Suchergebnisse

Recent results of the Digital Economy and Society Index (52, 45%) and the European Index of Digital Entrepreneurship Systems (EIDES) (48%) illustrate an improved level of the digital performance in European Union countries and a significant progress towards unlocking the productivity of digital value co-creation and collaborative networks. It is also agreed that the rapid digitalization of the economy and the digital entrepreneurship approach fosters a transition of traditional business models to networked and integrated digital platform business models. Despite the well-recognized benefits of the digital entrepreneurship and the digital business ecosystem, application of emerging technologies and modern business models also brings inevitable sustainable management challenges. The main negative outcomes are in the disruption or exposure of vulnerabilities within collaborative organizational and social networks, the additional socio-technical pressure for both network supervisors and incumbents, and the asymmetry of digital information and resources, etc. Therefore, the present research provides a critical review on the scientific literature, a reconceptualization within the multi-level side effects, and an overview of the influence of the digital entrepreneurship within the sustainability and digital business ecosystem domains. The present paper delineates the sustainable digital entrepreneurship term and the combined conceptual framework of the digital sustainable value cycle.

This paper deals with the sluggish Europeanisation efforts of the current political elites of Bosnia and Herzegovina. A typical explanation for the lack of progress would be the complex structure of consociational democracy of the specific Bosnian confederation. The authors, however, claim that the structural obstacles could have been bypassed given the real will of political elites of all three nations to cooperate. The authors examine the role of the structure of the peculiar political system in comparison with the influence of the agency of Bosnian elites on the integration process. The empirical analysis focuses on the situation after the general elections in 2018. The authors discuss the contrast between the official declarations of consistent support for a European future with the real political performance of the various Bosnian party elites. These elites often misuse the institutional settings of the political system to block reforms. They also prefer the politics of obstruction to cement their leading positions within their constituent nations. More than a quarter century after the Dayton Peace Treaty and adoption of the Constitution, the lack of genuine intrinsic motivation to pursue Europeanisation has remained the main reason for the reluctant rapprochement of Bosnia to the European Union.

With all key political institutions firmly in Orban's hands, and with the electoral rules basically tilted to Orban's advantage, many observers question whether Orban's regime can be successfully challenged domestically, from within. As a result, the attention has shifted to the European Union and its role in policing the violations of EU basic values, which include democracy and the rule of law. After examining the EU's record in protecting the rule of law and democracy in Hungary, I conclude that EU sanctions are not likely to save democracy in Hungary. In conclusion, I argue that instead of focusing too narrowly on sanctions, the Hungarian opposition should articulate a coherent (politico-economical) alternative to Orban's authoritarian populism. Instead of focusing only on legal or economic sanctions, the EU and member states should look to alternative economic and social policies that would speak directly to the anxieties of populist voters. The good news is that this trend can be reversed— but only if European leaders, together with the Member States, articulate a coherent alternative to the failed neo-liberal economic and social policies of the last two decades. Only an economic policy that promotes growth, better jobs and wages, and social inclusion can stem the nationalist-populist tide.

ABSTRACT: In this work, a technique to generate aspherical liquid crystal lenses with positive and negative optical power is experimentally demonstrated. The main enabling element is a micro-metric electrode with variable spatial size. This produces a decreasing resistance towards the lens centre that generates the desired voltage/phase profiles. Then, the voltage is homogeneously distributed across the active area of the lens by micro-metric concentric electrodes. As it is demonstrated, the phase shift can be controlled with voltages from 0 to 4.5 VRMS. As a result, parabolic profiles are obtained both for negative and positive optical powers. Furthermore, this approach avoids some disadvantages of previous techniques; parabolic profiles can be obtained with only one lithographic step and one or two voltage sources. Other complex aspherical profiles could be fabricated using the same technique, such as elliptical or hyperbolic ones. ; Funding: European Social Fund (NAWA PROM projekt nr POWR.03.03.00-00-PN13/18); Comunidad de Madrid and FEDER Program (S2018/NMT-4326); MCIN/ AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and European Union "Next generation EU"/PTR (PDC2021-121172-C21); MCIN/ AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and FEDER "A way to make Europe" (PID2019-107270RB-C21, PID2019-109072RB-C31, RTC-2017-6321-1).

This paper considers the relationship between the European Union and Asia with the purpose of developing new ideas for multilateral co-operation and building of trust in the area of comprehensive security. Specifically, this paper focuses on cooperation between Europe and Asia in three multilateral institutions: Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), ASEAN Regional Forum and the Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) process. The paper notes that Asia is contested concept and that none of the institutions is universal in its membership. Next, the paper reviews the recent history of Europe-Asia relations and notes that extensive areas of cooperation have already been mapped out. The paper therefore argues that Europe must prioritize immediate and long-term challenges to Asian regionalism and regional security. Six major issues are then highlighted: the ASEAN Charter and community building, Australia's proposal for the creation of an Asia Pacific Community, the situation Myanmar, conflict resolution in regional hot spots, mitigation of the impact of climate change and developing safe nuclear energy. The paper way to address these issues and build trust is through the cluster where individual European and Asian states take the lead on issues of particular concern.

