Revista de Economía y Negocios

This study investigates the impact of COVID-19 induced global panic on crude oil and natural gas price volatility. The author uses the Structural Vector Auto Regression (SVAR) to examine the magnitude of shocks in global oil and gas prices caused by COVID-19 induced panic between 3rd January 2020 and 30th June 2021. The results show that shocks in oil and gas prices were negative and more severe in the first five months of 2020 when the pandemic was spreading across the globe forcing countries into lockdowns. The negative shocks gradually diminished in the following periods as the prices recovered courtesy of global economic recovery and vaccine rollouts. Furthermore, the panic was more pronounced in causing oil prices shocks as gas prices were already suffering amid mild temperatures during 2020 winter season. The author stresses the need for swift actions during early days of the crisis to adjust oil and gas supply to match demand shrinkage so as to stabilize their prices given their enormity to the global economy. The Russia-Saudi Arabia delays in agreeing on oil supply restrictions may have amplified the magnitude of negative shocks in oil prices. Existing studies have examined the country level impacts of COVID-19 on energy prices focusing mainly on oil. However, oil and gas are among the most traded commodities in the world thus stability of their prices is of a global concern. This study examines this phenomenon on a global scale by utilizing the novel global corona virus panic index.

The main objective of the study was to identify factors affecting the growth of MSEs in Robe Town. To achieve this objective, primary data were collected through a structured questionnaire from a sample of 384 micro and small-scale enterprise owners/managers. A multiple linear regression model was applied for data analysis. The results of multiple linear regression results reveal that growth of MSEs measured in terms of employment change was affected by owners/manager's education level, work experience of the managers/workers, size of business enterprises, access to formal credit, infrastructure and work premises. Based on the major findings of the study, expansion of credit services, provision of training, development of infrastructure and provision of workplace were recommended.

Owing to a series of municipal mergers in 2005, the city of Niigata in Niigata Prefecture, Japan, transformed into the new Niigata City. Taking advantage of this opportunity, the industrial, governmental, academic and private sectors in Niigata collaborated for the nationwide promotion of food products and flowers, which are a specialty of Niigata City. Thus, the World Forum on Food and Flowers in Niigata was established. This study explores the comprehensive global food trade fair known as "Food Messe in Niigata" a large-scale event aimed at creating opportunities for food companies to negotiate directly with each other. This event was conceptualized to launch a movement aimed at building a network of small and medium-sized enterprises in the food industry in Niigata City. In this study, we use the Food Messe and Agano City as a case study and employ the concepts of social systems theory and network theory, with a focus on aspects such as the role of core institutions, the relationship between operational organizations and cooperation between small and medium-sized enterprises.

With the continuous development of economy and the acceleration of social transformation, the contradiction between regional economic development and discipline construction in universities is becoming more and more prominent. It is urgent to explore the coupling and coordination relationship between the two to achieve higher-quality development. At the same time, Hubei Province is a big education province in China and it is also one of the important areas of the rise strategy of central China. Taking Hubei Province as an example to study has certain representativeness and demonstration significance. Therefore, this paper builds the economic development and subject construction of colleges and universities in two comprehensive evaluation index system, selection of Hubei province in 2010-2019 and the 13 regional administrative region economic development and subject construction of colleges and universities in two system index data, using poor method and principal component analysis to data standardization and index weight calculation, two comprehensive evaluation index system, The results show that both of them increase steadily, the comprehensive evaluation index of economic development subsystem increases from 0.0962 to 0.9519, and the comprehensive evaluation index of university discipline construction subsystem increases from 0.1303 to 0.8438. Then the coupling coordination degree model was adopted, and the ArcGIS software was used to measure the coupling coordination relationship between the two systems and analyse the spatial pattern evolution. Finally, the Granger causality test method was used to test the coupling relationship between the two systems. The results show that the coupling coordination degree of the two systems in Hubei Province has changed from mild misalignment to high quality coordination, and has been developing continuously. The spatial distribution of administrative regions at different levels is not consistent, there is false coupling, and most of them are low level coordinated development. Economic development is insufficient in supporting the discipline construction in colleges and universities. Suggestions are given: the government should plan the two systems synchronously to make them develop harmoniously; Colleges and universities should actively respond to the policy call of "Double First-class" and improve the discipline construction system; Normal financial support system for discipline construction should be established between government and university, so as to give full play to the "Economic Education Power" of regional economy during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This study aims to determine whether wages and benefits for working period both partially and simultaneously have a significant effect on employee performance at PT. Aerofood Indonesia Kualanamu International Airport Medan Branch and what is the percentage. The method used in this study is a quantitative method with several tests, namely reliability analysis, classical assumption deviation test and linear regression. Based on the results of the primary data regression which was processed using SPSS 20, the following multiple linear regression equation was obtained: Y=8,358+0,059 X1+0,747 X2. Partially, the wage variable (X1) has no significant effect on employee performance, as evidenced by the value of t count t table (7.085>1.994). Simultaneously, the variable wages (X1) and benefits (X2) have a significant effect on employee performance. This means that the hypothesis in this study is accepted, as evidenced by the calculated F-value >F-table (26,299>3,13). Wage variable (X1) and long service allowance (X2) were able to contribute to the influence of the performance variable by 43.3% while the remaining 56.7% was influenced by other variables not examined in this study. From the conclusions above, the authors suggest seeing the low percentage of the influence of the variable wages and benefits on employee performance, the company and employees must work together to support the professionalism of employees so that the goal of increasing professionalism can be achieved. It is hoped that there will be in-depth research. In the future, other researchers have conducted research regarding the variable of wages and long service benefits on performance.