Upward Mobility Criteria from Croatian Women's Point of View

Little is generally known about the factors affecting the career advancement of women in the world of work. This is especially true for Croatia. Formally and legally, women should have equal opportunities for employment and advancement as their male counterparts have. However, in practice, situations are often different due to socio-cultural, support systems, self imposed barriers and the like. This paper examines factors facilitating and hindering career advancement from the Croatian women’s point of view. Differences between female managers and workers related to the career advancement criteria, which give them an edge in today’s global workplace, are discussed as well. While the top female managers pointed out the personnel competence and soft factors as the most important in climbing the managerial ladder, the other working women did not assign the greatest importance to these factors. This can be explained in the social-cultural context that has been developing in Croatia. Unfavorable consequences of the transition process, the war as well as a decrease in trust in the most of institutions in Croatia jeopardized social and working norms making the personnel competence, self-initiative, pro-activity, responsibility and the similar characteristics without consequentreward in terms of better and higher job positions. But, many Croatian firms faced with global competition and necessity of following transparent business behavior norms have been forced to conduct a proper career advancement policy. Consequently, women employed in such firms stressed above mentioned factors as the most important for career advancement.career advancement, working women, female managers, factory analysis

Enhancing Regional Competitiveness Through the Entrepreneurship Development

Although there is no generally accepted theory of regional competitiveness, competitiveness (regional or urban) has become very popular subject of interest among scholars, business and policy authorities, where the latter are especially interesting in formulating regional policy aimed at boosting it (from the both demand and supply side). The main purpose of this paper is to discuss issues associated with the interpretation of regional competitiveness under the framework of achieving regional and national sustained economic growth and of contemporary findings in entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship, briefly considered in this paper, may be the driving force that enables the transformation of regional resources into regional and national competitiveness, added value, economic growth and development. The paper also focuses on the City of Osijek. It is the largest city of the Croatia's region named the Central and East Croatia. The region is positioned below the Croatian average and it is lagging behind. Lessons considering the early-stage process of entrepreneurship development in the City of Osijek and the role of policy authorities are discussed as well.economic growth and development, regional competitiveness, regions lagging behind, entrepreneurship development, Croatia, City of Osijek

Do stringent environmental and business regulations, and uncertainty matter for foreign direct investment inflows? Evidence from G7 and BRICS economies

This paper empirically evaluates the impact of environment stringency policy, business regulations, policy and economic uncertainty, and real GDP per capita on foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows by employing the autoregressive distributed lag approach and using data from 2000 to 2015. Specifically, we focus on two groups of countries with different economic development, the Group of Seven (G7) and the BRICS countries, and the composite indices of business and environmental regulations and policyinduced uncertainty, along with real gross domestic capital (GDP) per capita, were selected to reflect the multidimensionality of the settings in the selected countries. Our results indicate that only the effect of real GDP per capita turned out to be homogenous and statistically significant across different income groups and time horizons. Findings also show that more friendly business regulations significantly encourage FDI inflows in the long run, but there is a bottom line. When regulations are already at a low level, as is the case with G7 countries, further liberalization would adversely affect FDI inflows. Furthermore, more stringent environmental regulations have a marginally adverse effect on FDI inflows only in the long run. At the same time, they weakly support the pollution haven hypothesis. The impact of policy-induced uncertainty on investment is adverse but largely nonsignificant in the short run. It appears that cross-border investments follow a pattern of the safe-haven effect to avoid uncertainty in the long run

Technical Efficiency and Productivity Change in the European Union with Undesirable Output Considered

Global competition and climate change are changing the nature of economic activity and impose the urgent need to have environmentally sensitive productivity growth. The paper addresses both desirable and undesirable output to assess technical efficiency and productivity changes, as well as evaluate the importance of an energy input in the production function and productivity change differentials in the European Union (EU) over the period 2000–2018. To that end, it uses output-oriented data envelopment analysis and Malmquist productivity analysis. The results reveal that the EU is facing significant challenges due to a decreasing trend in technical efficiency and slow productivity growth. The absence of major improvements in human resource performance has reduced the benefits of technological innovations which are the main source of productivity growth. Additionally, the results show that energy use did not critically influence efficiency and productivity

Efficiency of Energy Taxes and the Validity of the Residential Electricity Environmental Kuznets Curve in the European Union

To achieve the energy targets, energy policy of the European Union (EU) is trying to discourage residential electricity consumption employing different measures but without worsening the quality of life and jeopardizing its economic growth and development at the same time. This paper aims to directly and indirectly explore the effects of energy taxes on household electricity consumption and test the validity of the household electricity environmental Kuznets curve (EEKC) in a multivariate setting and a system generalized method of moments framework for EU member countries in the period 2005–2016. The results reveal that energy taxes influence electricity consumption more efficiently through energy prices than directly and in the long-run. Efficiency of energy taxes can be reinforced by combining changes in energy prices and policy measures that change the electricity consumption behavior patterns. As for the EEKC, the paper corroborates its inverted U-shaped form, assuming thereby at least the same level of policy efforts directed to accomplish the energy targets and household willingness to use goods in an environmentally friendly way

Analysing the Pattern of Productivity Change in the European Energy Industry

For an industry to succeed in a competitive market, it should continuously take care of not only its stakeholders but also its technical efficiency and productivity. In this paper, data envelopment analysis was combined with Malmquist productivity analysis to investigate the pattern of multifactor productivity changes in the European energy industry over the period from 2005–2016. The results showed that the whole industry was technically inefficient and had large potential for improvement. A slight average increase in productivity that was observed over the studied period proved to be sensitive to the financial and economic situation and equally sensitive to technological and efficiency advances. As for efficiency gains, they reflected the nature of the energy industry, implying that they were due to scale efficiencies rather than human resource improvements. Although technological innovation and the optimal scale of production increased productivity, the slow pace at which this occurred and the negative outlook highlighted by the observed trends call for more serious consideration of the future productivity deployment of the European energy industry, particularly in the context of its decarbonisation, diversification, and modernisation