Sustainable Economic Development

This book is a pivotal publication that addresses the contemporary challenges of globalization and elaborate policy responses to environmental pollution, climate change, economic disruptions, poverty, hunger, and other threats to sustainable economic development. Many parts of the world, territories, and societies are now changing at an unprecedented pace in ways that fundamentally affect the markets, people, the environment, and biodiversity. Such changes are primarily driven by rapid social and economic developments, economic disparities between countries, the internationalization of production and value chains, and industrialization. Increasingly frequently, business interests are interfering with sustainable development goals. The issue is how to converge the economic benefits with the urgent need for establishing resilient production chains, social networks, sustainably-operating markets, and environmental protection. This publication highlights the need for the balanced economic development and comprehensive coverage of many sustainability–business areas. Economic, production, financial, and social factors of sustainability are discussed by over 90 contributors representing 40 universities and research institutions from seven countries. Their findings are translated into workable approaches and policies for the benefit of the global economy, people, and the environment

Economic Complexity and Human Development

This book combines the human development approach and innovation economics in order to explore the effects that structural economic change has on human development. The author discusses how innovation, social networks, economic dynamics and human development are interlinked, and provides several practical examples of social and micro-entrepreneurship in contexts as diverse as Peruvian rural villages and Brazil's urban area

Tradition and Innovation in Construction Project Management

This book is a reprint of the Special Issue 'Tradition and Innovation in Construction Project Management' that was published in the journal Buildings

Management, Technology and Learning for Individuals, Organisations and Society in Turbulent Environments

This book presents the collection of fifty papers which were presented in the Second International Conference on BUSINESS SUSTAINABILITY 2011 - Management, Technology and Learning for Individuals, Organisations and Society in Turbulent Environments , held in Póvoa de Varzim, Portugal, from 22ndto 24thof June, 2011.The main motive of the meeting was growing awareness of the importance of the sustainability issue. This importance had emerged from the growing uncertainty of the market behaviour that leads to the characterization of the market, i.e. environment, as turbulent. Actually, the characterization of the environment as uncertain and turbulent reflects the fact that the traditional technocratic and/or socio-technical approaches cannot effectively and efficiently lead with the present situation. In other words, the rise of the sustainability issue means the quest for new instruments to deal with uncertainty and/or turbulence. The sustainability issue has a complex nature and solutions are sought in a wide range of domains and instruments to achieve and manage it. The domains range from environmental sustainability (referring to natural environment) through organisational and business sustainability towards social sustainability. Concerning the instruments for sustainability, they range from traditional engineering and management methodologies towards “soft” instruments such as knowledge, learning, and creativity. The papers in this book address virtually whole sustainability problems space in a greater or lesser extent. However, although the uncertainty and/or turbulence, or in other words the dynamic properties, come from coupling of management, technology, learning, individuals, organisations and society, meaning that everything is at the same time effect and cause, we wanted to put the emphasis on business with the intention to address primarily companies and their businesses. Due to this reason, the main title of the book is “Business Sustainability 2.0” but with the approach of coupling Management, Technology and Learning for individuals, organisations and society in Turbulent Environments. Also, the notation“2.0” is to promote the publication as a step further from our previous publication – “Business Sustainability I” – as would be for a new version of software. Concerning the Second International Conference on BUSINESS SUSTAINABILITY, its particularity was that it had served primarily as a learning environment in which the papers published in this book were the ground for further individual and collective growth in understanding and perception of sustainability and capacity for building new instruments for business sustainability. In that respect, the methodology of the conference work was basically dialogical, meaning promoting dialog on the papers, but also including formal paper presentations. In this way, the conference presented a rich space for satisfying different authors’ and participants’ needs. Additionally, promoting the widest and global learning environment and participation, in accordance with the Conference's assumed mission to promote Proactive Generative Collaborative Learning, the Conference Organisation shares/puts open to the community the papers presented in this book, as well as the papers presented on the previous Conference(s). These papers can be accessed from the conference webpage (http://labve.dps.uminho.pt/bs11). In these terms, this book could also be understood as a complementary instrument to the Conference authors’ and participants’, but also to the wider readerships’ interested in the sustainability issues. The book brought together 107 authors from 11 countries, namely from Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Serbia, Switzerland, and United States of America. The authors “ranged” from senior and renowned scientists to young researchers providing a rich and learning environment. At the end, the editors hope, and would like, that this book to be useful, meeting the expectation of the authors and wider readership and serving for enhancing the individual and collective learning, and to incentive further scientific development and creation of new papers. Also, the editors would use this opportunity to announce the intention to continue with new editions of the conference and subsequent editions of accompanying books on the subject of BUSINESS SUSTAINABILITY, the third of which is planned for year 2013.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Complexity in Economic and Social Systems

