Imagining people’s functions in everyday life and work without the use of ICT, seems difficult. Their application is ubiquitous everywhere, regardless of which aspect it is viewed from, because it has a strong function in ensuring the competitiveness of various systems at the micro and macro levels. Numerous national and multinational strategies try to encourage educational systems to put a greater focus on ICT to more efficiently acquire skills, competencies, and knowledge, which should represent added value to all generations in the future. This article analyzes the progress of the ICT development index (IDI) in Scandinavian countries by comparing these countries in the European region. It is known that the Scandinavian countries belong to that part of the countries that have recognized the importance of involving ICT in education programs, which improves the economy of a certain country. Given this, the research reveals how ICTs play a key role in improving socio-economic development in Scandinavian countries.

This paper models 54,559 Chinese news items about education industry and scientific industry by machine learning during the COVID-19 epidemic to build China’s increased scientific research policy (ISRP) index. The result of interrupted time series analysis indicates that, the ISRP has an emphatic positive causality on the education industry advancement and promotes the development of the education industry. The ISRP also has a remarkable positive causality on the development of the scientific industry. Moreover, the result of causal network indicates that, a virtuous circle within the ISRP, the education industry and the scientific industry has been formed, which has promoted the sustainable development of the education chain.

In the present and future of education, fostering complex thinking, especially in the context of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), is critical to lifelong learning. This study aimed to analyze learning scenarios within the framework of a model that promotes complex thinking and integrated design analysis, to identify the contributions of linking design models to the SDGs. The research question was: How does the open educational model of complex thinking link to the SDGs and scenario design? The analysis examined a pedagogical approach that introduced 33 participants to the instructional design of real-life or simulated situations to develop complex thinking skills. The categories of analysis were the model components, the SDGs, and scenario designs. The findings considered (a) innovative design capacity linked to SDG challenges, (b) linking theory and practice to foster complex thinking, and (c) the critical supporting tools for scenario design. The study intends to be of value to academic, social, and business communities interested in mobilizing complex thinking to support lifelong learning.

Through Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) on destination attractiveness characteristics at the country level, this study identifies attribute configurations in the pre- and post-pandemic period to analyze the changes and differences generated by an exogenous event (COVID-19). The results suggest that the destination attractiveness attributes work together, in multidimensional configurations, to increase leisure travel volume. We found an important change in pat-terns/configurations of attractiveness between the pre- and post-pandemic scenarios. Our findings suggest that the destination attributes may change in importance and valuation or disappear for some configurations. The conclusion has implications for the stakeholders related to the destination attractiveness development, showing possible patterns of tourism attributes to guide the action to improve the resilience in the tourism sector and recover these activities in a disaster scenario.

Being supposedly the ground for an exchange system that does not depend on central, top-down regulation, cryptocurrencies increasingly need new algorithmic and policy-driven rules to maintain their trustworthiness and capacity to exhibit empirically supported growth. The present paper offers a conceptual and philosophical discussion on whether and how cryptosystems could be able to generate resilient development in a way that is coherent with a non-reductionist view of positive economics. As proposed, a plausible way to understand them can be achieved considering their complexity and their concrete, local features, which have to be grasped both in terms of formal and material specificity.

Financial inclusion and social protection have been recognised as the primary essential stimuli from the potential they carry as avenues for economic development, especially with respect to reduction in poverty and inequalities, the creation of employment and the enhancement overall welfare and livelihood. However, inclusive access to financial resources and equitable access to social protection interventions have remained a significant concern in Nigeria. In addition, the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic exposed the weakness of Nigeria in all sectors of the economy such as energy, health, education and food systems and low-level inclusive access to financial resources and social protection coverage. On the other hand, this study argues that financial inclusion and social protection has the potential to mitigation shocks orchestrated by the COVID-19 pandemic. This study empirically examines how social protection interventions and access to financial resources responded to COVID-19 pandemic. The study made use of data sourced from the World Bank’s COVID-19 national longitudinal phone survey 2020 and applied the logit regression. The findings show that social protection and access to financial resources significantly associated with the likelihood of shock mitigation during the COVID-19 pandemic. The results show that social protection intervention reduces the probability of being severely affected by shocks by 0.431. Given this result, the study recommends that the government should put more effort into proper social protection intervention to mitigate the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic.