The aim of this paper was to investigate the relationship between countries’ PISA study results from 2018 and a set of indices related to socio-economic inequality, such as the Gini index, human development index, or gender inequality index, along with purely economic variables, such as GDP per capita and government expenditure on education. The study covered 70 countries, consisting of 37 OECD countries and 33 non-OECD countries. Research methods included multivariate linear regression models, k-means clustering, and hierarchical clustering. Our findings revealed that the Gini index was statistically insignificant, indicating income inequality had little effect on students’ PISA performance. On the other hand, the gender inequality index was the single most statistically significant explanatory variable for both OECD and non-OECD countries. Therefore, our recommendation for policymakers is simple: increase students’ PISA performance, thus enhancing countries’ human capital and competitiveness, and focus on decreasing gender disparity and the associated loss of achievement due to gender inequality.

Psychological well-being and teacher self-efficacy are essential dimensions for ensuring effective educational performance and high-quality teaching. Fostering these competencies in educators is key to addressing the challenges associated with the current educational system. This study evaluated the effectiveness of a training program designed to enhance these two dimensions in teachers, taking gender and years of experience as covariates. The sample included 143 primary school teachers from Alicante (Spain), with an average age of 42.4 years and a mean of 14.14 years of professional experience. Of the participants, 58.3% were women and 41.7% were men. Psychological well-being was measured using Ryff’s scale, while teacher self-efficacy was assessed with Skaalvik and Skaalvik’s scale. Using an experimental design with control and experimental groups, along with pre-test and post-test evaluations, the program’s effects were analyzed through a general linear model for repeated measures. Results showed significant improvements in psychological well-being and self-efficacy in the experimental group. Although teaching experience proved to be a significant covariate, the program was effective in controlling for this effect. These findings highlight the feasibility of designing effective training interventions to strengthen teachers’ competencies.

Since the beginning of the 21st century, major innovations and important technological advances have led to a socio-economic paradigm shift characterized by robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, as well as the use of Social Networks in companies, creating the industrial revolution 5.0, based on digital transformation. The aim of this research focuses on analyzing the implementation of digitalization in European companies, through socio-economic variables, delving into SDG4 -Quality Education- and SDG5 -Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment-. A quantitative multivariate methodology, cluster analysis, was used for them. Due to the novel implementation of most of these technologies, and the recent measurement of the data, the longitudinal analysis is carried out from the first year with contrasted statistical data, from 2017 to 2022. The results show that the speed of adoption of new technologies is uneven across the European Union, with countries such as Sweden, Finland, Denmark and the Netherlands with Very High Digitalization, compared to Romania and Bulgaria with Very Low Digitalization. Likewise, the countries that make up the cluster of countries with the highest digitisation rates also coincide with the countries with the most equal employment conditions and the lowest ratio of working women at risk of poverty, although the gender gap is still evident in all the countries analyzed. The Women Work Risk Poverty variable has decreased the least between 2017 and 2022.

The aim of this article is to examine the possibility that a market demand function (curve) might not be monotonically decreasing in its entire domain according to the consumer theory neoclassical as assumed by the law of demand (for normal goods). This may happen due to limited rationality of (some) consumers and the anchor price effect. When a price of a good decreases to some point, the amount demanded might stops increasing due to the loss of confidence effect: consumers' unwillingness to buy a too cheap product. The existence of this effect was examined via questionnaire on a sample of 377 undergraduate university students from the Czech Republic, Ecuador and Spain. The main result of this experimental study is that the loss of confidence effect appeared at all three locations, which indicates that the law of demand may not be valid in its entire domain. Furthermore, the results of this study imply that a significant percentage of people make decisions of limited rationality even when facing a very simple task. In addition, statistically significant difference in rational behavior with respect to gender was found.