There is no term that better describes the essential features of human society than complexity. On various levels, from the decision-making processes of individuals, through to the interactions between individuals leading to the spontaneous formation of groups and social hierarchies, up to the collective, herding processes that reshape whole societies, all these features share the property of irreducibility, i.e., they require a holistic, multi-level approach formed by researchers from different disciplines. This Special Issue aims to collect research studies that, by exploiting the latest advances in physics, economics, complex networks, and data science, make a step towards understanding these economic and social systems. The majority of submissions are devoted to financial market analysis and modeling, including the stock and cryptocurrency markets in the COVID-19 pandemic, systemic risk quantification and control, wealth condensation, the innovation-related performance of companies, and more. Looking more at societies, there are papers that deal with regional development, land speculation, and the-fake news-fighting strategies, the issues which are of central interest in contemporary society. On top of this, one of the contributions proposes a new, improved complexity measure

CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY IN ROMANIA

The purpose of this paper is to identify the main opportunities and limitations of corporate social responsibility (CSR). The survey was defined with the aim to involve the highest possible number of relevant CSR topics and give the issue a more wholesome perspective. It provides a basis for further comprehension and deeper analyses of specific CSR areas. The conditions determining the success of CSR in Romania have been defined in the paper on the basis of the previously cumulative knowledge as well as the results of various researches. This paper provides knowledge which may be useful in the programs promoting CSR.Corporate social responsibility, Supportive policies, Romania

Industry and knowledge clusters : principles, practices, policy

http://www.ester.ee/record=b1758117*es

The Legal, Administrative and Managing Framework for Spatial Policy, Planning and Land-Use. Interdependence, Barriers and Directions of Change

The book aims to explore the legal and administrative aspects of spatial governance and the challenges that their interaction entails. It does this through a number of chapters focusing on case studies located in different geographical areas of Europe and beyond. By doing this, the editors shed light on a set of challenges that emerge around the world at the intersection between the legal and administrative spheres during the governance and planning of territorial phenomena. The issues addressed in the various chapters highlight how spatial planning activities continue to face serious challenges that have not yet been satisfactorily addressed. In more detail, a correlation emerges between the legal regulations that allow and shape spatial-planning activities and the socio-economic and territorial challenges that those activities should tackle. This is often a consequence of the path-dependent influence of the traditional administrative and spatial planning configuration, which presents an inertial resistance to change that is hard to overcome. A similar situation arises concerning the mismatch between the boundaries of the existing administrative units and the extent of territorial phenomena, with a system of judicial–territorial administration that does not always coincide with the boundaries of the fundamental administrative division of a country, leading to an overall deterioration of the conditions in which all actors involved in spatial development operate

Transitioning to a circular economy

We are living on a finite planet. Mankind is overstepping planetary boundaries, however. In 2021, worldwide consumption has exceeded the yearly bio-capacity of the Earth (what we call the overshoot day) on the 29th of July. For industrialised countries, the situation is far worse: In 2022, Belgium reached that overshoot day on the 26th of March. In the face of these urgent challenges of sustainable resource use, there is wide agreement on the need for a transition, a fundamental societal shift, towards, amongst others, a circular economy (CE), the focus of this book. The book speaks deliberately of transitioning. This marks our focus on transition processes and activities. Discussions of ‘the transition’ easily get stuck in abstract visions, remote future goals and ideological statements about the desired world of tomorrow. By contrast, much more attention needs to be paid to concrete transformation processes that could lead towards these projected futures. Transition how? Where to? By whom? We highlight that companies are key actors in CE transitioning. This edited volume presents key outcomes from the “Transitioning Belgian companies into circularity” research chair, established by Belgian Employers’ Federation FEB/VBO. Whilst focusing on the role of companies, we show how the private sector cannot bring about such societal transformations single-handedly. We consider companies as embedded transition agents, i.e. as actors that operate as parts of broader business ecosystems

Technology and the dynamics of specialization in open economies.

Internationale Arbeitsteilung; Neue Wachstumstheorie; Offene Volkswirtschaft; Innovation; Hysteresis; Industriepolitik; Theorie;