Volumen 15 (2020): Heft 3 (December 2020)

In the current context of the modern world, economies depend on a dynamic innovative environment, the innovation actually representing one of the main facilitators of change. The economic growth has certainly led to an exponential increase with respect to the interaction between innovation and entrepreneurship. Undoubtedly, innovation depends on the entrepreneurial context and mostly on the cooperation between the market process’ level actors. In order to implement the innovation in the entrepreneurial activities, there is a sine qua non condition of having the abilities to contribute as a promoter on spreading and adoption of innovation. The current innovations are, in certain situations, capitalized and they can be oriented towards gaining profit. The disparities in terms of development and the favourable evolution of the business environment are determined by multiple factors, at present the implementation of technologies representing one of them. The correlation between technology and economy exists and the effects it produces on the market reality are showcased in this article. Therefore, the purpose of the current research is to identify the correlations between the economic development and technologies adoption in the entrepreneurial field. For this purpose, quantitative methods have been used in order to strengthen the obtained results.

There has been a long debate about whether exchange rate depreciation promotes output growth or not. In this context, we use Iran’s foreign exchange market which has had large fluctuations in recent years. Since the exchange rate influence on industries’ activity through different mechanisms, we examine the exchange rate effects in the industry level. To do this, the Iranian manufacturing industries data at 4-digit ISIC level are used from 2011 to 2017. The results of GMM dynamic panel data estimations show that the effects of real exchange rate depreciation on average, are positive in the non-crisis periods. But this relationship does not remain valid in a currency crisis conditions. Accordingly, depreciation does not have any positive effects during the currency crisis. Also, estimation results indicate the exchange rate volatility negatively affects industrial production in all periods. Our findings confirm that due to different characteristics of industries, the effects of exchange rate on production vary among them. So, export orientation, access to the preferential rate and higher level of raw material inventory amplify the positive effect of the real depreciation while import dependency and a higher level of final goods inventory fade the effect and turn into negative in some industries.

Studies in different countries comparing the quality of education in private and public schools have used a variety of measurement methods to determine educational quality and findings have been mixed. For the unique situation of Greece, the variable of student admission to the Greek university system, depending on whether the student’s secondary education was in the public or the private system, provides an apt outcome variable to measure relative educational quality. We provide estimates of the effect of private secondary schooling in Greece on students’ admission to their preferred university academic department, using data from nationwide surveys conducted identically in 2000 and 2015. This repeated-measures research design allowed us to compare the same set of factors between the two administrations, thus examining for the stability or change of their contribution over time. Our final sample consisted of 4740 secondary school students. We used a weighted questionnaire to investigate the effect of private schooling on the trajectory to university. In our empirical model, a multinomial logistic regression was performed to classify subjects based on values of a set of predictor variables. Results indicate that attending a private high school offers secondary education students a significantly higher probability of stepping successfully into an academic department of higher relevance to their academic preferences and future career expectations. We also find that private high school education significantly minimizes the efforts required for a student to enter a desirable university department. Positive correlations between the attendance of private high school education and demographic attributes of both students and their families were also found. Research and policy recommendations are included.

As strategic asset – determinant of sustained competitiveness – corporate/firm reputation has a very distinctive feature that sets it apart: although reflection of (better, worse or not at all performed) reputation management at a company’s level, it is rather a “representation” / “perception” – built on a business’s previous behaviors, but more precisely on the ways its different stakeholders have interacted (acknowledged, internalized, resonated) with them – in a (sometimes unconscious) process highly mediated and moderated by the media. Thus, the current study aims to explore the interplays between corporate/firm reputation and media as they are reflected in the scientific literature – through a bibliometric analysis of the WoS Core Collection database records (between 1992 and 2019), using the VOSviewer tool. With its emphasis on corporate/firm reputation and media, the paper shapes the broad theoretical backgrounds in anticipation of future research and empirical results to be revealed on a much more focused and applied/practical area, namely the reputation of the media in Romania.

The paper analyzes if the international monetary system calls for reform and whether China and the renminbi will play a decisive role in the post COVID-19 world. It also evaluates the main scenarios and trends that is being discussed since the global crisis – selecting the relevant authors, journals, institutions and opinions – examines present conditions and tries to extrapolate into future trends. Opting for a nontechnical approach, the article could be a good insight into the international monetary system, for academics, non-experts and policy makers. The paper concludes that if the 2008 crisis has induced the growth of the China role in the international monetary governance and the increase of the renminbi internationalization, the COVID-19 pandemic and post crisis reconstruction could generate a deeper reform of the international monetary system, in which the Chinese currency will strengthen its global position alongside the US dollar and the euro.

