0.001), and the direct effect of Multisensory Experience on Loyalty (β = 0.561) substantially exceeded the satisfaction-mediated indirect path (β = 0.119), while Digital Content Influence was the strongest single predictor in the model (β = 0.785 on Sensory Expectations). This research extends both servicescape theory and expectation-confirmation theory to the context of digitally mediated hospitality, with practical relevance for hotel managers and digital travel platforms regarding the joint role of pre-arrival content and on-site digital infrastructure associated with the guest experience, and potential, though untested, implications for destination-level standards relating to review authenticity and content quality.

This study integrates the fragmented literature on digital influence in tourism and hospitality by combining a bibliometric analysis with a PRISMA 2020-guided systematic literature review (SLR), examining how creator-mediated, peer-mediated, and platform-mediated influence jointly shape the customer decision journey. Scopus was searched (last searched 19 May 2026) for English-language articles and reviews addressing tourism or hospitality and at least one digital-influence mechanism, published 2010–May 2026; 906 records met these criteria and were retained for bibliometric analysis. A further eligibility criterion—direct examination of relationships among digital-influence sources, consumer appraisal, and decision outcomes, restricted to 2020–May 2026—narrowed this to 117 studies selected for structured evidence coding, with study design classified using the Mixed Methods Appraisal Tool (MMAT). The corpus grew sharply after 2019 (84.1% of records), and bibliographic coupling and keyword co-occurrence analysis identified four research fronts and five thematic clusters spanning the three influence channels. Building on this structure and a Stimulus–Organism–Response basis, the study proposes a Tri-Channel Digital Influence Framework formalized into seven research propositions (P1–P7). Evidence coding shows consumer-appraisal and decision-progression pathways (P4) are most extensively evidenced (64 studies), while cross-channel interaction (P5, 3 studies) and post-consumption feedback (P7, 4 studies) remain the least tested, representing the main evidence gaps. To our knowledge, this is the first study to integrate all three channels into a single, evidence-based decision-journey framework, offering an integrative theoretical architecture and a specific, evidence-based agenda for future research that current single-construct reviews of eWOM or influencer marketing do not provide.