Policy recommendations on cycling tourism for the countries of the Danube region

EcoVelo Tour Project (Fostering enhanced ecotourism planning along the Eurovelo cycle route network in the Danube region (DTP-055-2.2) aims to develop cycling tourism and ecotourism in connection with the Eurovelo international cycle routes crossing the Danube Region. It exploits synergies of the Eurovelo network, works out and ensures communication opportunities for ecotourism in the region, promotes cultural and natural values through cycling tourism, and strives for preserving biodiversity, landscape elements and air quality while developing ecotourism strategies

Green infrastructure

The published proceedings of the conference "Green Infrastructure: from global to local" comprises selected abstracts in English and Russian. The conference is held at the Marble Palace, St. Petersburg, Russia, and in SLU, Uppsala, Sweden on the 11–15 June 2012, and is an initiative supported by Saint-Petersburg Administration, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Saint-Petersburg State Forest Technical University, FORMAS (Sweden), Baltic Institute (Sweden), and the European Federation of Landscape Architects. The abstracts came through the double blind peer reviewed process organized by the Conference Scientific Committee (Dr. Shelley Egoz (NZ), Dr. Maria Ignatieva (Sweden), Dr. Per Berg (Sweden), Dr. Rolf Johansson (Sweden), Ms Tuula Eriksson (Sweden) and Dr. Diane Menzies (NZ))

Factors Influencing Customer Satisfaction towards E-shopping in Malaysia

Online shopping or e-shopping has changed the world of business and quite a few people have decided to work with these features. What their primary concerns precisely and the responses from the globalisation are the competency of incorporation while doing their businesses. E-shopping has also increased substantially in Malaysia in recent years. The rapid increase in the e-commerce industry in Malaysia has created the demand to emphasize on how to increase customer satisfaction while operating in the e-retailing environment. It is very important that customers are satisfied with the website, or else, they would not return. Therefore, a crucial fact to look into is that companies must ensure that their customers are satisfied with their purchases that are really essential from the ecommerce’s point of view. With is in mind, this study aimed at investigating customer satisfaction towards e-shopping in Malaysia. A total of 400 questionnaires were distributed among students randomly selected from various public and private universities located within Klang valley area. Total 369 questionnaires were returned, out of which 341 questionnaires were found usable for further analysis. Finally, SEM was employed to test the hypotheses. This study found that customer satisfaction towards e-shopping in Malaysia is to a great extent influenced by ease of use, trust, design of the website, online security and e-service quality. Finally, recommendations and future study direction is provided. Keywords: E-shopping, Customer satisfaction, Trust, Online security, E-service quality, Malaysia

For the sake of development? Municipal government and local development in Emilia-Romagna and Turin (1945-1975)

This paper (1) examines two areas of Italy, with very different political subcultures and production systems,with the aim of making a comparative analysis of the role of local government policies in stimulating growth processesover the thirty-year post war period.Historians now agree that the policies of Italian local governments were a major factor in the processes ofeconomic growth and the spread of social services. They acted through a highly varied mix of policies, includingregulatory processes (town planning, coordinated local programming, etc.), operations enabling institutions to providethe local environment with specific public goods (industrial estates, business services etc.) as well as redistributionpolicies (i.e. the setting up and spread of local welfare systems and local tax systems).This influential steering role of local administrations, marked in some cases by the gradual inception ofspecific institutional authoritativeness, was not distributed uniformly over the whole of Italy and there were significantasymmetries between areas.A comparative analysis is made of the "Emilia-Romagna model" of local government, controlled by an ItalianCommunist hegemony in a context of small and medium sized firms, and the model of the city of Turin, which was basedon an industrial Ford model because of the presence of the Fiat factory. The two models are compared from theperspective of actors and their different interests. Our aim is to gauge the nature and intensity of the local institutionalactions that accompanied and promoted the processes of development