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Portfolio theory occupies an essential place in modern finance, while portfolio management grounded on its achievements has been recognized as one of the main tasks of financial experts worldwide. Taking into account the previous, the research aims to understand the development process of portfolio theory profoundly and to familiarize the investment community with the basic features of each of its phases: traditional, modern, and post-modern portfolio theory, with inevitable comparative analysis of these theories and presentation of their positive and negative aspects. The rationale of implementing an analysis of the evolutionary process of portfolio theory lies in the intention to provide a systematic overview of the development of theoretical thought within this area and grounded on the belief that accumulated knowledge in the field of portfolio theory and portfolio management is one of the most valuable knowledge assets of contemporary society.

In the developed countries, the importance and development of sharing economy as a new economic model have been increasingly discussed in recent decades. In Serbia, sharing economy has not yet been sufficiently explored in official reports and academic literature. On the other hand, in practice, there are several collaborative platforms used by consumers. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to point out the specifics of the sharing economy in Serbia. At the outset, after a brief introduction, the concept of a sharing economy is defined. Consumers’ attitudes about knowledge of the sharing economy, the expectations, and motives that drive them to market engagement are examined and presented. Examples of good practices in the field of sharing economy in Serbia are given. The factors that stimulate or restrict the development of the sharing economy are highlighted, and the legislative framework that directly and indirectly regulates this area is presented. The conclusion about the level of the development of sharing economy in Serbia is derived, and recommendation for future research is given. &nbsp

The development of academic thought is a slow but unquestionable process that leads to a more advanced intellectual structure of the research area. The global growth of tourism demand in rural areas has conditioned the accelerated development of rural tourism, and thus the growing interest of the academic community in this tourism specialism. In this regard, the paper aims to provide insight into recent trends in rural tourism literature and examine the intellectual structure of this discipline. A detailed review of relevant literature published in the Web of Science (WoS) tourism journals and the application of evaluative bibliometric analysis identified the predominant interests of authors and dominant research niches, the most common research regions, the most frequently used research methods, papers that had the highest impact on modelling scientific thought within the subject area, the most productive and influential journals, as well as the authors who have left the most profound trace in the analyzed discipline in the past ten years. It is expected that the paper stimulates academic discussion on the relatively steady interest of researchers and the need for further and more dynamic intellectual development in the field of rural tourism.

Moving the standard finance theory further away from practice has led to an increased criticism of standard finance. Much evidence in favor of the absence of perfect investor rationality have called for the need of a new approach and a new point of view offered by behavioral finance. Behavioral finance relies on standard finance, supplements its theory and, according to behavioral economists, gradually substitutes it; however, behavioral finance also faces a number of limitations. The aim of this research is to find answers to the question of whether preference should be given to standard or behavioral finance, in terms of finance theory and investment practice. By applying the methods of qualitative economic analysis, it has been concluded that we should strive towards the integrated application of these theoretical frameworks in order to achieve their synergy, exploit the positive and concurrently eliminate the negative aspects. An example of a theoretical approach that reconciles the differences between standard and behavioral finance is Adaptive Markets Hypothesis (AMH), which is given particular attention in the paper and has not been discussed in the literature in the Republic of Serbia thus far.

Since agriculture is the highly important economic activity in the Republic of Serbia, it is necessary to create an environment in which competitive agricultural enterprises will develop. However, regions in the Republic of Serbia considerably differ regarding the intensity of agricultural activity. This paper examines the impact of agricultural enterprises on the region's contribution to the gross domestic product (GDP) of the country in the period between 2010 and 2018. Activity of agricultural enterprises was observed using number of agricultural enterprises, number of employees in them, their turnover and gross value added. Random-Effects GLS regression showed that regions with higher agricultural activity contribute to the lesser extent to the GDP of the country. Research results are robust to changing sampling period and lagging independent variables. In this regard, several proposals have been recommended.

The modern era has brought the need for the establishment of farmland real estate investment trusts. The establishment of these trusts positively affects growth and development of agricultural sector and ultimately contributes to global poverty reduction and sustainable development of the world economy and society. The research objective is to highlight the importance of these institutional investors as a new mechanism for investing in farmland and an additional source of financing for the agricultural sector. No studies on this issue in domestic and insufficient number of them in foreign literature have been a motive for the conducted research. The intention is to introduce investment community with the basic characteristics of farmland real estate investment trusts, as well as the key factors that arouse interest and lead to investment in farmland as new asset class.

