Overview
Advances in Applied Economic Research is a conference proceedings volume edited by Nicholas Tsounis and Aspasia Vlachvei, gathering the papers presented at the 2016 International Conference on Applied Economics (ICOAE), held in Kastoria, Greece, and organized jointly by the University of Nicosia and the Western Macedonia University of Applied Sciences. The volume belongs to Springer’s series of proceedings in business and economics and runs to roughly nine hundred pages, comprising a large number of relatively short, self-contained research papers rather than a single continuous argument. Each contribution follows the standard format of an empirical economics article: a stated research question, a review of the relevant literature, a description of data and method, estimated results, and conclusions or policy suggestions.
Aims and intellectual character
As the editors set out in the volume’s framing material, the purpose of the collection is to present new research methods, theories and applications across the various branches of applied economics. The unifying thread is methodological: the papers are overwhelmingly quantitative, and the great majority rely on applied econometric techniques — panel estimation, time-series causal testing, logit and probit modelling, efficiency frontier methods, computable general equilibrium simulation, and descriptive statistical analysis of survey data. Applied economics is presented in the volume as a field that deliberately joins economic theory to econometric measurement in order to analyse real-world problems, usually with an eye to economic policy.
A second stated aim is the exchange of experience between economists working in different subfields and with different techniques. The conference series is described as an annual meeting intended to let researchers from macro- and microeconomics, international economics, finance, agricultural economics, health economics, education economics, international trade theory, and management and marketing strategy compare methods and results, and to encourage joint work across those boundaries. A third characteristic feature, emphasised in the volume’s own description, is the prominence of country-specific studies: many papers take a single national economy, stock market, or institution as their case and close with concrete policy analysis and proposals.
Thematic range of the contributions
The papers fall into several loose clusters rather than formally designated sections.
Public finance and fiscal policy. A group of contributions examines the relationship between government spending, revenue and growth. One study tests the causal relationship between government spending and revenue, asking whether taxation precedes expenditure or vice versa — the classic “spend-and-tax” versus “tax-and-spend” question — in an empirical country study. Another assesses the contribution of government expenditure on social and community services to Nigeria’s economic growth. A further paper examines the relationship between government expenditure on health and GDP in Turkey, treating health spending both as a claim on output and as an investment in human capital, and testing for the direction of causation between the two series.
Macroeconomic modelling and the environment. Several papers use simulation and time-series methods to link the economy to energy use and emissions. One applies a computable general equilibrium model to estimate the macroeconomic effects of carbon dioxide emission reduction in the Algerian economy, tracing the consequences of mitigation policy through prices, output and sectoral adjustment. Another models the dynamic causal relationship among energy consumption, CO₂ emissions and economic growth in Italy, testing whether growth drives energy use and emissions or whether energy availability constrains growth.
Finance, banking and capital markets. This is among the largest clusters. A panel analysis investigates the direction of causality between banking efficiency and financial stability, asking whether more efficient banks are more stable, or whether stability is itself a precondition for efficiency. On the securities side, one paper examines the multiple dimensions of market liquidity using the Polish stock market as its case, while another undertakes a formal econometric identification of crisis periods in euro area stock markets. Corporate finance is represented by a study of how financial leverage affects corporate performance, and household finance by an analysis of the link between financial literacy and financial behaviour in the Albanian context.
Firms, innovation and strategy. Papers here address competitiveness and management practice. One compares innovation performance across the Visegrad countries, using indicators of research, patenting and innovation output to benchmark the four economies against one another. Another argues for strategic cost management as a means of securing competitive advantage, framing cost control as a strategic rather than purely accounting function.
Marketing, consumer behaviour and digital technology. A distinct group of contributions deals with the commercial and organisational uses of digital media. One paper studies the use of blogs within the purchasing process, examining how consumer reading of blogs feeds into buying decisions. A related contribution analyses the economics and marketing of local e-commerce — commerce at close range — and its evolution toward social commerce. Still another shows how demographic variables can be used to define target market segments within binary logit models, a methodological paper on segmentation. Two further papers address the institutional side of the same theme: social media usage in university activities, and job satisfaction factors among university staff officers in an emerging economy, using Sri Lanka as the case.
Development, migration and labour. A study of the impact of international migration on human development adopts a South Asian perspective, considering how remittances, skills and demographic change affect development outcomes in sending countries. This sits alongside the country studies on growth and public spending noted above.
Beyond these identifiable titles, the volume contains numerous further contributions in the same vein, consistent with its stated ambition to cover “all areas of economic science” that employ applied econometric analysis. The range of countries represented — Algeria, Nigeria, Turkey, Italy, Poland, Albania, Sri Lanka, the Visegrad states, the euro area as a whole, and others — reflects the conference’s international composition and its editorial preference for cases with direct policy relevance.
Intended readership and use
The volume is addressed to researchers, academic economists, practitioners and policy makers working in applied economics and econometrics. Individual chapters are written to stand alone, so the book functions less as a textbook than as a reference collection of current empirical work: a reader interested in, for example, the fiscal-causality literature or in bank efficiency measurement can consult the relevant paper without reference to the rest. Its value lies in the breadth of techniques demonstrated and in the accumulation of country-level evidence on questions — growth and public spending, energy and emissions, financial development and stability, digital marketing — that recur across very different national settings.
Taken together, the chapters present applied economics as a problem-driven enterprise in which the choice of quantitative method follows from the question and the available evidence, whether the unit of analysis is a country, a firm, a consumer, or an institution. The volume’s coherence lies less in a single theoretical framework than in a shared commitment to empirical testing, measurement, and policy-relevant interpretation. Its juxtaposition of macro-level fiscal and financial questions with firm-level competitiveness, consumer behaviour, and development issues makes visible how similar analytical concerns—incentives, efficiency, institutional context, and behavioural response—reappear across different fields of applied economics.
The collection also illustrates the evidentiary value of country and regional studies. By assembling analyses of different economies within one volume, it allows readers to see how comparable questions are addressed under different institutional and data conditions, and how conclusions may depend on specification, measurement, and context. This comparative dimension is part of the book’s contribution: it does not offer a unified model of economic behaviour but gathers applied work that tests, qualifies, and extends general propositions in specific settings.
For its intended audience, the significance is both substantive and methodological. Substantively, the volume adds to accumulated empirical evidence on recurrent questions in public finance, finance, competitiveness, marketing, and development. Methodologically, it demonstrates the range of econometric and quantitative approaches used in contemporary applied work and the importance of matching technique to context. The book therefore functions as a compact record of applied economic research as practised across diverse fields and economies, and as a source of empirical reference points for readers seeking grounded analysis rather than a single theoretical treatise.
