Since the mid-1990s, enterprise resource plannig (ERP) information systems have been installed in thousands of companies worldwide. A growing number of studies and research papers show that information systems have a significant role in the sustainable economic development assuring economic competitiveness. Modern enterprise performance management shares a strong strategic and sustainable orientation of management focused on further strategic growth and business development with parallel use of information and all highly sophisticated knowledge resulting from modern enterprise information technology. The paper focuses on research findings related to information processes and their impact on overall entrepreneurship performance. The most important results show that the companies from the selected industrial segments in Slovakia have a strong focus on the application of innovation procedures and specific business information systems. The results bring the findings that business intelligence (BI) is based on information and knowledge with a high added value has a positive long-term and sustainable effect on the overall entrepreneurship performance. By application of selected management tools such as ERP, BI information systems and others, it can be achieved a higher entrepreneurship performance of industry companies in Slovakia and EU. We believe that our study presented in this paper contributes to explore a new dimension to the existing view on business information systems in industrial companies. More detailed research results are presented in this paper.
In foreign studies Latvia is positioned as a “depressive” region in the year 2030, which will have an insufficient population of young people. Thus, Latvia as a country with a business-friendly environment will not be able to be competitive in relation to other European countries and the flow of investment will be at risk, as well as passed on other, more competitive and better developed regions in demographic terms. Therefore, it is pertinent to analyse the trends in youth employment in Latvia and to work on Latvia’s economic development. There is necessity to promote human involvement in the labour market and to reduce their departure to foreign countries. It is important to draw attention to these challenges and to find answers to the questions: Which of the youth employment-promoting scenarios can be realised in Latvia’s regions in the near future? Which of the scenarios is the most appropriate for the development of Latvia’s regions? Which of the scenarios are more focused on the interests of all parties involved? Which scenario will ensure the country’s economic development? Four possible scenarios for promoting youth employment in Latvia were evaluated by experts. The experts were asked to assess the criteria for each scenario by hierarchy analysis. The most optimal scenario for promoting youth employment in Latvia in the experts’ opinion is the scenario with EU participation. The main idea of the scenario is the effective use of European Union (EU) funding for youth mobility in the labour market organised by the State Employment Agency.
According to the EU Competition Policy Brief on the new state aid rules for a competitive aviation industry issued in February 2014, the regulation for the financial public subsidies of any art on the EU national or regional level for regional airports will be a considerably striker. The strategic aims of these new regulations, among other things, are to motivate and encourage the Member States (here: regional airports) to implement more efficient market stimulation measures, make airports work on cost efficient and profitable basis and establish transition periods for regional airports. In practice it means that public subsidies may be granted only to those regional airports that proved to have a sustainable and realistic business model that shall clearly demonstrate the durable financial stability. The authors took part in two air transportation initiatives in the Baltic Sea Region (BSR) and were lead partner in the EU Project Baltic. AirCargo.Net, which deployed a number of empirical measures in selected regional airports in the BSR. This paper presents success factors of sustainable business development models for the regional airports in the BSR based on cases studied during the project lifetime
In the White Paper on Transport 2011 the European Commission stressed the concept of green transport corridors, i.e. transshipment routes with concentration of freight traffic between major hubs and by relatively long distances of transport marked by reduced environmental and climate impact while increasing safety and efficiency with application of sustainable logistics solutions. Green transport is based on inter-modality, powerful logistics hubs and advanced ICT-systems improving traffic management, increase efficiency and better integrate the logistics components of a corridor. Sustainable hub development along the transshipment routes of green corridors is one of the major tasks of green corridors in order to safeguard and meet the necessary corridor performance for the current and future transport demand. The main corridor hubs represent logistics clusters in the sense of Yossi Sheffi, comprising ports, logistics centers and other transshipment nodes. The paper will present results about the development of core logistics clusters representing hubs in green transport corridors and it will indicate actions for hub development with a future-oriented compilation of sustainable development measures of infrastructural, legal or organizational nature. Since the author took part in some important green transport corridor initiatives around the Baltic Sea, including “East-West Transport Corridor (EWTC II)” initiative, representing the first European project which delivered a green corridor manual formulating recommendations and requirements of green transport corridors to European level, some case studies from EWTC project will be discussed.
Issues of sustainable development and socially responsible business currently have been discussed a lot. Nevertheless there are no many evidences about causal relationships between social responsibility and profit. But it appears that companies begin to have strong stimuli to pursue social responsibility as a driver of value added in monetary terms. In this context, cause - related marketing obtains higher importance and can be employed for directing activities of profit seeking companies towards socially responsible activity. The presented paper is devoted to analyze Cause-Related Marketing (CRM). Numerous authors have tried to define Cause-Related Marketing concept to realize its field and to differentiate it from others terms. However, there is still no general agreement about the definition, content and scope of CRM, especially in countries such as Spain, where there is a higher conceptual confusion accentuated by translation errors. In this sense, the main objective of this paper is to review and complete the conceptual framework where the theoretical development of CRM is based.