The international expansion of higher education has intensified in recent decades with a rapidly growing number of international branch campuses appearing on the scene. This study investigates the economic, cultural and institutional, and educational determinants of transnational higher education on both the extensive margin (number of international branch campuses), and the intensive margin (the total number of educational programmes offered). Using the gravity equation, we applied fixed-effect empirical methods to a panel dataset that combined and extended the raw data from campuses and master’s programmes in 33 source countries and 76 host countries in the period from 1948 to 2016. Estimates reveal that although cultural, economic and institutional ties foster cross-border educational relationships, their effect differs significantly from one margin to another. The study highlights the relevance of globalisation, research activities, and aggregate demand in international higher education.
One of the most common business strategies in companies’ growth and internationalization is the Joint Venture (JV) strategy. This type of entry mode in the global market has contributed to building a more sustainable international market. This type of collaborative business normally happens between firms located either in the same country or located in different countries with different levels of development. This paper presents a thorough cross-bibliometric analysis of studies examining the relation between joint ventures and sustainability published in academic journals during the period from 1997 to 2020 and available in the Scopus Collection. This mapping of the field on the one hand graphically illustrates the publications’ evolution over time, and on the other hand, the use of bibliometric methodology shows a picture that clusters the academic research of the relationships among these two topics according to the following criteria: JV type, sustainability criteria, host country groups and activity sectors. In addition, the public or private JVs’ nature shows a relation to the type of sustainability, and mainly development and management sustainability. The paper reveals the knowledge gap regarding the connection of these two fields, JV and sustainability, and provides a robust roadmap for further investigation in this field.
The organization of an open-air sporting event involves a series of challenges. People are drawn by the desire to do sport, preferably in close contact with nature, so as to complement healthy lifestyles, and in search of air purity. Sporting organizations are increasingly searching for new locations that do not only attract athletes, but spectators and companions too. Races in natural parks provide the additional benefit of doing sport in a unique space, usually a transmitter of simplicity, pure air, and tranquillity. Organizing a mountain race in a natural park implies some issues. These are areas of great environmental richness that must be protected. Natural parks are places of individual recreational activity. Within the running phenomenon, a new type of mountain race has appeared: the hiking-oriented pilgrimage, in which athletes travel ancestral paths, pilgrimage routes thus combining sport practice with spirituality. This paper aims to analyse all the actions and policies that were carried out for the peaceful integration and coexistence of two totally different events that coincide physically and temporally: the Penyagolosa Trails race, and the Peregrins de les Useres, an ancestral pilgrimage that is carried out by each and every one of the towns belonging to the Penyagolosa Natural Park. The objective is to demonstrate the sustainability of the project thanks to the collective effort and the goodwill of the interested parties, in a way that produces a mutual benefit.
Objectives: Higher education institutions have a mission to train and equip tomorrow’s leaders with a comprehensive set of skills they can use anywhere in the world. For example, the creation of the Erasmus Programme in Europe became a driving force for study mobility among university students. At the same time, many institutions have also organised academic trips to give students more specialised experiences that complement the knowledge provided in the classroom and open up new environments for cultural immersion. However, despite the existence of studies on this aspect, the diverse objectives of these trips and the use of different terminology to describe them in published research make it difficult to identify them and group them together. The aim of this paper is to present a literature overview of academic trips as a learning tool in higher education. Methodology: The methodology was based on a systematic analysis of the literature, carried out using the Web of Science (WoS) search engine. For this purpose, specific search criteria were employed using various keywords related to academic trips, enabling the construction of a solid corpus of relevant studies. Results: The results of the corpus analysis revealed that works on academic travel experiences in higher education are fragmented given their remarkable terminological diversity, thus making it very difficult for stakeholders to identify them. Most of the papers found belong to the teaching and STEM disciplines, while other papers that have reported interesting findings have gone unnoticed.