Editorial

Citation

Tsoukatos, E. and Dimotikalis, Y. (2011), "Editorial", EuroMed Journal of Business, Vol. 6 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/emjb.2011.34606baa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: EuroMed Journal of Business, Volume 6, Issue 2

About the Guest Editors:Evangelos Tsoukatos is a Lecturer in the Department of Finance and Insurance, at the Technological Educational Institute of Crete, Greece. His PhD in Management Science was from Lancaster University Management School (LUMS), UK, while his Master’s and undergraduate degrees were from LUMS and Aristotelian University of Thessaloniki, Greece, respectively. Before joining academia he practised a number of years as an insurance consultant and in senior management positions. His research interests include: services marketing, service quality, customer behaviour, culture’s effects on service quality perceptions and customers’ behaviour, risk management and insurance, applications of quantitative methods in business. He was awarded the “2007 Brian Kingsman prize for best doctoral researcher” and shares with Evmorfia Mastrojianni the best paper award in the EuroMed Journal of Business for 2010. He is also a member of the EuroMed Business Research Institute (EMRBI) and chairs the “Cross-Cultural Management” research Committee of the Institute.

Yiannis Dimotikalis is Assistant Professor of Quantitative Methods in the Department of Finance and Insurance, at the Technological Educational Institute of Crete, Greece. He holds a Diploma and PhD from the Technical University of Crete (Chania). His research interests include quantitative methods, nonlinear forecasting, simulation and data analysis. Dr Dimotikalis has teaching experience in the Technical University of Crete, University of Crete and the MSc Program in Business Economics, Finance & Banking of the University of Portsmouth (UK). He is a member of the organizing committees of several national and international conferences and co-editor of three books (Conference Proceedings) in Chaotic Modeling and Simulation.

Wide-ranging regulatory/structural reforms and technological advancements, in the recent years, resulted in a single, globally integrated and extensively competitive financial market. The extent of the market’s integration, however, returned an unprecedented turmoil when the collapse of the US market for sub-prime mortgages, in 2007, spread rapidly across the globe. As a consequence, the range and complexity of challenges that market regulators and managers are now facing is greater than ever before.

The financial system needs to keep running in the short term, while in the longer term it must stay open and dynamic and capable of serving as a reliable engine for growth and prosperity. Charlie McCreevy, European Commissioner for Internal Market and Services, places the challenges that the system faces:

[…] under four broad headings: improving transparency, improving valuation standards of complex financial instruments, improving prudential rules and risk management practices, and making progress on wider issues related to market functioning, including, credit rating agencies.

Beyond securing immediate liquidity, financial services management faces a complex, interwoven set of additional challenges: keeping-up with competition in the short-term while proactively planning for the future, although the conditions under which markets will operate in the post-crisis era are not clear yet; safeguarding and increasing customer retention via improving customer management approaches and addressing customer service and price expectations; improving operational efficacy via strict cost and risk controls and enhanced management practices regarding business processes and activity monitoring as well as corporate and employee performance.

The present special issue of the EuroMed Journal of Business is an attempt towards enhancing our understanding in all above areas of knowledge which have never been as important before. It includes seven papers accepted for publication, among 30 that have been submitted. All submitted manuscripts have been blindly reviewed by at least two academics/experts in their fields. Seven very topical areas are examined in the current issue:

1. 1.

   Zoe S. Dimitriades and Nancy Papalexandris study the relationship between employee commitment and financial performance in the Greek retail banking sector;

2. 2.

   Jamel E. Henchiri presents evidence on the usefulness of company disclosures on the Web in promoting the efficiency of financial markets;

3. 3.

   Kosmas Kosmidis and Konstantinos Terzidis propose that counterparty credit risk should be included in the Basel II framework in view of incentives for synergy between bank management, corporate management and auditors;

4. 4.

   Simona Mihai Yiannaki frames ten effective implications/lessons from some of the most recent bank bailouts;

5. 5.

   Ruth Rios-Morales, Mohamed Ramady and Louis Brennan present an analysis of the role of SWFs in sustaining economies throughout the Globe;

6. 6.

   Naji Deeb Mualla assesses and measures the sales culture within the commercial banking industry in Jordan; and

7. 7.

   Alexander Salhi and Andreas Kern evaluate the latest reforms in the banking and financial systems of Mediterranean Partner Countries (MPCs).

Special thanks go to all authors that submitted their manuscripts for publication in this special issue. Furthermore, as the Guest Editors we would like to express our gratitude to all reviewers, whose anonymity needs to be preserved.

Evangelos Tsoukatos, Yiannis DimotikalisGuest Editors