Globally, it is estimated that around 10% of the fish that are caught are discarded. This is considered to be a wasteful human marine activity since these fish are often dead or dying. To reduce the high discard rates of commercial fisheries, the European Union (E.U.) has enacted a landing obligation that includes the ability to exempt "species for which scientific evidence demonstrates high survival rates". Therefore, discard survival studies (henceforth DSSs) have become one of the most politically prioritized fisheries research areas in European fisheries. International expert groups have produced guidance reports to promote best practices and to harmonize the methodologies. Nevertheless, there has not been any focus on how to implement animal welfare (AW) regulations experimentally. Discard survival studies are "frontrunners" in fisheries science research areas that are embedded by animal research welfare requirements and are expected to be more restrictive in the future because of an increased public focus on fish welfare. This paper focuses on AW regulations in relation to conducting DSSs, but the outreach is much broader. We investigate experimental procedures by bringing in relevant examples, using output results, and relating this information to relevant AW guidelines and regulations by focusing on implementing 3R principles.

The nature of the European Union (EU) as a global actor has long been the
subject of academic debate. Proponents of understanding the EU as a
normative, civilian force agree that its greatest transformative power lies
in its enlargement policy, which allows it to shape reforms in countries
that wish to become its members through strong conditioning. It is in this
context that we will analyse the new methodology of accession negotiations,
with the basic premise that it represents a debatable attempt of the EU to
preserve its transformative power in relation to candidate countries despite
the crisis of the enlargement policy and to further strengthen the already
strong mechanisms of conditionality that accompany this process. Two years
have passed since the new methodology was adopted, yet there have been no
significant changes. Meanwhile, the dramatic change in the geopolitical
situation, caused by the outbreak of war in Ukraine in February 2022, has
led to a sudden fall of the new Iron Curtain on the continent, creating
additional controversies regarding the enlargement policy: Will it apply
also to Eastern European countries in the future, and will it become part of
a differentiated integration? Also, the question of whether the EU can act
strategically towards establishing new relations in Europe is being raised
once again.

We analyse the causal effect of grading practices on socioeconomic differences in GPA. While earlier studies have documented the significant role of non-academic student traits such as self-discipline or cultural capital in producing social gradients in GPA, this study is the first to analyse the effect of grading practices on the socioeconomic gradient in grades. We exploit a Swedish educational reform, which changed the compulsory schools grading system from a relative scale to an absolute scale between 1997 and 1998. Under reasonable and largely testable assumptions, the changes between these two years in the association between various socioeconomic background variables and student GPA has a causal interpretation as an effect of the change in grading practice. Results show that changing the grading practice can significantly alter the social gradients in GPA, in this case widening the gap between students of low and high educated parents, while also narrowing the achievement gap between girls and boys. We attribute the increase in social gradient to an interplay between school segregation and frog-pond effects. ; Funding Agencies|European Research Council under the European Union [324233]; Riksbankens Jubileumsfond [M12-0301:1]; Swedish Research Council [445-2013-7681, DNR 340-2013-5460, 2017-02177]

Given the fact that Ukraine declares a European path of development and considers itself a potential member of the European Union, the study mainly examines the relationship between trust and economic growth in Ukraine and other countries of the world, including post-Soviet countries. The hypothesis that general trust has a positive effect on economic growth in general is tested, and a comparative assessment of the level and factors of trust across the regions of Ukraine has been carried out. The results show an historical tradition of mistrust of the state and its institutions particular to Ukraine as the country where the state has been perceived as foreign by most of the population for over 70 years; exceptional weakness and corruption of state administration, even by the standard of third-world countries; availability of influential and consistent stereotypes, partially universal and partly specific to post-communist countries. It causes polarization in society and within certain social groups and governmental institutions. Ukrainian society is characterized by the waste of symbolic capital of confidence in authorities. Meanwhile, there is some symmetry between mistrust of the system and trust in entities created by people to meet their spiritual, social, psychological, and other needs.

The European Green Deal has re-ignited the imperative of green finance that is called to support the European Union transition to a greener economy. Green finance becomes even more opportune in the context of the economic recovery after the COVID-19 pandemic. The aim of the paper is to explore green banking practices in the Romanian banking system. The investigation reveals the efforts of banks to be environmentally friendly and to be involved in financing of some green projects, such as the energy efficient projects. Nevertheless, the green banking products are still in the emerging stage and banks in Romania should develop their role in the field, by diversifying the range of green products and services, improving the expertise to assess green projects or intensifying the marketing initiatives to promote green products. In order to encourage banks in Romania to provide green financing several incentives should be conceived; similar to banks, the borrowers seeking green projects should be rewarded. Some mandatory requirements for banks to be involved in green investments may promote green banking in Romania. An essential condition to achieve the development of green banking in Romania is to increase awareness towards environmentally friendly behaviour at all levels.

