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Has Lukashenka forgotten his warnings about the dangers of free market reforms?
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Has Lukashenka forgotten his warnings about the dangers of free market reforms?
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Obama tells Putin, Erdogan to stop trading insults, get on with task of combating terrorism.
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The American vice-president carries a message to Kyiv that Washington wants to see more progress in fighting corruption.
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Unverified accounts say Amiran Georgadze opened fire after officials rejected his demand for a giant bribe.
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Move will backfire on Ukraine, Russian premier Medvedev warns.
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Watchdog EIA says the timber company Schweighofer is illegally overcutting Romania’s virgin forests.
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Successful entry into new markets and creating new market niches is the new challenge for organizations arising from global competition and can become a test of their stability. This statement is particularly relevant in this moment of a financial crisis and uncertainty. Difficulties in the successful implementation in new markets or the formation of new market niches are numerous and of various types. This is especially true of innovative products or services, the market performance success has an uncertain outcome and contains risk, but difficulties for many market participants namely entering a new market segment is the outcome of a protracted stagnation for too long. This study focuses on the research of circumstances of the entry of new and innovative products on the market and/or the opening of a new market niches for such products. There are well-established models (Johanson/ Vahlne – Uppsala model), which give a clear idea of how the market penetration works. The product research includes the study as one of the most important sources of innovation and new scientific knowledge (Peter Drucker). The purpose of this paper is to present a method for assessing the marketing of scientific institutions products.
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In this article are represented the main economic problems in the mechanism through which EC decides on corporate concentration. The underlying conclusion is that this mechanism does not work in favour of the small ( and poor ) EU member countries.
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The aim of this article is to examine the influence of the determinants on the 19 euro zone countries’ credit ratings assigned by Standard & Poor’s Financial Service. The hypothesis was posed that: If the level of economic, trade development and the economy stability increase, the country’s credit rating rises. There are proposed static panel data models based on data from the years 2000-2015 obtained from Reuters Eikon. As the dependent variable short-term and long-term credit ratings given by S&P’s are used. The ratings are decomposed lineary on the numeric variables. As the dependent variables the macroeconomic factors are used. The results are compared with forecasts of Standard & Poor’s Financial Service. In addition, results are compared with trends in countries’ credit ratings.
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The aim of the article is the analysis of relations and comparison of central position between financial companies and real economy enterprises in the network of interlocking directorates on the Polish capital market. We obtained corporate board information on the main market of the Warsaw Stock Exchange and on the NewConnect market in December 2014. It was found that, comparing to real economy enterprises, financial companies adapt interlocking strategy more frequently and with higher intensity, and also hold more central position in the network of directorates in terms of closeness and community measures.
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The aim of the study is to assess the sustainability level of the development ofgminas in Poland, while indicating the problems limiting the sustainability of development. For this purpose, the statistical data from the Local Data Bank of the Central Statistical Office were used. On the basis of a development measure the synthetic indicators of economic, social and environmental development were calculated. This indicators enabled to assess the sustainability level in the three aspects and to present the relations between them. The measure of cohesion was used to assess the sustainability level of gminas. Five sustainability groups were identified: very low, low, medium, high andvery high. It was concluded that among all the surveyed gminas (2,479), a higher sustainability level demonstrate urban-rural (26.2% of the total number of such gminas) and rural gminas (20.1%) rather than urban gminas (17.9%). It was also pointed out that the environment may be a barrier in the shaping of the sustainable development of gminas.
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The paper concerns the changes in sector structure of employees in predcimmantly rural subregions (NTS 3). comparing the structures in 2005 and 2012. To аззезз the extent of changes the author used the dissimilarity measures: Bray-Curtis index, Clarke's divergence index and Euclidean distance. It was stated that the most significant changes were observed in the subregions with the increase in the percentage of employees in agriculture sector
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In the wake of the Great Recession that begun in 2007, several central banks became trapped in the zero lower bound. The Federal Reserve Bank, the Bank of England, and the European Central Bank were unable to reinvigorate bank lending despite slashing their interest rates to a zero level. The Federal Reserve Bank and the Bank of England adopted their QE programs just after the collapse of Lehman Brothers to alleviate balance sheet recessions by facilitating economic recovery which in turn gradually unlocked credit and money creation. The decision to launch the ECB’s QE was significantly delayed which pushed the Eurozone into a double-dip recession. Despite being long overdue the ECB’s QE led to a number of favourable outcomes. One of these was a reduction in public debt service as QE programs are tools which facilitate government debt restructuring through de facto conversion of the treasuries purchased by the central bank into zero-coupon perpetuities.
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Growing trends of fear and insecurity in cities have sparked the re-visitation of gating, posing significant problems for citizens and policy makers alike. Gated developments are a global phenomenon occurring in diverse countries in both the developed North and developing South. Metropolitan areas in South Africa have also witnessed a rapid increase in the number and spread of gated developments since the late 1980s. Development of enclosed neighbourhoods has become increasingly popular, gaining widespread support for their utopic lifestyle and safety features. On the whole, high levels of crime and fear of crime have led to the construction of defensible space, in the form of gated developments, resulting in elevated levels of segregation. This paper provides a spatial analysis on gated developments in the non-metropolitan setting of Bloemfontein. The pattern and timeframe of gating in this city is shown to be similar to those found elsewhere in South Africa and, indeed, globally. Overall, it is the contention that gating is a trend not only seen in large metropolitan areas, but across the entire urban hierarchy of South Africa, and, as a consequence, requires investigation far beyond its metropolitan regions to more fully understand gated developments.
