Journal of Security and Sustainability Issues

This paper is focused on the current state of opinions and positions on issues of education and development of commanders within the Lithuanian and Austrian Armed Forces. The contribution presents the results of a questionnaire survey entitled „Analysis of current situation, opinions and attitudes to the issue of education and development of military commanders (managers) of chosen subjects in subordination of the National Defence System of Lithuania“and „Analysis of current situation (opinions, attitudes) of the issue of education and developmet of managers (military leaders) of chosen subjects in subordination of the Austrian Armed Forces“. The selected areas provide a current overview of the opinions and attitudes of the views of awareness and opportunities for consultation, development of managerial skills and leadership managing at the beginning effect on the function, development needs, barriers, educational and development activities attendance and integration of new elements to training. Attention is paid to the methodology of Crew Resouce Management from a civilian and military point of view, its history, focus, aplication, etc. This paper focuses on the use of CRM at United States Navy and Marine Corps, United States Air Force, United States Army, United States Coast Guard and other world´s military services.

Critical Energy Infrastructures can suffer different impacts from accidents and natural disasters which concern the whole energy system and specific functional aspects of Energy Security as well. A negative energy event -i.e. a strategic refinery blockade due to an accident- can provide useful experiences which demonstrate the connection among logistic efficiency, resilience and Energy Security. Spanish refinery Puertollano suffered an accident in year 2003 which stopped oil logistics in a significant part of the country. Military oil refined products logistics in Spain are managed by CLH oil products logistic company -operating in the framework of a Public-Private Partnership and civil-military cooperation model- and then this enterprise facilitated the implementation of a resilience measures aimed to guarantee the operation of oil products logistic chain in the affected area. Management of Puertollano refinery crisis in 2003 showed positive results for ensuring National Energy Security, market and business normal function, system stability and infrastructure re-adjustment. This crisis advanced criteria and lesson learned for Critical Energy Infrastructure Protection and business continuity planning.

Since demographic problems have appeared, the pension system’s transformation has become an extremely relevant issue in terms of dealing with country’s social security problems. Development of medicine and a better quality of life have caused population aging which is particularly noticed in the developed countries. The problem of an aging population has encouraged scientists and practitioners to actively discuss the issue of social security. Particularly, the importance of a changing pension system has become a concern in regards of ensuring the public welfare. Therefore, the article analyses the sustainability of Lithuania II pillar pension funds using multi-criteria methods. The carried out research has enabled the evaluation and comparison of II pillar pension funds and their performance. The use of multi-criteria methods combining a few funds’ actions defining indicators into a whole have helped to evaluate the pension funds. In addition, it has helped to identify the funds’ operational sustainability and to choose the best fund, emphasizing the most important aspects for each member and shaping the weights of multi-criteria methods’ evaluation. It is important to emphasize that the aspect of reward indicator is significant in the asset accumulation in pension funds because the goal of these funds is to accumulate the biggest amount of asset for the future pension in a long period and not just to protect the money from its depreciation. Finally, it is worth mentioning that this type of a research provides a new perspective on the pension funds’ evaluation in the context of other criteria.

The development of human resources is an important condition for ensuring the sustainability of the society and the development of the national economy. Knowledge is becoming more and more one of the basic factors for society sustainability and development. In the 21st century economy, which is based on knowledge, the innovation becomes one of the major factors to increase the competitiveness. It is confirmed by the experience of leading economic systems when investing considerable resources in the society educating. It is especially important for the Baltic States in the context of the creation of the knowledge based society declared in the EU space. Thus one of the basic aims of the Latvian economy policy is to create efficient, competitive and sustainable economy. One of the basic priorities of an up-to-date state development strategy is a modern education and science system as the education level and the development of human capital are the most important indicators that are creating the competitiveness and sustainability of the country. In the article there are considered the global tendencies of the higher education; also the connection of education with innovation and sustainability are analysed. The aim of this study is to focus on sustainable competitiveness concept and provide in-depth understanding of higher education impact on ensuring sustainable competitiveness on national level. In the research there are used primarily quantitative comparative research methods. Quantitative indicators are used to characterize specific features of the higher education impact on economics in the Baltics and Nordics. For the calculations, methodology and definitions the OECD methodology and World Economic Forum, global competitiveness concept is used.

The implementation of external and internal politics of the state cannot be considered without taking into account socially psychological challenges, which constantly are taking place in the social reality of all its residents. A transformation of cognitive, attitude-related, motivational components of psychological space of every person living in the country, in accordance with the cardinal changes of geographical and political determinants, has not been studied well enough. This fact does not allow, from the scientific point of view, reforming the educational, political and emigrational strategies of the state. The individual concepts often derive from the social representations prevailed in the society. Very often it is the only way to receive the information on the required subject. Social representations based on information from mass media, knowledge received from the other people’s experience, including rumours, gossips, beliefs, etc., provide a good ground for the individual concept of the phenomena. Joining the European Union in May 2004 caused an important transformation of social reality and ‘life-space’ of residents of the Baltic States through their reflection of life in the new European Community. It caused a cardinal reconstruction of social representations of a new environment of its residents. The increased mobility of population of the Baltic States, the war in Ukraine, acts of terrorism in some European countries, recently have taken place in this part of the world. All these events have made a big impact on social representations about EU countries. The study on social representations of personal security of EU states among Latvian residents is a part of research-project on Social Representations about EU countries among Latvian residents. The objective of the given research is to shape the content and follow the transformation of social representations of European Union countries in modern Latvian society. One hundred Latvian residents 18-65 years old (Mean = 33.82; SD = 10.70) have participated in the study held in 2015 in addition to 2329 Latvian residents who participated in the study in 2005. The results received in both studies are compared are discussed.