Today, sustainability has been clearly recognized as a necessity at global level by many, and the role of the business environment as a contributor in ensuring sustainability has become more and more acknowledged lately. Several efforts undertaken in this direction were focused on obtaining higher life quality levels and long-term benefits through businesses’ actions. Exploring and understanding agri-businesses from a managerial perspective becomes necessary due to sector’s particularities, but also to the fact that they are generally small enterprises, deeply embedded into their local communities. Beekeeping, as an agricultural branch, has indispensable contributions at societal and environmental level through a number of activities related to food and medicinal product supply and pollination. Sector’s dynamic, however, demonstrates that businesses are facing a series of challenges, and therefore, they need to showcase a proactive managerial approach in order to respond to risks and opportunities given by sustainability. Consequently, this paper looks to obtain a better understanding of sustainability management in the beekeeping sector by applying the triple layered business model canvas and featuring a series of facts from the Romanian industry.

As a consequence of adopting the IFRS in Romania, starting with 2012, for companies whose securities are admitted for trading on a regulated market, financial reporting demarches include ascertaining the comprehensive income in addition to the net income. The present paper aims at investigating how the share price evolves considering the level of the comprehensive income as compared to the reported net income, in a multiannual empirical study implying panel data analysis through Pooled OLS, Fixed Effects and Random Effects models processed through EViews. Furthermore, the informational and decisional utility of the two main forms of disclosed accounting results (the net income and of the comprehensive income) is examined through a sample of 57 notable companies listed on the Bucharest Stock Exchange. Admittedly, the empirical study findings substantiate the fact that both results categories are significantly associated with the evolution of the share price, rendering a heightened value relevance for the Romanian capital market investors. Moreover, the identified results indicate that from an investor standpoint, the comprehensive income does not bear a greater significance than the net income, the two having comparable impacts over the share price.

The crises the European Union has gone through over time have called into question the Union’s legitimacy and efficiency. The 2008-2009 financial crisis, the European debt crisis, the migration crisis and Brexit, have all tested the solidarity between member states. The COVID-19 pandemic is without a doubt the most drastic crisis in the EU’s history, with very severe socioeconomic consequences. The EU leaders were strongly criticized for not reacting quickly and efficiently enough to mitigate the impact of the virus, reduce suffering, and ward off the economic crisis. In this context, the questions that arise are: Is the Union a modern-day Titanic? Will it sink or it will sustain its legitimacy and come out stronger and more united from this unprecedented challenge?

The research objective is to study how Romanian and Dutch organizations’ business models have changed under COVID-19 conditions. The role of digitalization in adapting business models and business practices is studied. The theoretical background reviews literature about business models and their dimensions. Literature review investigated digitalization in Romanian and Dutch organizations.

Research questions were:

To what extent do Romanian and Dutch organizations use:

• more digital methods in their offer to their clients now than before the crisis?

• more digital methods in their business processes now than before the crisis?

• more digital methods in communicating with their clients now than before the crisis?

To what extent are there any significant differences between Romanian and Dutch organizations regarding the use of digital methods?

Using qualitative and quantitative methods, conclusions show that Romanian and Dutch organizations adapted their business models to the ongoing COVID-19 crisis by applying digitalization in their value creation and value delivery using different digital methods. The frequency and choice of specific digital methods are in line with digitalization levels of Romania and The Netherlands as per the DESI index. In both countries, digitalization helped business models resilience although the level of digitalization in the organization’s country were significantly different.

Reverse mortgage is an alternative source of financing of elderly population that usually has some homeownership, but insufficient income and savings to support desired or indispensable level of consumption. It is a financial innovation mostly provided by banks and finance companies to seniors, which enables a home equity conversion to liquidity without selling or leaving a property. In circumstances of ageing society, modest pension income, increasing long-care expenditures, limited access to loan market and high risk of poverty, a reverse mortgage product has a solid ground for implementation and adoption. Croatia is an ageing country with negative demographic trends, which accelerated in the last few years. Retired population which is “home rich and cash poor” is particularly vulnerable and at strike to sustain a decent life. Therefore, we raised a question concerning the justification of the reverse mortgage introduction in Croatia. After giving an insight into some contextual factors, an estimation of the potential demand for reverse mortgage service in Croatia was made by carrying out an exploratory – pilot study with around 120 questionnaire respondents. We found out that there is a poor knowledge about the reverse mortgage among Croatian financial consumers (i.e. only 24% of respondents are familiar with the reverse mortgage term), as well as the lack of demand for this home equity extraction instrument. Namely, almost 67% of respondents would not accept a reverse mortgage instrument regardless of the circumstances, primarily due to socio-cultural reasons.

