Editorial

Welcome to the second issue of the International Journal of Management and Economics in 2020. Despite the Covid-19 outbreak we continue our efforts to timely process all incoming papers and publish the accepted ones in the regular quarterly schedule. We had been working exclusively on-line already for a long time, so the editorial board is used to distance work-processing. We operate the peer review and submission software ScholarOne Manuscripts by Clarivate Analytics. All our publications are automatically covered by citation monitoring. We maintain a wide international exposure thanks to our presence in indexing and full text databases. Currently the IJME is covered by nearly 40 different services, including among others Web of Science Emerging Sources, ProQuest, EBSCO, and EconLit.

The current issue contains six papers covering various areas in economics and management. There are five empirical papers and one orignal conceptual work. The geographical scope of this issue is truly international and covers aspects of German, Indian, Turkish, Sub-Saharan, as well as Polish and other Central and Eastern European economies.

Lilli Zimmermann and Michael Frenkel in the first article entitled “What drives Germany's exports” review a number of different hypotheses that aim at explaining the development of German merchandise exports. They use cointegration estimation techniques and the data from the period 1992–2016. The estimation results indicate that, in addition to the traditional factors such as world demand and price competitiveness, other determinants, such as energy prices and the increasing fragmentation of production processes are also significant in explaining German exports.

In the second paper, “The determinants of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) outflow from India to Poland.”, Robert Dygas discusses FDI outflow from India to Poland. The paper also offers a few wider and more general remarks on Poland's competitiveness in attracting FDI from Asia.

Mehmet Yasar and Ender Gerede in the paper entitled “Identification of factors affecting competitive tension in the domestic air transport market in Turkey” draw our attention to the issue of competitive tension defined as a pressure among firms operating in a competitive market and forcing them to take action against each other. The authors identify a number of variables related to market characteristics and test whether these variables have an effect on competitive tension among domestic airlines in Turkey. The findings reveal that market commonality has a positive effect and market concentration has a negative effect on competitive tension. On the other hand, resource similarity and competitive asymmetry were found to have no significant impact.

In the next paper, Beata Stępień and Michał Młody examine the grounds and possibility to induce and develop reshoring activities in the luxury goods sector. They demonstrate that reshoring activities spread unevenly in the luxury goods sector (both regarding the luxury pyramid tiers and within industries) and attempt to find the grounds for this discrepancy. They also notice that the luxury home base production either has deteriorated in its meaning and value to modern’ luxury buyers or it is blurred by a communication bias. However, they argue that the country of origin of luxury brands still remains important for the consumers from both developed and luxury aspiring countries.

The fifth article, “The comparative empirical analysis of the social protection system in selected Central and Eastern European countries: Emerging models of capitalism”, is by Piotr Maszczyk. The study evaluates the level of similarity between social protection system in selected Central and Eastern European countries (CEE11) and the four models of capitalism identified by Amable. The author takes two snapshots of the institutional arrangements, at 2005 and 2014. The analyses point out that in 2014 in the area of social protection almost all CEE countries were the most like the Continental model of capitalism represented by Germany, with the exception of from Latvia and Romania. Nevertheless, the author argues that the variety of results for the individual variables and substantial changes between 2005 and 2014 suggest that the model of capitalism prevailing in Central and Eastern Europe in the area of social protection system is evolving at a very fast pace and thus currently may be called a hybrid or even patchwork capitalism.

The final article of this issue, “Growth effect of income inequality in Sub-Saharan Africa: Exploring the transmission channels”, is by Ibrahim Odusanaya and Anthony Akinlo. The authors draw our attention to the fact that Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) ranks as the second most unequal region globally in terms of income distribution. They offer a study over the period 1995–2015 with data from 31 Sub-Sahara African countries. Findings from two-step system generalized method of moments (GMM) suggest that income inequality exerts significant positive effect on economic growth via the saving transmission channel and it has statistically significant negative effect on economic growth in the region through the fertility, capital market imperfection and the fiscal policy channels.

We hope the current issue of the International Journal of Management and Economics will be a source of good scientific inspiration for our Readers. Please enjoy reading!