Journal of Security and Sustainability Issues

The author presents a new European security environment after the “Cold War”, including not only the challenges and threats to the international security but also the essential conditions and problems of the European security evolution at the beginning of the 21st century. He shows the dynamic and constant changes taking place within the international environment and those related to the progress of civilization. Moreover, he stresses that current policy and security measures are not capable of effective action against having to appear before the new challenges and threats. Then the problem of unity and identity in the transatlantic relationship is taken. According to the author, in complicating sphere of the international conditions the role of multilateral institutions effectiveness in the international cooperation increases. Due to the increasing importance of interdependence and internationalization, European security challenges are European-wide and even transatlantic. Addressing them requires the preservation of unity that will be possible by strengthening common identity based on shared values and common interests.

The internationalization practice of the financial institutions has been intensively studied since the 1960s. Due to the increase in international capital flows, foreign direct investments and international trade at that time active development of international or cross-border banking began. At the moment the world is undergoing a very complex process with a high uncertainty in the global banking and financial markets. This article focuses on the banking sector development and some aspects of management of commercial banks in Lithuania and other two Baltic countries. The main subject of the paper is to comparatively analyze the inwards and outwards development in the international banking. The main stress is oriented to aggregated credit enlargements in the Baltic States during the period of the first decade in the 21st century. Commercial banks during the last global economic crisis have been looking for a possible optimization of activities and consequent changes in their networks could be an option for its development assessment. However, the priority could be to identify the cross-border international credit expansion in the Baltic countries. On the other hand, these activities are relied to the countries’ macroeconomic indicators and mainly to the accumulated money supply. There is a scientific self-determination described in this paper in line with the analysis identifying the particular Baltic countries in the dynamics of accumulated deposits and credits of international banks. Subsequently it increased the growth of money supply. Nowadays banks are required to make sensible strategic decisions in order to keep sustainable banking businesses in the future. However, influences of the financial institutions to the global economical recession affect international banks creating negative feedback to their previous problems.

The scientific discussions in existing literature focusing on sustainable development are vast. The broad focus of sustainable development has raised the need to develop indicators which allow measuring the progress towards sustainability and evaluating policies intended to support sustainability. This research aims to analyse and determine the relationship between the Human Development Index (HDI) and some of the sustainable development indicators partly comprised in the Sustainable Society Index (SS1). Using data for the period of 2001-2010 from selected eleven EU countries, the goal of this paper to shed some light on the main shortages of the HDI as a measure of sustainable development. The findings of this research show that in most cases the HDI ignores sustainable development indicators, making it a partly fit measure and that there are no cases where the HDI can be described as an absolutely correct measure of sustainable development.

While labour market research is not a new phenomenon, interest in it is growing. Literature frequently discusses changes in the market as separate disciplines, isolated from each other. On the other hand, it can be found that more and more scientists understand and choose interdisciplinary research as a powerful tool for understanding, critique, explanation and change. But some of these approaches have difficulty accounting for change and the co- existence of similarity and diversity, as well as being ‘gender blind’.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how learning in collaboration can support the development of sustainability competence in the military. The concept of sustainability in the military is controversial; nevertheless, requirements for more conscious decisions regarding economics, environment and society issues enter military practice and require rethinking the processes of military education and development. The application of computer-supported collaborative learning brings new opportunities in overcoming controversy of sustainability in the military and at the same time puts forward the solutions and skills for implementations of sustainability in the military.

International migration has become a key challenge and concern in the European Union (EU) and most part of the word. On the one hand, the freedom to move to another Member State is the right guaranteed for all the EU citizens. On the other hand, emigration or immigration is a longstanding concern for policy makers in many countries. Generally, human capital is one of the future sustainable competitiveness resources. Moreover, now, as the Lisbon Strategy is being replaced by the new EU strategy Europe 2020 for smart, sustainable and inclusive growth (2010), there is evidence that mobility in the EU will increase. In order to achieve the goals of the strategy Europe 2020 (2010), especially employment target, the flagship initiative “Youth on the Move” places a lot of emphasis on mobility as in moving to another country to study, train or work. The perceptions of this research show that growing mobility can be followed with new migration trends in the future. Moreover, no single answer to the question what level of migration (emigration or immigration) should be tolerated in the context of sustainable developing economy could be provided. This research not only confirms this observation and theoretical problem of “sustainable migration” but goes much further by discussing the reasons why one of the highest emigration rates in the EU happened to be found in Lithuania.

Technical and fundamental analyses are the two investment making decisions widely spread all around the world. The financial crisis of 2008-2009 had a negative impact on the decisions of the Lithuanian investors to choose stock as the best investment option. However, national economics is cyclical and after recession recovery follows. Production volumes are anticipated to increase seeing that analysts forecast further GDP growth. Due to this reason, additional funding for the successful performance of enterprises will be required. Therefore, financial resources must be attracted by issuing new volumes of stocks. On the other hand, the successful performance of an issuer has a positive influence on the stock price in the market which is the subject of forecast made by the investors of Lithuania. Positive changes of stock prices in the market are partially influenced by the expectations of investors that stock prices will grow rapidly in the future. However, this feature is not known and can only be forecasted using different econometric models. At the theoretical level scientists disagree about the effectiveness of the methods used by the Lithuanian investors. Recently technical and fundamental analyses became popular among investors, though there is not much research done in order to test the effectiveness of the applicability of these methods in the Lithuanian stock market. With reference to the above mentioned information, this research is aimed to determine whether it is possible to forecast stock prices by estimating the financial ratios of a particular company. Due to this reason, a link between the return of a stock price and the financial ratios of the selected companies will be evaluated using correlation and covariance as the main analytical tools. Appropriate conclusions and suggestions are provided after obtaining reliable empirical results.