The objective of the research is twofold. The study examines the role of public finance in promoting sustainable development in SSA. Secondly, the study investigates the optimal level of public finance beyond which public finance crowds out investment and hinders sustainable development in SSA. The study adopts a battery of econometric techniques such as the traditional ordinary least square (OLS) estimation technique, Driscoll-Kraay covariance matrix estimator, and the dynamic panel threshold model. The study found that an increase in public debts lead to a decline in sustainable development. In contrast, the results show that increase in spending on health and education, and tax can engender sustainable development in SSA. Further, we uncover the optimal levels of public spending on health and education, and public debts that engenders sustainable development in SSA. One main implication of the findings is that governments across SSA needs to reduce public debts levels and increase public spending on health and education to within the threshold levels established in this study to aid sustainable development in SSA.

Given the importance of Information Communication Technology (ICT) in stimulating stock market development, many researchers have investigated their influences on the developed markets and high-income economies. The aim of this study is to examine the impact of ICT diffusion on stock market development for a panel of 17 selected emerging countries over the period 1990–2020 and employed the system-generalized method of moments (S-GMM) to test its objective. Three stock market development indicators are also used, namely: stock market capitalization (SMC), stock market total value traded (SMTT), and stock market turnover (SMT). Three ICT indicators are also employed, namely: Fixed telephone subscriptions (FTS), Individuals using the Internet (IUI), and Mobile cellular subscriptions (MCS). Three financial development indicators (deposit money among bank assets (DMB), liquid liabilities (LLB), and private credit by deposit money bank (PCM)) were employed as control variables. In its findings, all selected ICT dynamics positively affect stock market development and its constituents. Secondly, no proof was confirmed in relation to the impact of fixed telephone and stock market development with its elements. Thirdly, evidence of a positive relationship is sparingly apparent in financial development and its components. Fourthly, compared with fixed telephone, internet users more positively and significantly affect stock market development indicators. Policy implications are discussed.

Job satisfaction is a goal of every organization and human resources department. Many studies have shown the relationship between employee satisfaction as a predictive factor for a variety of key organizational indicators such as employee commitment, employee engagement, productivity, attrition, and turnover. Engaging in well-being activities is one strategy that companies can use to boost employee satisfaction. The term “well-being” activities in Hebrew is a bit different from the common use of the word in the literature. It is a combination of the concepts of Fun Activities, Employee Experience and Perks and Benefits. In High-tech companies, there are many activities aimed at creating a positive employee experience and an attractive organizational culture. These activities include a vast range of activities such as: department events, happy hours, company events, holiday gifts, enrichment activities, sports classes (for example, yoga), and more benefits. Despite the considerable investment in this budget, there are not many studies illustrating the contribution of well-being activities to employee satisfaction and their ROI. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between workplace well-being activities and job satisfaction in the Israeli high-tech market. The hypothesis of this study was that there is a positive relationship between well-being activities in the workplace and satisfaction in the workplace, but also to identify which issues within the well-being policy will predict the highest level of employee satisfaction. The study was conducted among 91 employees from a variety of high-tech companies in the Israeli market. The study’s findings supported the hypothesis. Practical suggestions for organizations for the successful implementation of well-being policies are discussed.

Machine analysis of detection of the face is an active research topic in Human-Computer Interaction today. Most of the existing studies show that discovering the portion and scale of the face region is difficult due to significant illumination variation, noise and appearance variation in unconstrained scenarios. To overcome these problems, we present a method based on Extended Semi-Local Binary Patterns. For each frame, an aggregation of the pixel values over a neighborhood is considered and a local binary pattern is obtained. From these a binary code is obtained for each pixel and then histogram features is computed. Adaboost algorithm is used to learn and classify these discriminative features with the help of exemplar face and non-face signature of the images for detecting the location of face region in the frame. This Extended Semi Local Binary Pattern is sturdy to variations in illumination and noisy images. The developed methods are deployed on the real time YouTube video face databases and found to exhibit significant performance improvement owing to the novel features when compared to the existing techniques.