In addition to the well-established and most commonly used portfolio performance measures, both in theory and practice - the Sharpe ratio, the Treynor ratio and the Jensen's or alpha index, the financial literature also includes other alternative portfolio measures, such as: two modified versions of the Sharpe ratio - the information ratio and the M2 portfolio performance measure, one modified version of the Treynor ratio - the T2 portfolio performance measure, models that measure the market timing abilities of fund managers - the Treynor-Mazuy and the Henriksson-Merton model and a ratio based on the downside risk and the downside deviation as its measure - the Sortino ratio. The paper aims to inform the investors in the Republic of Serbia about the basic features of the aforementioned portfolio performance measures, as well as to point to the importance of understanding the decomposition of the actual portfolio performance of mutual funds.

Portfolio performance evaluation is an integral part of a continuous portfolio management process aimed at improving its efficiency. The importance of being familiar with the evaluation models of mutual fund portfolio performance is reflected in the fact that such models inform individual and institutional investors about the success of portfolio management, as well as about the performance of individual mutual funds; moreover, the portfolio managers identify strengths and weaknesses of the created portfolios based on the mentioned models. In this respect, this paper looks at the methods that are most widely used, both in theory and in practice, to measure portfolio performance: Sharpe index, Treynor index and Jensen's alpha or index. Bearing in mind that none of these methods of portfolio performance measurement is perfect, the author focuses on identifying and understanding the disadvantages and limitations of these models. By identifying and understanding these disadvantages and limitations, their importance and effects are being reduced, while at the same time, the importance and accuracy of the results are being improved.

This paper shows practical implementation of the multilayer feedforward neural network, trained by supervised backpropagation algorithm, to the problem of automatic classification of countries into beforehand predefined categories of economic development, contained in the United Nations report entitled World Economic Situation and Prospects 2012. The goal of the paper is to automate the process of classification of countries, to define a set of key measurable economic development indicators, as well as to emphasize significance of neural networks for solving classification problems. The research includes classification of 168 countries in 4 groups of economic development, based on 7 selected measurable indicators. The data from the official reports of the international economic institutions served for training of the intelligent decision-making system based on neural network, and as a measure of quality of training, confusion matrix was used, showing the precision of the intelligent system by determining the percentage of overlap with empirically obtained data. Precision of automatic classification speaks of neural networks as powerful apparatus for solving classification problems, but also of justification of choice of classification parameters and their importance. The importance of selected indicators is reflected in the fact that knowledge of their value is sufficient condition for automatic classification with reliability level of 80%.

Cycle tourism is one of the most interesting tourism products because it can be developed in very different regions. Over the last few years within the framework of European projects, national and regional organisations, international routes like EuroVelo and other routes and trails from local to international level have been developed and promoted. The objective of this paper is to summarise the lessons from the creation of an operational plan for cycle tourism at regional level in the case of Istria County. Istria County, as the most developed tourist county in Croatia, began to develop cycle tourism in the middle of the nineties of the last century. Compared to other regions in Croatia, the County of Istria has many cycling trails and routes. Also, for a growing number of tourists, cycling is one of the important motives for their arrival in Istria. In the design of the cycle tourism development plan, a number of stakeholders were involved. The involvement of stakeholders was very important since the development of cycle tourism can have a significant impact on a large number of stakeholders in the region.

Tourism is a very complex activity that arises from a number of different aspects of biological, sociological, demographic, economic, natural, spatial, architectural and other relevant phenomena with an increasing importance in terms of income generation and increasing participation in the social product of our country. Insurance in the context of tourism, as an economic activity, is a significant factor, since it provides clients with a sense of security when they are temporarily away from their place of permanent residence. This is exactly the aim of the paper, to show the significance of insurance protection for an increasing number of tourists and great material interests that can be endangered. Travel agencies as organizers of tourist trips have the obligation to provide their clients with appropriate services as well as protection, i.e. security. Agency provides travellers with the services anticipated by the program and contract, takes care of travellers’ rights and interests in accordance with good business practices. It is necessary to review risk management methods in tourism so that insurance protection is in line with the continuity of tourism development.