In the current turbulent market, firms spend lots of tangible and intangible resources to gain competitive advantage and superior performance. Prior studies have discussed several determinants of competitive advantage and performance, particularly in developed economies, whereas small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in emerging economies have received minor attention. This study examines the mediating role of competitive advantage between enterprise risk management practices and SME performance and the moderating role of financial literacy between enterprise risk management practices and competitive advantage. A structured questionnaire is used to collect data from 304 SMEs operating in the emerging market of Pakistan. The hypotheses of the proposed study are tested through Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) in Analysis of a Moment Structures (AMOS). The results indicate that enterprise risk management practices significantly influence competitive advantage and SME performance. Competitive advantage partially mediates the relationship between enterprise risk management practices and SME performance. Additionally, financial literacy significantly moderates the relationship between enterprise risk management practices and competitive advantage. Firms are advised to implement formal enterprise risk management practices to gain competitive advantage and superior performance. Top managers need to have enough financial education that they will be able to perform risk management practices in an efficient way to gain a competitive position in the market. Implications for practices have been discussed in detail.

Achievement of sustainable competitive position and superior performance is the first priority of business organizations. However, small firms, due to fairly known reasons; lack of resources, financial capabilities and lack of managerial skills are often unable to succeed in their mission. Hence, they often look for less risky and convenience sources to compete in the market. A variety of factors has been tested towards a firm competitive position and performance but the role of government support in this perspective has received minor attention. The present study examines the influence of government financial support and nonfinancial support on firm performance with mediating role of the sustainable competitive position. Hypotheses were tested using structural equation modeling in Analysis Moment of Structure (AMOS) on a data set of 326 Pakistani Small and Medium Size Enterprises (SMEs). The results indicate that government financial and nonfinancial support have a significant influence on sustainable competitive position and firm performance. Additionally, a sustainable competitive position partially mediates the relationship between government support and firm performance. Government bodies and policy makers are advised to provide financial and nonfinancial support to SMEs which in turn can upsurge economic growth and sustainability.

Sustainable development is the ultimate objective of the nations around the world, and the adoption of development strategies is the driving force for obtaining long-run economic growth, environmental protection and social inclusion. On other hand, globalization integrates the countries around the globe economically, politically and socially. Thus, it is vital to conduct a study on the impact of globalization on sustainable development in Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) countries, as most of the countries are in a transition state from socialism to capitalism and are opening their doors to the world. Globalization comprises three main components, which are economic, political and social. Henceforth, this study investigates the effect of economic globalization, political globalization and social globalization on sustainable development. Energy has been highlighted in the literature and received attention from researchers as a factor of income and environmental quality; thus, it is added as a control variable in this study. The long-run relationships among variables are established through panel cointegration once the order of integration is determined. This study finds a positive and significant effect of economic globalization and political globalization on sustainable development, whereas energy consumption is deteriorating in CIS countries. Policy implications are recommended.

In the developing economy, tourism is the most visible and steadiest growing facade. Tourism is considered one of the rapidly increasing elements for economic development from the last two decades. Therefore, the proposed study used vector autoregression (VAR) model, error correction model (ECM), and the Granger causality to check the relationship between the tourism industry and economic growth based on the data of the Beijing municipal bureau of statistics from 1994 to 2015. Gross domestic product (GDP) is used as a replacement variable for the economic growth index, while internal tourism revenue is used as a tourism industry indicator. The study supports the tourism-led growth hypothesis proposed in the existing literature in a different survey of tourism and economic development. The results show that there is a strong relationship in the tourism industry and economic growth in the context of Beijing, and at the same time, tourism creates a more significant increase in long run local real economic accomplishments. The results of the VAR model confirm that in the long run, Beijing’s economic growth is affected by domestic tourism, while the ECM model shows unidirectional results in the short term. Similarly, there is a one-way causal relationship between the tourism industry and economic growth in Beijing, China. The empirical results are in strong support of the concept that tourism causes growth.

This paper introduces a new method of adaptive blind digital image watermarking in spatial domain. Watermarking is a way to hide secret information in a cover image or host medium. Amount of information to hide in the cover image is limited because there is a trade-off between imperceptibility and payload of the data to hide. So increasing the payload in the cover image while watermark remain imperceptible is a critical aspect in watermarking process and has attracted many researchers in the recent past. In the proposed method both cover and secret images are partitioned into equal size blocks. Then host for each secret image block is intelligently selected through Genetic Algorithm (GA). GA helps in identifying the target blocks of the cover image such that with the LSB embedding, visual quality of the cover image and imperceptibility of secret image remains least affected. At the watermark extraction phase only watermarked image is required from which using Jigsaw Puzzle Solver (JPS) the secret image is reconstructed. In spite of increasing the payload 2 times experimental results have shown better imperceptibility i.e. PSNR results of the proposed method as compared to the current approaches in this domain.