International Journal of Technology Management & Sustainable Development - Volume 23, Issue 1, 2024

Precision agriculture, a sustainable solution for enhancing crop productivity, utilizes enabling technologies, primarily centred around the Internet of Things (IoT), to optimize irrigation and increase crop yields by adapting farming techniques to specific conditions. This study presents the adoption of a low-cost and eco-friendly IoT initiative in rural farms in Vietnam, which is an unexpected location. It marks the country’s first IoT start-up for agriculture during the 4.0 Industrial Revolution. To answer three research questions, we conducted a contemporary case study mixed with a couple of field experiments in a real-life context to learn how an IoT application was blended with local culture to transform traditional agriculture to a modern and digitalized industry. The pilot implementation yielded promising results, with positive feedback from farmers. Following necessary modifications, the system has been widely adopted across provinces in Vietnam. The study identified three key factors contributing to the start-up’s success: ‘Thiên thời, Địa lợi, Nhân hòa’.¹ We believe that the start-up can assist millions of local farmers to get on the 4.0 train and that adopting IoT to initiate smart agriculture in Vietnam has sent a strong message ‘To be successful, global technology has to integrate into local culture’.

This study examines the long-term effect of contemporary challenges such as growing resource income, rising consumer prices, inefficient public spending and globalization on Africa’s quest for sustainable development (SD). A robust measure of SD that integrates resource productivity is adopted. The study period spanned from 1991 to 2021, and data was sourced from 24 African countries. The empirical output for this study is derived using long-term methodologies, including feasible generalized least squares (FGLS), Driscoll-Kraay and panel dynamic ordinary least squares (PDOLS). The estimation of the long-term model is to capture the consequential effects of contemporary issues on SD. Evidence from the model reveals that increases in resources income, consumer prices, public outlay and globalization are deterrents to SD. The individual cross-sectional regression outputs also demonstrate similar effects. Given these contemporary challenges, the study proposes relevant policy measures to aid the attainment of SD.

The current spread of financial technology (fintech) adoption within the financial and business industries across the globe is expected to increase the demand for employees with fintech skills and competencies. This in turn is likely to shift the traditional skill set required for financial and accounting professionals. This article investigates the competency level of employability skills required for the current job market from employers’ perspective in the United Kingdom and Sri Lanka. The United Kingdom and Sri Lanka are typical of industrialized and emerging economies, respectively. They are at the end of two opposing poles in terms of financial infrastructure, economic development, regulatory framework and educational system. This suggests a significant divergence of the two countries in terms of skills gap. We test for this via three main hypotheses. To this end, we identify the competency level of employability skills as expected by employers and identify the skills gaps between expected and observed competency levels of employability skills. Information on a set of twenty skills is collected via a questionnaire. We find no major skills gaps in the United Kingdom. Sri Lanka, on the other hand, shows severe skills gaps. The gaps are particularly acute within the soft skills such as critical thinking, problem solving and decision making. Our findings reflect the importance of expanding the fintech higher education curricula by assessing and implementing employability skills development activities.

European Green Deal (EGD) was introduced by the European Union in December 2019 with a pledge to transform the European Union into a carbon-neutral economy by the year 2050. This study intends to undertake a bibliometric evaluation of the existing literature on EGD. This research aims to precisely identify and evaluate the most influential sources, contributors and cited works in the EGD literature, as well as delineate primary research directions and geographical hotspots, thereby offering a comprehensive overview of the current state and trends within the field. An attempt has been made to identify the trends of the research on EGD, along with the top countries contributing to the literature on EGD. The emerging keywords in the EGD literature are traced to provide future research directions. A total of 846 research documents are obtained from the Scopus database, and the Visualization of Similarities (VOS) viewer software is used for data analysis. The results of the analysis reveal that sustainability, sustainable development, energy efficiency, energy policies, greenhouse emissions, climate change, biodiversity, circular economy and renewable energy emerge as prominent and interconnected areas of research within the academic discourse on the EGD.

Energy is a key factor in the production and industrialization process in developing countries. This article aims to analyse the effect of energy policies on industrial development across 25 sub-Saharan African countries from 1996 to 2020. For this purpose, a new industrial development indicator and the Driscoll–Kraay estimation method are used. Results reveal that the implementation of energy policies promotes industrial development. Indeed, public energy policies and, more specifically, public investments in energy capital have a positive impact on the growth rate of the industrial sector’s value added per capita. These results remain robust when using the generalized method of moments. In terms of policy implications, the results of this research suggest that the strengthening of existing public energy policies and the implementation of new policies with a focus on investments in energy capital accumulation are necessary to drive sustainable industrial sector development in sub-Saharan Africa.