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financial grant creates an avenue to reduce poverty, inequality and to improve equitable economic development. The objective of this paper is to examine the effect of social financial grant increases on poverty alleviation in South Africa. The paper inclines on prior poverty theories of economic growth, which highlights the use of social financial grants to achieve poverty reduction and equitable economic growth. The paper applies a quantitative approach; data on social grants were from the publications of the South African department of statistics and the South African Social Security Agency. The ensuing cross-sectional data were analysed using the structural equation modelling approach. Findings from the analysis indicate that, amongst the seven types, only three namely, the grants for old age, grants for disability and grants for supporting a child enhances reduction in inequality. On the contrary, four of the seven social grant types enhance reduction in poverty level; these are the grants for war veterans, aid grants, grants for dependency, and grants for fostering a child. The paper highlights policy implications of the findings, which includes inter alia, that policy makers may target poverty reduction or inequality reduction using specific social grant types. Findings from this paper provide an avenue for further research to assess poverty and inequality reduction through these social grant types in other developing economies. Such research should check if this current research result is replicable using social grant data from other developing countries. This paper uniquely applies the SEM model to evaluate poverty and inequality implication of social grants in South Africa.

Sports is globally regarded as having the ability to foster friendship and peaceful coexistence among peoples across such different barriers as skin colours, country of origin, religion, gender as well as social strata. Sport is a strong source of harnessing diversities that may exist in a political system for sustainable socio-economic and political development. Sports have been used by different countries as justifiable mechanism for foreign policy and a veritable vehicle for peaceful co-existence. However, just as sport is capable of promoting friendship, it can also be used as an instrument of development in same way as it can foster national cohesion especially in plural and heterogeneous societies. To that extent, this paper sets to establish the extent to which sports can be used to engender development. It relied on the qualitative method of gauging information to establish its case. The study reveals that, indeed sports has the potentials of promoting national cohesion in a clime that is fragmented along many divisive lines such as ethnicity, religion, language and many other centrifugal forces; it further reveal that sports can also engender development in all facets such that is will enhance the standard of living of the people. The paper suggests among other things that, there is the need for the government to synergize with the private sector in order for the people and the society at large to reap the benefits that lays in sports and in the sport industry.

This research paper affirms that a high level of social and economic development at national level as well as a decent living of the population can be ensured through a secure and well-paid work. The right to work is considered one of the main rights in both national law and international conventions. In his context, this paper aims to perform a comparative analysis of normative acts issued in the Republic of Moldova and the Danube States (EU members) on the right to work as well as the social and economic results from the application of these normative acts. The authors expect to establish the logical link between legislation on labour-welfare and population-economic development of countries by conducting a comparative analysis of the provisions of regulatory documents, by observing and analysing statistical data on the economic and social situation in the analysed states. The results of this research will serve as a theoretical and applied basis for students, researchers, but also to formulate recommendations for the national legislature based on the successful experience of EU countries.

The paper deals with the idea that EU has to reformate as a result of the latest challenges, including the Brexit. A possible effect and opportunity from this can be a stronger position for the EU Balkan Member States. The analysis in the paper takes into consideration all Balkan economies, including candidate countries in order to obtain a general approach for the region. This approach is new because it puts together member and candidate members from a region, in the context of re-evaluating the EU, and leads to the idea of finding a regional leader able to generate regional progress and to support the region’s interests in the European Institutions. The analysis covers five representative economic indicators (GDP growth rate, gross fixed capital formation, unemployment rate, inflation rate and general government gross debt) and is realized on three levels: a comparative analyses, a cluster analysis, and a cumulative analysis as well. Moreover, regression is used in order to point out the economic disparities across the region. The main conclusion of the analysis is that the great regional economic disparities can be decrease using common regional policies. Moreover, the analysis identifies a regional economic leader able to coordinate common initiatives at least on short and medium terms. The analysis and the conclusions in the paper are supported by the latest official statistic data, pertinent tables and diagrams.

This paper appraises the Nigerian Land Use Act and its capacity to engender economic development and prosperity. The Land Use Act was enacted in 1978 with the aim of energizing economic development by ensuring effective and equitable utilization of land and land resources in the country. As this paper has found out, however, achieving this lofty objective has been hampered by two major obstacles. The first is the inherent contradictions and defects in the law, and the second is institutional weakness and lack of political will to implement the Act fairly and equitably. The paper has further discovered that the result of these anomalies is a failure of the Act to accomplish some of its major objectives. To re-focus the Act and secure economic development and easy access to land by both government and the citizens, the paper has recommended the amendment of certain provisions of the Act in addition to mustering the political will by government to implement the amended version of the Act in a fair and equitable way.