The aim of this paper is to investigate consumers’ purchase intentions towards novel dairy products with evidence from Greece and Serbia. Based on the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) model, this research empirically tests a set of hypotheses concerning the consumers’ purchase intentions towards novel dairy products. In addition to the dependent variable of purchase intention, the independent variables of food neophilia, product knowledge, health consciousness, social contacts and price perception are used for the development of hypotheses. A total of 288 usable questionnaires (144 from each country) were collected and analyzed. Finally, the empirical findings are discussed and managerial implications as well as recommendations for future research are presented.

Organizational culture and job satisfaction are the most important factors for any university. Research into how satisfied professors are with university culture is crucial in finding ways to increase job satisfaction in the present as well as the future. The aim of our study is to investigate whether the type of organizational culture has any effect on job satisfaction and whether there are any differences between Serbia, Slovenia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. The study was conducted on 489 professors at universities and colleges in Serbia, Slovenia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. The study shows that university professors in the three investigated countries have a moderate level of job satisfaction. The case study method was used. The data collection technique applied was a survey conducted among university professors. The survey was conducted electronically, via Google Forms, and the key instrument was a questionnaire. The data were processed using SPSS Statistics 21. The results of the study show that improving perceived organizational support can increase the level of job satisfaction of university professors. It is also very important to emphasize the importance and originality of this study since similar studies have not been conducted before in the three countries mentioned.

The aim of this article is to measure economic development and the impact of economic globalisation under the prism of global political economy. Global political economy is a field of study that has its roots in international relations. The growth of world economic transactions after the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in the 1970s created the need for a new field of study, in order to explain the interdependence between politics and economics on the international level. Global political economy is the field of study that also examines the implications of economic globalisation for national economies and for the global economy. The concept of economic development is broader than economic growth, which is related to GDP growth. The concept of economic globalisation has changed the prospects of economic development for certain developed and developing economies. The main changes of economic globalisation are closely related to the following aspects of national economies: trade, finance, and production. The analysis of this article will reveal the effects of economic globalisation on different aspects of economic development. These aspects are studied under the prism of indexes such as Financial Development Index, openness to trade, Human Development Index, the GINI Index and other inequality indexes. The aftermath of the global economic crisis of 2007-2008 placed at the epicentre the interdependence of national economies and the issue of economic inequalities. The study of the aforementioned indexes will highlight the alterations that have occurred from the manifestation of the global economic crisis until today. The article is focusing on the following countries: China, Germany, Greece, and the United States for the last decade (2009-2019), on the basis of the available data.

The Greek economic activity has been declined dramatically in recent years as many sectors of the economy that cannot cope with the new state brought about by the economic crisis. An economic crisis can be described as the phenomenon when an economy is characterized by a continuous and noticeable decline in its economic activity. As an economic activity, we are referring to all the macroeconomic dimensions of the economy, such as employment, the national product, prices, investments, etc. The downturn in the supermarket sector, which is attributed to the country’s financial situation, has led to a decline in the household disposable income. The present study was carried out at the time of the economic crisis, concerning a productive sector of the Greek economy, where millions of euros are exchanged hands. The objective of the study was to explore the impacts of the economic crisis on the sector by using a series of financial indicators. The results point to significant effects on the efficiency and earnings of the major actors of the sector.

We will investigate in this paper the relation between income inequality and climate change, taking into account that the increase of carbon emissions has among consequences the increase of inequalities. The most vulnerable to climate change are the poorest and less developed countries. Climate change represents an important challenge for EU policymakers and the transition to zerocarbon emissions will lead to greater social inclusion and convergence among EU countries. We use in this paper two-stage OLS in order to analyse the relationship between income inequality and carbon emissions in case of EU countries.. We apply our model to two groups of European Union countries, the old member states - EU15 and new member states - EU13. Our results confirm that there are important differences between the two groups regarding the relationship between climate change and income inequalities. Therefore, policies implemented at EU level are extremely important in order to mitigate the adverse effects of climate change on growing inequality and poverty in EU countries. Governments must invest in new technologies, industries and innovation in order to address the complex challenge posed by mitigating climate change.