The objective of the research is to define the development of constitutionalism and socio-cultural challenges related to the formation process of the European Union’s legal identity. To achieve this goal, the concept of constitutionalism and its changes during the period of the European Union’s development are examined. Tendencies of the European Union Member States’ constitutionalism process are analysed and socio-cultural tensions of the formation of the contemporary European Union’s legal identity, which arise between security and freedom, order and justice and government and society are identified. The article states that the sustainability of public democratic processes and the functioning of the European Union is possible only if the constitutional values are protected. The reseach also reveals that the further evolution of European constitutionalism and legal identity still needs to enhance the development of the rules which could influence the creation and activities of the independent, self-governing EU’s political community.

Sustainability project is an important part of project management and depends on many factors, such as financial resources, human resources, scheduling operations and especially potential risks. This paper presents a way to work with uncertain information processing project risk analysis with regard to its sustainability. Risk management is an important part of various disciplines, e.g. Project management, Crisis management, Change management, Information Security Management System, etc. Risk analysis is mostly based on expert estimates. However, this may be a problem with brand new tasks as identification of different threats and their numerical evaluations can be interpreted as a decision-making task which can be formalised as a decision tree. A decision-making task solution requires knowledge of all relevant input information items (III), such as probabilities, penalties and profits. If all those numerical values are known then the well-known methods of decision trees evaluations can be used. However, if complex project management problems are solved then a substantial set of relevant data items is missing or its accuracies are prohibitively low. The aim of this paper is to present easy approach how missing elements of the III set can be obtained and integrated into incomplete data sets. The paper contributes a common sense heuristics to obtain missing elements of the III set which can generate all numerical values, i.e. a problem under complete ignorance is solve, and a reconciliation mechanism based on linear programming which allows results of common sense heuristics simply integrate into incomplete data set, i.e. a problem under partial ignorance is solved. The results are therefore divided into two parts. In the first part solves a problem under total ignorance. The second part of the case study evaluates some unknown probabilities, therefore solves a problem under partial ignorance. Both tasks, i.e. partial and total ignorance are demonstrated using a quasi-realistic decision tree. The decision tree has one root node, 6 lotteries and 15 terminals; the total number of unknown probabilities is 21 under total ignorance and 18 probabilities are evaluated under partial ignorance.

Understanding of the tax burden in public finance is probably an important issue for the each country’s growth. It affects the public sector and the development of the country’s and individual citizens’ lives. Therefore a significant focus on the general development of the public finance studies is obviously increasing. Moreover that process is organized in connection with the relevant higher education and research programs. On the other hand the finance management education are treated differently in different countries. In some countries, social scientists are still debating whether the public finance management can be seen as an important educational and scientific branch of study. That is becoming increasingly important provision that such a discussion does not directly benefit the common development of financial education in recent years. One of the possible ways to deal with personal finances in different economic conditions could be changing attitudes to finance knowledge among students in universities. The young people could be supported by financial education programs that are clearly incorporated into their underground or postgraduate courses. The correct management of these programs helps to improve student and cadets learning experience and the economic well-being. Moreover the learning based on the public administration and the public finance probably educate patriots of the country and people intolerant to non-transparent activities of public servants. Eventually the best ways to determine the country consolidated tax paid by natural and legal persons could be the tax burden rate. Besides the financial data supplied to the main European Statistics Authority – the Eurostat – by the national statistical institutions sometimes can be not very correct. Therefore even more important could be an issue that an ordinary country’s citizen who is living only from the income related to the labour relations (or corresponding relations of income) obviously has the much higher tax burden. Then we have an increase of the direct taxes burden by almost twice versus the official country’s tax burden. However the additional tax burden includes hidden taxes related to the aggregated spending of an employee’s income inside the EU. In that case the tax burden for an average employee could approach up to the two-thirds of the total (work-related) income. Then “the freedom from the taxes day” can be relocated to the second half of the year for the ordinary worker. This perception of the tax burden can encourage each citizen of the country to be responsible for the all public servant activities and for budget planning processes.

The aim of this article is to examine the selected attributes of commercial banks security in relation to customer satisfaction. We focused on electronic banking products as these represent a significant segment of today’s bank activities. We compared the opinions of different social groups (men and women, university educated respondents and the others, respondents under the age of 35 and the elders). Our empirical research in the banking sector of Slovakia showed that only 71.96% of the respondents think their bank takes proper care over their money. Electronic forms of banking are used by more than 90% of the respondents, particularly by university educated ones. The trust in security of electronic payments was found to be at quite a low level of 78.19%. At the same time, 12.77% of the respondents declared they had been a target for hackers, men being a more frequent target.

In the coming decade, implementation of smart specialisation strategy concept will be topical for all EU member states given a special focus made on the areas of technology and innovation. Members of academic community conduct research in these areas to identify the challenges and offer optimal solutions to the complicated problems. It is of particular importance for the countries with a relatively modest capacity for innovation. Some of the aims of the Latvian smart specialisation strategy are to establish a platform for cooperation between research community and the private sector and to develop nanostructured materials industry. The paper analyses research results in the field of nanotechnology in Latvia using the data on the publications and projects, as well as publication citation indices. Publicly available information on performance results of the selected enterprises in the field of nanotechnology is analysed and benchmarked using public data on performance indicators of the manufacturing industry with regard to technological intensity.