Generolo Jono Žemaičio Lietuvos karo akademija

The role of inland navigation in the global logistics system is gaining significance. This process is stimulated by policies implemented by major economies and international organizations such as the European Union. The objective is to achieve sustainability in transportation by exploring alternatives to conventional infrastructure. These initiatives also extend to tourism and recreation associated with inland navigation. This article presents the results of an analysis related to the location of a tourist river port, considering optimized benefits and developmental opportunities. An interesting location meeting these criteria, as well as possessing scenic, cultural, ecological, and environmental values, is Gorzów Wielkopolski. In the second part of the article, the authors propose a concept for a sustainable energy system that meets the requirements of port operations and customer demands in an era of rapidly advancing technology and increased emphasis on environmental protection.

The paper presents a calculation technique and projections on the indices of social efficiency of sustainable land management. The relevance of this study is determined by the authors’ technique measuring social, economic and environmental efficiency parity, and its implementation prospects in the context of more sustainable land management in Ukraine as a country that has tremendous potential for its use with a potential worldwide impact on food markets. The paper is aimed at presenting the technique of projecting social efficiency of land management in the context of sustainable development. Projections about the integral efficiency of land management are made according to the developed criteria (productivity, motivation, consistency) using the map of projected effects using conventional and relative, as well as absolute input parameters. This enables improved information support during the formation of national sustainable development strategy of land relations development. The authors substantiate the methodological approaches to planning parameters of land use in dynamics, which are based on determining the impact, including social one, and evaluation of social efficiency of sustainable land management, which allow diagnostics at meso- and macroeconomic scale and can also become tools for scenario modeling.

This paper argues that social enterprises (SE) in EU Member States share at least following common features: the dominance of a social or societal objective over market goal, an apparent social responsibility, particularly in the field of profit distribution. However, numeric limits for the criteria of SE identification remain ‘unclear’: in the majority of cases there are no comprehensible requirements regarding the employment of vulnerable groups and the reinvestment of profits into social projects. Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Finland, Italy, Lithuania, and Slovakia advocate accuracy and precision in dealing with the terminology surrounding SE regulatory and legal acts to the greatest extent. Being a significant facilitator of sustainable development, SE growth has a close relationship with certain macroeconomic factors. Our correlation and regression analysis clearly proves that there are certain factors of financial and social environment which have the greatest impact on the increase of the number of SE per 10,000 population, namely: Monetary Freedom, Income Distribution and Helping a Stranger. The first two factors show the impact of government regulation quality in business relation, including the links between employers and employees. The latter factor demonstrates an average social perception of so-called ‘inclusion ideas’ in different societies.

For establishing the best monetary policy it is essential to know if in practice monetary variables determine gross domestic product (GDP) in constant prices. Price stability contributes to the formation of stable environment for the development of commercially sustainable activities and expresses the responsibility of central banks for sustainable industrial development. It contributes to maximizing the GDP, employment, stable interest rates and sustainable economic development which have consequences for households’ welfare as well as enterprises’ value maximization. For a set of more monetary variables, we identified that in Romania money aggregates M2 and M3 as well as internal credit were strongly correlated with GDP over the time period 1995:Q1-2015:Q4, while in Slovakia only M2 and M3 were strongly correlated with GDP in the same time period. Contrary to expectations, according to a Bayesian linear regression, the internal credit changes had a negative impact on economic growth on the overall period. This conclusion is consistent with other empirical studies. This paper’s analysis discovered that the aforementioned negative correlation is due to the crisis period, because the regime-switching Bayesian model indicated that only in times of economic contraction changes in internal credit negatively affected economic growth.

Security and competitiveness are two very important aspects of the economic and political development of every country. In the 21st century, one of the key drivers of most economies in countries throughout the world is energy. Different countries adopt different measures so as to ensure their security and competitiveness through the effective energy policies that make traditional and renewable resources adequately available hence eliminating the possibilities of shortages. Our paper takes up the case study of Germany as one of the wealthiest and most developed economies in the European Union which also occupies the first positions in the charts of energy uptake and consumption. German policy-makers realize its vulnerability when it comes to energy security and attempt to diversify its energy competitiveness using the renewable sources of energy (for instance via the adoption of the Erneuerbare-Energien-Gesetz or the “Renewable Energy Act” (EEG)). We analyze the issues of energy security and competitiveness of a country using an example of Germany. Moreover, we describe what challenges the renewable energy sources (RES) might bring into the conventional game and how this might influence the competitiveness and security.

Agriculture constitutes a very important sector in the Slovak economy that generates in addition to the basic food production also services, provides jobs, has a significant impact on regional development and provides nutrition of the population. One of decisive factors influencing the economic stability of agriculture is production efficiency which is strongly linked to support policy, through which partially is ensured the financial availability of enterprises. The use of subsidies by the EU is very important tool for ensuring economic sustainability of agriculture in the Slovak Republic conditions. The aim of this paper is economic evaluation of primary agricultural production in manufacturing and economic conditions in the Slovak Republic and their alternative comparison with selected EU Member States. The paper also refers to differences in level of subsidies in selected countries in the EU and their impact on possibilities of investing funds into the production development. Our calculations showed that without the intervention of the Common Agricultural Policy of the EU (especially subsidy policy) would be Slovak agriculture economically unprofitable, what could lead to its failure.

Our paper tackles the issue of the European energy security and economic growth. Specifically, it evaluates the relationship between natural gas consumption and economic growth in the European Union (EU). Channels along which natural gas is supplied to the EU energy markets yield dependence from the Russian Federation which presents a threat to the European energy security. Our sample includes panel time series data over the period from 1997 to 2011 for a 26 EU countries. Based on neoclassical growth model, we create a multivariate model including gross fixed capital formation and total labor forces of a country as additional explanatory variables. Using panel cointegration tests, we found that there exists a long-run relationship between economic growth, natural gas consumption, labor and capital. In the short-run there is bidirectional causality between natural gas consumption and economic growth. The causality running from economic growth to natural gas consumption is positive. On the other hand, the causality, which runs from natural gas consumption to economic growth, is negative.