This issue marks an important moment for the International Journal of Management and Economics and, for me, the beginning of a new responsibility: it is my first editorial as Editor-in-Chief of IJME. I take on this role with respect for the journal’s history and achievements, but also with the conviction that a scholarly journal must evolve together with the research community it serves.
Over the past months, we have therefore started a number of changes to strengthen IJME’s international profile, clarify its scholarly identity, and make the journal more accessible to authors and readers.
We have revised and more precisely defined the journal’s aims and scope. IJME remains a journal at the intersection of economics, management, finance, and international business, but we want to state more clearly the kind of contribution we seek. We are particularly interested in research that explains how firms, markets, financial systems, institutions, and states operate in an increasingly complex and transforming global environment. Global economic transformation, strategic uncertainty, technological change, sustainability transitions, geoeconomic tensions, financial interdependence, and evolving state-market relations are therefore natural areas of interest.
International relevance is central to this profile, but it does not mean that every article must compare several countries. Single-country, sectoral, firm-level, and institutional studies remain welcome, provided that they contribute beyond the immediate case: to theory, comparative understanding, international debate, economic policy, or managerial practice.
Changes are also taking place in the journal’s institutional framework. We are rebuilding and further internationalising the Academic Board to broaden the range of perspectives represented in IJME and strengthen links with research communities outside Poland. We have unified the licensing framework, are introducing accessibility standards to make published research easier to reach and use, and have abolished the submission fee. We hope that removing this financial barrier will encourage a wider and more diverse group of researchers to consider IJME.
Greater openness, however, does not imply lower expectations. We intend to maintain a selective editorial policy based on scholarly contribution, methodological quality, analytical clarity, and relevance to the journal’s international readership. Lower barriers to submission should broaden the pool of potential authors, not lower the threshold for publication.
These changes come at a moment when IJME’s international visibility is also improving: the latest Journal Impact Factor increased from 0.8 to 1.0. We welcome this as a sign of growing recognition of the research published in IJME, while continuing to regard bibliometric indicators as a consequence of good editorial work rather than its primary objective.
The present issue illustrates well the intellectual space that we want IJME to occupy.
It opens with a study of Japan’s innovation activity in hydrogen technologies, based on patent network analysis. The paper maps the technological domains and corporate actors shaping the country’s hydrogen innovation system and highlights the interaction between state policy, corporate R&D and accumulated industrial capabilities. Its findings point to strong specialisation in fuel cells, hydrogen production and storage, and mobility applications, while also showing unresolved challenges in cost competitiveness, dependence on imported energy, and the deployment of low-carbon hydrogen.
The second contribution turns to the modelling of implied volatility in EUR/PLN currency options. Using long-term market data, the study examines the relationships between spot returns, historical volatility, and the level and shape of the implied-volatility surface. The results demonstrate the forecasting value of these interdependencies and show how information embedded in the foreign-exchange options market can be used to understand the dynamics of risk expectations.
Questions of risk and resilience are then considered at the level of the global economy. The article on friendshoring asks whether geopolitical tensions are driving a shift away from liberal globalisation toward trade and production networks organised increasingly around trusted partners. The available value-added trade data do not yet indicate a completed restructuring of global value chains, but they reveal substantial sector-specific dependencies, particularly on China in manufacturing and on Russia in energy and raw materials. The paper therefore presents friendshoring less as an accomplished transformation than as an emerging strategic response to the vulnerabilities of economic interdependence.
Political uncertainty and its implications for financial markets are at the centre of the next contribution. The analysis of the S&P 500 around the US presidential elections of 2016, 2020, and 2024 finds significantly higher volatility during election periods involving Donald Trump, while differences in average returns between event and control periods are not statistically significant. Political events thus appear to affect markets primarily through heightened uncertainty rather than a straightforward directional effect on asset prices.
The issue then moves from financial uncertainty to distribution and social perception. The study of income inequalities in rural and urban Poland over 1988–2019 combines evidence on income distribution with evidence on attitudes toward inequality and redistribution. Its findings show that objective inequality, concern about inequality and preferences for redistribution are related but do not simply move together, while differences between locality categories remain important.
The final contribution examines sustainable consumer choices in the cosmetics market, with particular attention to packaging. Based on qualitative research and a representative survey of consumers in Poland, the study shows that ecological awareness is increasing, but sustainable packaging is not yet a leading determinant of purchasing decisions. Price and the limited availability of environmentally friendly alternatives remain important barriers. The paper thus captures a broader challenge of sustainability transitions: favourable attitudes do not automatically translate into behaviour when consumers face economic, functional, and market constraints.
Read together, these contributions reveal connections across very different areas of research. They address technological transformation and industrial strategy, the measurement and pricing of financial uncertainty, the reconfiguration of international economic relations, the impact of political events on markets, the social dimension of inequality, and the conditions under which sustainability preferences become economic choices. They also span different levels of analysis – from consumers and households, through firms and financial markets, to states and global value chains.
This is the breadth we want to preserve while making the journal’s profile more coherent.
The next stage in the development of IJME will therefore combine continuity with change: a clearer scholarly identity, a more international Academic Board and author community, greater accessibility, lower barriers to submission and demanding publication standards. Our ambition is to make IJME an increasingly visible forum for rigorous and relevant research on management, economics, and finance in a transforming global economy.
A journal is ultimately a collective academic project. I would like to thank our authors, reviewers, readers, and everyone involved in IJME’s editorial work. I am pleased to begin this new chapter with an issue that already reflects much of the direction in which we want the journal to develop.