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The paper looks into the dynamics of the population size of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus after the census of 1989. Regions and cities of these countries were the focus of the research (territorial units level NUTS-3). The analysis addresses the question to what degree the remoteness from the regional centre, i.e. the position in the core-periphery system, influences the dynamics of the population size of the territorial units of the given level. For the analytical purposes the distinction has been made between the regional centres including adjacent suburban areas and internal regional periphery comprising districts and cities. The main indicator employed was the distance between the periphery areas and regional centres. The results of the analysis show that in spite of the depopulation of all three countries and severe transformational crisis, there was a steady growth of the population size in the regional centres, while the periphery areas of the regions continued to lose the population. The mentioned differences are primarily determined by migration flows, since the fertility rates are below the replacement level in all the countries' territories. Population tends to concentrate in the regional centres, which means urbanisation has not been completed yet. While similar patterns of population decline are observed in the periphery areas of Ukraine and Belarus, in Russia the depopulation rates are negatively influenced by the factor of remoteness of a periphery area from the regional centre. All three countries experienced rural population decline everywhere but suburban areas of the regional centres.
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Since the accession of the Visegrad Group of countries (V4) to the European Union, the importance of clusters has increased. With growing global competitiveness and EU 12 trends, a gradual awareness of creative industries is observed in V4 countries. Therefore, this article analyses creative clusters and factors conditioning their establishment and development. On the basis of a literature review and a questionnaire survey, a mapping of creative clusters was conducted. In addition, catalysts, main motives and key factors in the process of their establishment were identified, as were the activities and factors hampering their development. The scheme of cluster development is presented as the outcome of the qualitative analysis, along with a comparison to findings of other studies. Research findings show that trust building and administrative obstacles are among the main barriers, especially for design clusters and cultural clusters.
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Students are increasingly recognised as important actors of urban change in contemporary cities. The article presents an analysis of incipient studentification processes in Gdańsk. Its general aim is to reveal patterns of students' presence and activity which translate into spatial and socio-economic transformations of a post-socialist city at the level of neighbourhoods. The study consists of a survey on students' residential behaviour, complemented by field and desk research. According to the results, due to the fact that Polish students' housing and lifestyle choices are limited by their low purchasing power, student-dedicated services have a rather negative impact on the quality of urban space. Furthermore, under these conditions studentification may not be regarded as a stimulus to the gentrification process, which is rather driven by hipsters and affluent foreign students.
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Every year the Republic of Croatia, especially in its south part in Dalmatia, faces forest fire risks. The weather is exceptionally conducive to fires, so the main period of fire occurrences is between June and October, characterized by long lasting dry and warm weather with temperatures over 30oC. Research carried out by the authors in 1997 and 2012 have pointed to the fact that human impact is the main cause of ignition. This paper presents an overview of the total number of fires in the period from 1998 to 2012, with the emphasis on forest and woodland fires in the Croatian region of Dalmatia. Data on the situation in Dalmatia refer to the situation in the areas of responsibility of four Dalmatian Police Administrations. Analysis is based on official data of the Croatian Ministry of the Interior and the report of the National councillor for managing and controlling forest fires. The authors have analysed the frequency of forest fires in Dalmatia in a period of fourteen years (1998-2012) comparing it with the previous period, 1989-1996. The results that the authors have obtained reveal how forest fires most commonly (2/3) break out during the warm part of a day, from 09.00 until 18.00 hours in the warm period of the year. Particularly vulnerable are the forests of Aleppo pines and maquis being mostly thermal forests, whilst in the south of the country the forests of Holm oak (Quercus ilex) and English oak (Quercus robur) are at the highest risk. Reforesting of burned areas is very slow and Croatia has been far behind in reforesting in the continental part of the country.
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The aim of this paper is to identify trends in the marketization of selected public tasks implementation in large cities. An analysis of the implementation of selected public tasks in the form of budgetary units, local budgetary establishments and through the involvement of large cities in companies was made. The profitability of the introduction of user charges for selected public services in large cities in Poland in 2012-2014 was analyzed. This made it possible to identify key areas of marketization with the proceeds generated through user charges for services and their impact on cities’ finances. It was indicated that user charges for services in the surveyed cities, as a rule, were calculated at the level that did not allow for balancing spending on these tasks, particularly in the case of social tasks. At the same time these tasks for which self-financing was possible were separated organizationally to be implemented by municipal companies.
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The aim of this paper is to map the spatial variations in the size of the shadow economy within Brussels. Reporting data provided by the National Bank of Belgium on the deposit of high denomination banknotes across bank branches in the 19 municipalities of the Brussels-Capital Region, the nding is that the shadow economy is concentrated in wealthier populations and not in deprived or immigrant communities. The outcome is a call to transcend the association of the shadow economy with marginalized groups and the wider adoption of this indirect method when measuring spatial variations in the shadow economy.
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