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This paper examines the impact of business cycles on unemployment rates in EU countries. The relationship between changes in gross domestic product and changes in the unemployment rate is referred to in the academic literature as Okun’s law. This law is of particular importance and the relationship has been extensively investigated in the scientific literature, but there are not many studies that analyse the European Union countries. This paper examines the relationship between the unemployment rate and real GDP in the EU-27. The data used for the study cover the period 2007–2019. The results of a correlation regression analysis provide evidence of the inverse relationship between the unemployment rate and real GDP as established by theory. The results also show that the relationship between business cycles and unemployment varies from country to country: in Lithuania and the UK, there is a very strong inverse relationship between the unemployment rate and real GDP. In Lithuania, the coefficient was –0.9377, and a similar coefficient was found in the United Kingdom (-0.9337). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public rights of access to engage in recreational activities in open non-urbanized countryside in Lithuania, Scandinavia and UK are analysed in this paper. Currently there is no universal public right of access in Lithuania. On the other hand, there is no strict prohibition to walk or stay in open countryside as well. But public rights of access to the Lithuanian countryside are more and more undermined as privatization of land, forests and water is going on and land owners try to fence their properties. The present Lithuanian legal basis that regulates public access to countryside is evaluated. Foreign experience in this field is reviewed. Scandinavian countries and Scotland adopted universal everyman's right. On the other side, public rights are very limited in England and Whales. Summarizing these different approaches and current situation in Lithuania proposals on implementing the public right of access in the Lithuanian legislature are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article covers an extensive concept of partnership of private and public sectors. The authors emphasize an intermediate case existing between public procurement and privatization. The paper also give a broad overview of risks and their management related to the PPP projects. The idea of the necessity of the public sector to transfer risk to the private one maintaining the controlling function is emphasized. By applying Great Britain's example, the authors reveal some of the aspects of an effective management of PPP projects. Private companies are seen as entities that are capable of implementing projects in a faster way. The article presents some guidelines for the PPP improvement in Lithuania. The necessity of law and institution as well as the issues related to projects differentiation according to the types, responsibility and accountability is emphasized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents researches in the field of rural history carried out by science and educational institutions in Great Britain, i. e. universities as well as by formal and informal history science groups and societies. The article touches upon some problematic aspects, such as the organizational structure of researches in the history of the British villages, respective institution, research questionnaire concerning rural history as well as the main historiographical stages and achievements in the 20th century English rural history. First of all, the author presents universities' research programmes and their too specialized research directions of rural history which were mainly followed by Cambridge and Reading Universities. Cambridge University published a series of works under the title England's Rural History. A special mention should be made of The British Agricultural History Society, established in 1952 and still existing, which rallies different research centres and university researchers to investigate agricultural history, rural history including. The analyzed studies on rural history as well as researchers' preferences allow to claim that in modern historiography the social context becomes very prominent, i. e. agricultural history, development of ecological awareness, folklore researches, conventional culture and religion, rural literature and community, landscape researches, archeology and materialistic culture, ethnography, anthropology and rural sociology, women's role in a rural community, rural and urban relations, the role of community authorities etc. Special attention in the article is given to the prominent rural history researchers James Edwin Thorold-Rogers, Fridrich Seebohm, Sir Rowland Edmund Prothero, George Fussel, H. P. R. Finberg, Irena Joana Thirsk as well as to their contribution to the investigations of the British rural historiography. Retrospective evaluation of the achievements of the British agricultural history in the second half of the 20th century allows to claim that researchers were more concerned with the issues of villages than country estates; the importance of the fundamental processes of the 9th-10th centuries in rural genesis has been ascertained, a new approach to rural-urban relationship presented as well as market challenges and rural response to them displayed. Finally, the article introduces the existing polemics in the British historiography on the research object of agricultural history and rural history as well as the directions of the sociocultural or economic history, i. e. "stories about people" or stories about "cows and ploughs". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]