The objective of the paper is to present the EU policies, how they relate with Member States and with its partners, the multiculturalism has never been an impediment, but it has made it special, mentioning here the economic level, where the Union has the highest GDP per capita in the world. Our intention is to present the components of globalization, a phenomenon that is the basis for the European Union and the sudden evolution of Romania in the recent years. Romania was integrated in the globalization process and took advantage of all the benefits of this engine of the modern world. The result lies in a better understanding of EU policies and its effects on the Romanian economy. In this paper we have achieved an analysis of non-refundable grants offered by the European Union for the period 2007-20013 and how they helped the industrial and social development of Romania. The added value of the scientific interpretation of the Romanian situation at economic level is highlighted by the beneficial influence of the European space, opening towards a global market and the original approach in economic terms of the development analysis and participation in the globalization process.

Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) has significant impact on economic growth of developing countries like Pakistan for many decades. This paper has an objective to know the effects foreign direct investment on economic growth for the period from 1971-2013 by establishing empirical relation between business industries of primary, secondary and tertiary sector with FDI through Panel Cointegration and Granger Causality Framework for the specified period. The results show the significance of FDI and economic growth with proxies of GDP with the evidence of cointegration between these variables. The results also present long term causality between FDI and GDP while two-way causality if found under short run. Overall sectoral level, there is positively significance is identified between FDI and GDP. The policy Implications are also discussed in the paper showing that efficient and effective utilization of FDI.

The main objectives of this paper are to reveal some aspects regarding European funds‟ utilization, starting with the comprehension of EU philosophy regarding cohesion policy and emphasizing the important role played by Structural and Cohesion Funds for public administration, especially in times of economic downturn when the financial resources are difficult to access. Prior Work: this work continues prior research carried out for the “European Programs and Projects Management” MA thesis. Approach: The main methods employed for capturing the research evidence consists in management strategies analysis in the public administration, especially in studying the capacity of absorption of European funds in the case Galati County Council. The main results of this paper show that the risks of absorption capacity decrease of EU funds are linked to a number of factors, such as financial problems, poor information, lack of managerial experience, etc.

This paper aims to study the issues of cooperative sector in Iran. According to the theories,among the three sectors i.e. Public, private and cooperative sector probably cooperative sectorbecause of participating people directly in its process, can work better for economic development andcan be considered as a country economic developer example by job creation and others, Prior Workbecause Islam religion has invited people for having cooperation and also Iranian is a Muslim countrythen there have been a lot work on cooperative sector and this work is among the others who looks forthe challenges and issues in this sector, Approach this paper looks for the challenges and issues ofthe cooperative sector in Iran to run effective cooperation, Results Cooperative sector in alldeveloped and undeveloped and developing countries has its own challenges and in Iran as a fastdeveloping country which want to speed the developing process then needs to consider thecooperative sector challenges in Iran and other countries as well, Implications Practitioners,academician and others who want to work on challenges and issues of cooperative sector in Iran andothers . Value among the other important variables in economic development, cooperative has thepriority because of its fast returned effects in economic development then this paper aims to study thechallenges of this sector.

This paper examines the impact of governance on sustainable development in West Africa from 2002 – 2016. It adopts the system GMM approach, using all the six governance indicators, which include voice and accountability, political stability, government effectiveness, regulatory quality, rule of law and control of corruption. The results show that voice and accountability, political stability, government effectiveness and rule of law are positively related to development, with government effectiveness shown to have that largest impact, while regulatory quality and control of corruption are shown to be indirectly related to development in the short-run. However, in the long-run, all governance indicators are directly related to development in West African countries, with political stability and regulatory quality having the largest impact.

Small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs) play a key role in the world economy and contribute significantly to an economy’s output, income and employment. This paper seeks to assess the extent to which Zimbabwe’s commercial banks finance SMEs. Document analysis and an extensive review of the literature was undertaken to contextualize and draw a framework of analysis for the study. The literature shows that SMEs are of great socio-economic importance in developing countries but access to financial services for SMEs in Zimbabwe remains low. Zimbabwe’s economic challenges since 2000 to dollarization in 2009, the informalization of the SME sector, customers’ financial illiteracy and lack of training, lack of collateral security for loans, a high non-performing loans ratio, the lack of understanding of SMEs’ needs by banks, the inaccessibility of banks and the general lack of financial innovation are some of the major reasons for the low level of SME financing. A harmonised approach to policy suggestions for SMEs, lending institutions, the central bank and government to ensure the viability and growth of the SME sector are required and outlined. The research helps to formalize the SME sector considering its attendant benefits to the relevant players in the economy.

