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The purpose of this research paper is to address the need to finance Romanian education considering the changes that have occurred or are about to take place in this field, both in terms of providers and beneficiaries of educational services, as well as in terms of the content and material basis inherent in the teaching of new content and teaching methods. Highlighting the changes and linking them to the costs they entail, reveals the need to rethink educational policies regarding a new funding model focused on spending targets and expected results. Investment in human capital is identified as economic value for individuals, institutions and society. The effects of these investments produce global economic mechanisms. The human capital theory extends the concept of capital, starting from the education-qualification, skills-earnings relationship. Expenditure on formal education, adult education, education services in various areas that help individuals to get into the labor market is considered an investment in human capital.

This paper analyses the educational self-assessment of Hungarian undergraduate business economics students, focusing primarily on the concept of financial literacy as students predict and evaluate their own performance in written examinations relative to their externally assessed achievement. The main purpose of this study is to explore whether high-achieving students are more accurate in their self-assessment when predicting and evaluating their financial knowledge. In the pre- and post-examination predictions the higher achieving students actually seem to predict and evaluate their examination results more accurately than their lower-achieving fellows. Although we found no substantial differences in self-estimation by gender, females seemed to less likely to overestimate their financial knowledge after taking exams. Our conclusion also allows policy makers to identify potential needs in relation to specific features of financial literacy and provides evidence about which groups of people are in need of supplementary support, not only in higher education but in other contexts as well.

Human capital and sustainable development are related concepts. This paper aims to present a research on human capital sustainability in Romania. The human factor and its influence on development in general and more particularly on sustainable development can be analysed from many points of view. We are referring to the aspects of employment, education and social inclusion. The component of population is being analysed, in the context of new approaches concerning the human capital. Some current challenges for human capital sustainability are presented, related to demographic impact on the labour market. Using data from official statistics, we will expose an overview based on the social component of the sustainable development.

What is economic growth? Although the answer to this question may seems of real simplicity, developing an accurate definition of this concept may constitute a real challenge both from a theoretical but also empirical point of view. This constant debate upon the concept of economic growth as well as indentifying the optimum set of instruments for quantifying it, constituted the starting point of the current article. The concept of economic growth is used nowadays complementary to terms like economic development, economic welfare or economic progress with reference to this complex process that implies macro-scale structures. Moreover indentifying the main factors that generate a significant impact upon the dynamics of the economic growth process, constitute a useful approach taking into consideration the high degree of heterogeneity that characterize the architecture of the economies around the world. If we develop this analysis across the European Union member states this debate became even more challenging due to the high degree of diversity that characterize these economies. Moreover, the Central and Eastern European countries and especially the ones that joined EU in 2004 and 2007 embody a set of particularities that make them extremely different from the rest of the European Union member states, features related to the historical background, economic policies and common efforts to intensify the convergence process with the more developed EU members. This paper studies the impact of two main factors upon the economic growth process namely an endogenous-exogenous factor like the degree of openness and an endogenous factor like the human capital using a complex dynamic panel method. The arguments that were in favour of choosing this two factors are on one hand the multitude of theoretical studies that argued the importance of them in modelling the economic growth process and on the other hand the small number of studies that use panel methods in assessing this impact. The obtained results point towards a positive correlation between degree of openness, human capital and economic growth across Central and Eastern European countries. These results may be used by the responsible authorities as a basis for the development of the future strategies concerning economic growth. The ability of the new member states to adapt to the macroeconomic changes will prove to be vital in the context of the global architecture and will constitute a vital indicator of the economic growth and performance level of these economies.

The complexity of the concept of competitiveness lies in the fact that the term is used in various levels of aggregation, allowing the generation of its different meanings at microeconomic, mezzo-economic and macroeconomic level. This study is focused on the concept of company competitiveness, on the relevant factors in order to analyze and explain the advantage of competitiveness for a company in regard to another, as well as the dimension and intensity which it uses the sponsors’ capital, the organizational capital, the human capital, the innovational capital and the capital represented by the customers portfolio. Secondly, using the questionnaire method as a research method, the objective of this paper is to provide some empirical evidences designed to assess the factors determining the Romanian company competitiveness on the competitive market. By using an initial dataset of 300 companies, which are part of the 14 fields of activity provided in the activity classification of the national economy, Reviewed NACE 2, we have made their classification on size classes, taking into account as classification criteria the number of employees, the annual net turnover and the value of the total assets held, then testing the opinions of the managers from the selected sample concerning the factors determining the competitiveness of the companies they manage. According to the results, the analysis of the sample structure reflects the control of microenterprises followed by the small and medium sized enterprises. The manner of administration and organization and the quality of the employed human factor are influenced by the company dimension and position held on the market. We consider that the managers of the small size companies, as well as the ones from the provided sample, rely on a preponderant intuitive management, they deal the administered businesses based on the spur of the moment inspiration, make decisions subjectively not starting from objective economic criteria, being concerned only with the management of the current problems. Since they aren’t the beneficiaries of a managerial education, they don’t possess the necessary competences to focus on the elaboration of certain strategies by which to provide competitiveness and performance on the long-term. However, the managers’ training and competence influence on the identification and use of the factors which are able to provide the company development.

The paper aims to study, reveal and understand one of the most important production factor, considered by some as being labor, understood nowadays as human capital. It is important to reveal and to demonstrate that the investment into human capital will have results with a very high return on investment, maybe not so seen in the first years to come just after the investment, but for sure as a big result and a cause for economic development. The investment into human capital can be determined by public or private investment. Either the case the result will be in favor of the national economy

This paper investigates the European economic integration within the frame work of the 2000 Lisbon Council with the aim of studying the dynamics affecting the social and economic life of European Countries. Such a descriptive investigation focuses on certain significant variables of the new theories highlighting the importance of technological innovation and human capital. To this end the multivariate statistic technique of Principal Component Analysis has been applied in order to classify Countries with regard to the investigated phenomenon.