In Spain's foreign policy, the relationships with the Spanish-speaking Latin American countries have a special privileged place which dates back to the country's imperial past. Based on a narrative of common language and a shared cultural history and identity with the Latin American people, Spain still aims to maintain its leading role in diplomatic relations, cultural investment, and foreign aid more than any country. Moreover, the ongoing relationships with this region has been one of the key areas of Madrid's foreign policy for its global role expanding from the Iberian Peninsula to the entire world. Since Spain emphasises on the concept of Ibero-American identity in its relations with the Latin America, this study attempts to use a social-constructivist approach in analysing the place of the Latin America in the contemporary Spanish foreign policy. Specifically, it searches for the influences of Spain's European Union membership on these relationships. Consequently, it argues that European identity of the nation has gained a greater weight than its Ibero-American identity since the democratisation process of 1980s. Thus, the relationships with Europe have pushed the Latin America to a secondary position in the foreign affairs.

Legitimization of the institutional system of the European Union as an international organization sui generis The legitimacy of political power is one of the most important theoretical and research problems related to power as a social phenomenon and the very important issue of practice of its exercise, the functioning of the political institutions, political systems etc. Both scientific reflection and empirical research on legitimacy of political power are devoted mainly to this issue in relation to the state and its institutions. The purpose of the study is to present the issue of legitimacy of the European Union's institutional system as a specific, sui generis, international organization. In the first part of the article the problem of "democracy deficit" and "legitimacy deficit" in the functioning of the EU and its institutions is synthetically showed. In the next part it has been identified the specific features of the EU as an international organization and its institutional system which have the key importance to the question of legitimacy. The last section contains conclusions, that is consequences resulting from the nature of the EU and its institutional system in the context of the problem of legitimacy.

Abstract
The present article deals with the issue of family unity in the field of international protection, with a special focus on the European Union (EU) rules and their compatibility with the European Convention on Human Rights (echr) standards. In particular, the scope of the article is limited to family transfers of seekers of international protection under the Dublin system and to family reunification procedures for refugees, and beneficiaries of subsidiary protection. After examining the legal framework at EU and domestic level, the present study focuses on two rather controversial issues, from a human rights perspective: on one side, the regulation of the right to family reunification for beneficiaries of subsidiary protection and, on the other side, the different treatment between pre- and post-flight families in the field of international protection. The article concludes that the current rules regarding these two issues are not compatible with Article 8 of the echr taken together with Article 14 of the echr, and with Article 8 of the echr taken alone. It suggests that while the EU and domestic legislature remains inactive in order to correct these inequalities, the non-discrimination clauses may become directly applicable.

Kidney-associated pathologies would greatly benefit from noninvasive and robust methods that can objectively quantify changes in renal function. In the past years there has been a growing incentive to develop new applications for fluorine ((19)F) MRI in biomedical research to study functional changes during disease states. (19)F MRI represents an instrumental tool for the quantification of exogenous (19)F substances in vivo. One of the major benefits of (19)F MRI is that fluorine in its organic form is absent in eukaryotic cells. Therefore, the introduction of exogenous (19)F signals in vivo will yield background-free images, thus providing highly selective detection with absolute specificity in vivo. Here we introduce the concept of (19)F MRI, describe existing challenges, especially those pertaining to signal sensitivity, and give an overview of preclinical applications to illustrate the utility and applicability of this technique for measuring renal function in animal models. This chapter is based upon work from the COST Action PARENCHIMA, a community-driven network funded by the European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) program of the European Union, which aims to improve the reproducibility and standardization of renal MRI biomarkers. This introduction chapter is complemented by two separate chapters describing the experimental procedure and data analysis.

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is an emerging method to obtain valuable functional and structural information about the kidney noninvasively. Before performing specialized MR measurements for probing tissue structure and function, some essential practical steps are needed, which are common for most applications. Here we describe in a step-by-step manner how to (1) achieve the double-oblique slice orientation coronal-to-the-kidney, (2) adapt the scan protocol for avoiding aortic flow artifacts and covering both kidneys, (3) perform localized shimming on the kidney, and (4) check perfusion in the large renal blood vessels using time-of-flight (TOF) angiography. The procedures are tailored to preclinical MRI but conceptionally are also applicable to human MRI.This chapter is based upon work from the COST Action PARENCHIMA, a community-driven network funded by the European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) program of the European Union, which aims to improve the reproducibility and standardization of renal MRI biomarkers. This experimental protocol chapter explains the initial and essential MRI steps that precede specific functional and structural MR imaging techniques (T(1)- and T(2)*-mapping, DWI , ASL , etc.), which are described in separate chapters.