Under increasing macroeconomic uncertainty, governments base their economic policies on high-precision GDP estimates. The models considered based on building-up government budgets incorporate main drivers of economic growth, identified along a large range of empirical studies, mostly focused on economic productivity, factor accumulation, human capital, innovation and transfer of technology, structural changes, or institutional framework. However, there is little evidence related to the impact of accounting and assurance regulation on economic growth. Our study attempts to assess the significance of causal relation between forecasting error on GDP growth and quality of accounting standards, respectively quality of financial statements. The study analyzes the causal relation between country level measures of quality of financial reporting, synthetized by Isidro et. al. (2019), and the measure of GDP growth estimate mean error. Our results confirm a significant impact of quality of the output of financial reporting practice, related to disclosure quality and asymmetric timeliness. The results remain similar, even after controlling for accounting convergence influence. Checking for robustness of the model, we observe the main drivers of one year ahead GDP forecast error are related to institutional framework to issue high quality standards and enforce them properly. The results emphasize once again the role of economic development and corresponding complexity of economic activities and political framework impact on accounting regulation and subsequently on macroeconomic measures.

More than 100 years ago, Herbert A. Simon wrote the book “The sciences of the artificial” (1916) where he presented Economics as an artificial science. Even though back then the mainstream economics promoted the idea of <homo economicus>, Simon’s perspective of man was as one of an artificial system, characterized by a bounded rationality whose behavior depends on his inner and outer environment. Later, in the 70’s Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky investigated more on the limitation of human rationality and built, based on empirical studies, the maps of bounded rationality. Later, Richard H. Thaler introduced the concept of nudge, as a way to improve people’s choices by using the knowledge about their limited rationality and using it to direct their behavior in the direction in which they would have behaved if they were rational.

This articles treats human behavior through the lens of ergonomics, a scientific discipline concerned with the understanding of interactions among humans and other elements of a system, and the profession that applies theory, principles, data and methods to design in order to optimize human well-being and overall system performance. We adopt the perspective of the man as an interface between his inner and outer environment and describe how behavioral economics developed a different perspective about human choice in contrast with the one promoted by standard economics.

Romania is in a rather dishonorable position from the financial literacy perspective in the European Union, ranking last among countries. To increase the level of financial education of the Romanian population, public and private institutions, organizations, and companies have recently taken the initiative in this field, mostly after 2015. Our contribution builds on these recent developments and aims at testing the level of basic financial literacy of Romanian university students, enrolled in business and economics studies, using the OECD Financial literacy test. Data was collected through an online survey on a voluntary basis, and the responses were analyzed using statistical indicators. Results indicate a rather high level of financial literacy among students, but also significant differences among respondents that may be explained by several demographic characteristics and specific attributes. The most important characteristics that influence the degree of financial literacy of students are age, students’ cycle of studies, the way the students live, property ownership and students’ involvement in financial market transactions and contracts. We stress towards the need to act through concrete measures to improve young people financial literacy, as a necessary condition to navigate in an increasingly complex environment, where finance plays an essential role.

The gender inequality is the hot topic for most countries in the world. However, sometimes the talks about the risks and threats are more dramatic than the reality is. The paper aims to test the gender gap in the selected states and to consider the hypothesis that gender matters in entrepreneurial activity. The methodology of the regression and statistical analyses is proposed to access the main hypothesis and to trace the dynamics of the gender indexes and ranks. The preliminary results show that gender affects the level of entrepreneurial activity; besides government support programs and socio-cultural factors have a significant impact as well. The valid results for all states represented positive correlation and dependence between Entrepreneurial Motivation for TEA and Female/Male ratio for all analysed states. We can conclude that the change in the ratio of women and men engaged in entrepreneurial activity in the state (i.e. Poland) will affect the level of business innovation. For example, when the gender structure of entrepreneurs in Poland changes towards the number of women compared to men, the level of innovation of products and services will increase, or vice versa.

The European continent distinguished as an entity with genuinely regionalized economic structures. Considering the existing economic disparities in the European regions were found several reasons for the regional aggregation of research and innovation activities.Our study aims to assess the European region’s total factor productivity performance of knowledge production for the period 2009-2018, proposing to identify several clusters in the European countries based on their innovative potential and their total factor productivity. The present research evaluates the performance of regional knowledge production in the European countries by using the Malmquist Index procedure. We expect to assess the efficiency of research and development inputs in knowledge production and the contribution of the total factor productivity to the innovative capacity building. The source of data was the Eurostat database. To estimate the knowledge production achievement in the European countries, we examined the total research and development expenditures and the number of researchers involved in this activity as conventional inputs in determining the Malmquist Index. As output, we considered the number of patents applied at the European Patent Office. We applied cluster analysis to identify potential factors that determine disparities among different levels of development of innovation capacity and to detect similarities within the identified clusters.