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The objective of this paper was aimed at understanding the importance of SMEs in the market economy as the economic engine continues to be the factor that motivates both business and human existence. The yield and quality of the results of a national economy depend largely on the ability to determine the creation and operation of a large number of businesses which provide products and services of quality, cost and reduced prices and quantities and of appropriate requirements domestic and foreign market. The article deals with the content and structure, activities that are specific to SMEs and how they operate in the market, and how these types of companies influence the economy of the European Union and Romania. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Bologna process aims at creating a European Higher Education Area where inter-country mobility of students and staff, as well as workers holding a degree, is facilitated. While several aspects of the process deserve wide public support, others are less consensual. The paper checks the extent of academic staff confidence in the restructuring of higher education currently underway, by looking at its implications in Romania. Based on six open-ended interview questions of 29 faculty members in Romania, the results of our study identify central themes associated with this relevant stakeholder group's perception of benefits and issues/challenges associated with the implementtation process. Most notably the themes of process planning, accreditation, lack of information, and unexpected results emerged as issues/challenges, while mobility, wider choice of programs, improved quality, and international standing were perceived as benefits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Every nation's economic development is directly impacted by volatility in its stock market. In this article we will try to explain the collapse of the Romanian stock market since 2008, and the changes to the current one in the context of the globalized financial markets. Stock market volatility has implications on financial and economic activities in Romania and the dynamics of major stock markets around the world can have ramifications on the Romanian stock market. The linkages among stock markets can be analyzed to determine if there are any common forces driving the long-run movement of stock indexes or returns, or if each individual stock index or return is driven solely by its own fundamentals. In this paper we investigate the co-movement of the Romanian market with major stock markets, with special reference to North America and Europe. The study is hoped to show the linkages of how Romanian stock market react on the international financial arena with differing inflows of information and economic shocks from the international stock markets. The Romanian investors had "imported" the crisis through financial investments, at the time when the economic crisis was not yet felt in the national economy. The Romanian stock market volatility due to world market dynamics has further implications on financial and economic activities in Romania. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In today's global economy, entrepreneurship is an important economic growth engine for the European Union. Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are the backbone of Europe's economy, providing 85% of all new jobs. The European Commission aims to promote entrepreneurship and improve the business environment for SMEs, to allow them to realise their full potential in today's global economy (EC.2015. COSME). The expansion of SMEs in today's environment is increasingly influenced by the use of digital networks. The present research focuses on the characteristics of digital environment use by SMEs in two EU Member States - Romania and Latvia. Groups of entrepreneurs that produced both goods and services and differed in number of the employed and geographical location were surveyed in each country. The information acquired revealed the technological and economic characteristics of the digitalization process in each country, highlighting both similarities and differences. An analysis of the data gives an opportunity to identify main priorities to enhance SME digitalization processes in the future. The first of them is the accessibility of competent workers in digitization and digitalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The end of the 2007-2013 programming period requires a detailed analysis of the effects that the implementation of European-funded projects has had on the allocation of resources and on the structure of production. Since labour is considered to be a mobile factor of production, interconnected within the structure of production, any intervention that modifies its structure will have long term effects on economic growth. Thus, in the current article, the evolution of the quantitative and qualitative indicators regarding the impact of the Sectorial Operational Programme Human Resource Development will be analysed, the main objective being the assessment of the magnitude of its effects on the structure of the labour market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While migration scholars often neglect the national and transnational relations of production and exchange within which labor migration occurs, international political economists tend to treat labor migration as a mere side effect of transnational capitalism. By contrast, this article considers the constitutive role that post-socialist transformations and the EU integration played in shaping the various patterns of intra-European east–west labor migration since 1989. We argue that labor migration was not driven by development differentials between the west and the east as such, but rather by the particular type of development the latter adopted after the fall of communist regimes and by the way post-socialist countries were integrated in transnational circuits of production and exchange. We are sustaining our claims by a comparative assessment across time of the articulations between the different modes of production and different labor migration patterns during different stages of Romania's post-socialist transformation. This historical comparison enables us to insulate the influence of changing levels of development and modes of production on labor migration because our focus on a single country is keeping the influence of other national institutional factors constant. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this contribution we start from the emerging consensus on the widely disputed phenomenon of social capital. We propose to focus on structural aspects of social capital: formal (contacts within formal organizations) and informal (contacts outside of formal organizations). First, we address methodological questions on the cross-national equivalence of these social capital measurements. Second, we re-visit substantive questions on the patterns of relationships in different European countries. In particular, we inquire to which degree formal and informal social capital can substitute each other, as well as being complementary. We take advantage of recent Eurobaromer data (2004) containing a wide range of valid measurements on both structural aspects of social capital. We find strong evidence for cross-national equivalent measurements regarding formal social capital, employing probabilistic scalogram analyses. For informal social capital, we find strong evidence for configural and metric invariance as well as evidence for partial scalar invariance, employing multi group confirmatory factor analyses. We have to reject the substantive hypothesis on substitution of formal and informal social capital for all countries under consideration, except for Romania. We corroborate the hypothesis on complementarity of formal and informal social capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]