About FDI there are numerous studies, some of them have mostly theoretical character and others mostly practical. This article aims at capturing and analyzing the most important trends in the short, medium and long term on FDI flows worldwide, thus this study has a rather practical approach. Also, the paper aims to discern how FDI flows may influence the sustainable development and the national interest. The analysis starts from studying the past in the most significant developments of the world economy in terms of inflows of investment attraction, drawing marginally some advantages or disadvantages of joining a political entity with regional vocation (e.g. European Union) or a currency area (e.g. E.M.U.). It should also be noted that, beyond the analysis of past trends, the direction towards which worldwide foreign direct investment (FDI) should be considered in relationship with the ability to infer certain areas which in future can attract FDI for a sustainable and balanced national economy development, serving to the national interest. Thus, the article aims, through a broad set of indicators, to seize these structural or cyclical advantages of world economies and, to the extent that can be applied to the Romanian economy, to contribute to the restructuring of objectives of macroeconomic policies in order to mobilize the country's potential to attract FDI.

The major importance of entrepreneurship for economic growth, competitiveness, creating jobs and innovation is widely recognized. The objectives of our paper are to realize a comparative analyze of the characteristics of entrepreneurship in the EU countries, as well as to identify the perceptions about it. For our analysis we use the values for the key indicators obtained from data base and reports of Global Entrepreneurship Monitor. Also, in order to realize the comparison we use the classification of EU countries according to their development level. The results obtained show that there are important differences between the EU countries regarding entrepreneurial activity, but also among the countries in the same group. The countries with a higher economic development have a better entrepreneurial environment than those less developed. Regarding the perception about entrepreneurship, our results show that almost half of working age population from EU observe good opportunities in the region for starting a business, but almost as many of them affirm that a big constrain in starting a business would be their fear of failure. Overall, the results of our research allow identifying the measures that would be required to be taken by policy makers to stimulate entrepreneurship in European countries.

The level of taxation is very important for the development of current and future of a country and fiscal policy should always be considered as an important factor in the behavior of participants and their ability to tax evasion and informality. Government fiscal policies can trigger tax increase under pressure, especially in situations such as economic crisis, inflation, unemployment, instability, when the burden of this obligation grows, its effects are considered to take them to tax evasion and informality (Dragomir. et al. 2011). However, these reasons do not relate to all the great presence of this phenomenon in Kosovo, taking into account the recent economic crisis has not reflected in the economy of Kosovo and the Kosovo tax burden is among the lowest in the region, but leading cause of tax evasion and informality can be considered above the corruption of public administration officials including tax and customs officials, insufficient staff for his fighting, weak rule of law, as well as lower fiscal culture for paying taxes. For this reason the scope of this paper will be the theoretical treatment of the informal economy and tax evasion in view of tax avoidance, meaning, characteristics and their effects on the economy and possible recommendations on these viewpoints.

Simultaneous globalisation tendencies have created policy challenges for national and local governments. One response to these challenges has been a dramatic proliferation of development policies based on clusters of firms and industries. In EU Strategy 2020 – COM 546/6.10.2010 Initiative “An Union of Innovation”, COM 614/27.10.2010 Initiative “Industrial Policy in the Globalization Era” innovative clusters were considered the “engine” of economic development. They represent a framework for business development, collaboration between companies, universities, research institutions, suppliers, customers and competitors located in the same geographical area. Clusters of small and medium sized firms in developing economies are coming under increased pressure from competition as products mature, technology becomes widely available, and companies seek lower cost locations for production. In this paper, we consider that the cluster is an engine for economic development in our region and we need to have a regional strategy for clusters in Bucharest Ilfov Regional Development Plan for 2014-2020.

Creative industries comprise the creation, production, marketing and distribution of products and services resulting from human creativity. The European cultural and creative industries (CCI) represent a significant set of industries. Social, cultural and technological changes have helped fuel our thirst and demand for cultural products, new forms of entertainment, distraction, and inspiration creative and cultural industries manufacturing and production activities are the most regionally concentrated, and consumer oriented activities such as retail the least regionally concentrated. In this paper, we consider that the creative and cultural cannot be seen simply as cyclically dependent service functions to the rest of the economy. In Bucharest Ilfov region the cultural and creative industries is a model of economic development.

We shall open this paper with reference to the book “Understanding the Process of Economic Change” by D.C. North being considered ofreference in the issues which are subject to research („there are some fundamental characteristics of successful economic development which arecommon for all the economies but at the same time there is no universal pattern to reach these results”-North). How can poorness be explained inmost of the states of the world where the sources for economic growth are known? The human failure and the institutional framework have a specialcontribution in finding solutions in order to obtain economic growth and implicitly the growth of economic development. The article makesreferences to the institutional framework and its importance for the economic development of a country, to the educational organizations and to theircontribution to the economic development. Viewed from a reactive factor of development, the education has become proactive. This is because theperspective of education has been accentuating more and more, called in to prepare the people for types of societies which have not existed yet. Thegap within the field of education has a fundamental character in maintaining and emphasizing the gaps between the social – economic developmentof different countries.