THE JOURNEY TO COMPETITIVENESS: EU SPEEDING UP ON THE ROAD PAVED WITH KNOWLEDGE AND INNOVATION

In the attempt to boost its international competitiveness, the European Union realized that it should enrich the ways to achieve it by using the intangible assets that it holds. Knowledge and intellectual capital, innovation, science and entrepreneurship are key drivers of economic development and renewal. The traditional resources on which economies rely on are scarce, while these ones are abundant and steady. Moreover, this type of assets can easily increase their value through sharing and they trigger multiplicative effects in the economy. The paper tackles these issues and makes an assessment of the degree of innovation in the EU. The study aims to provide an answer to the question of whether EU's overall performance proves that it is truly driven by knowledge and innovation or not. Using a qualitative method of research, this paper identifies innovation patterns of the member states from a geographical perspective. In order to provide a compelling analysis, the data ranges from indicators capturing science and technology activities, firm innovation to the internationalization of research activities and the tertiary-level graduates. The results show substantial discrepancies between the European countries and reveal that knowledge flows scaled by the level of innovation are a localized phenomenon, therefore some countries are more innovation-oriented and they reap the benefits better.knowledge-based economy, competitiveness, innovation, R&D, technology

Use of LANDSAT data for natural resources investigation in the lower basin of Danube and Danube Delta

There are no author-identified significant results in this report

Use of LANDSAT data for resources investigation in the lower basin of Danube and Danube Delta

The author has identified the following significant results. A most important is that bands 4 and 5 very clearly show the sedimentary discharge into the sea and the spreading regime in the sea at the mouth of the Danube and out at sea at great distances to over 100 km. Another particularly significant result is shown by bands 6 and 7, presenting the successive stages of sediments in the Danube Delta, with the clear marking of the separation between the fluvial and marine delta. The survey of floods and of some of their effects may also be studied on all of the bands in the complex area of the Danube Delta and in the lower basin of the Danube

THE EVOLUTION OF THE INTELLIGENT CARDS AND THE ROMANIAN MARKET

This paper will try to describe the close relationship between the economic evolution and technology, especially how the technical aspects of debit/credit cards interact with the economical aspects. There are approached concepts related to smart card and especially the use of cards in different economic purposes. Since the introduction of the first cards there has been an accelerated growth of the use of smart cards. One of the essential growth factors has been the progress in the electronic industry and the accelerated development of the software companies, which allowed the emergence of interactive financial services such as e-banking, mobile banking, smart cards being considered the access key to these modern services.Smart cards, credit cards, debit cards, card market in Romania, card payments

The Real Economy and Competition Policy in Periods of Retrenchment

Competition policy works well when markets are given time to evolve and drive improved efficiency; but this takes time. However, under current turbulent times, the short-run survival actions may be insistently sought by policy-makers under the pressure of trade unions and the exit of failing firms may be perceived to be more costly for society. Actually, the immediate costs that existing businesses, employees and consumers have to incur may be up-front and visible, while the benefits of competition may be less visible. As a consequence, times of severe financial and economic crises bring about a severe questioning of market mechanisms with unfailing regularity and the stance of the competition policy against this backdrop. We shall therefore look in the current paper at the role of competition authorities in a time of severe economic and financial crisis and in particular, at how the crisis will impact the application of competition law. In the end, we will conclude in favour of the need to preserve competition policy as well in difficult times even if we admit that a certain flexibilisation in procedures (but not in rules) may be probably necessary.retrenchment, antitrust and merger control, state aid policy, competition authority

A Numerical Approach to Stability of Multiclass Queueing Networks

The Multi-class Queueing Network (McQN) arises as a natural multi-class extension of the traditional (single-class) Jackson network. In a single-class network subcriticality (i.e. subunitary nominal workload at every station) entails stability, but this is no longer sufficient when jobs/customers of different classes (i.e. with different service requirements and/or routing scheme) visit the same server; therefore, analytical conditions for stability of McQNs are lacking, in general. In this note we design a numerical (simulation-based) method for determining the stability region of a McQN, in terms of arrival rate(s). Our method exploits certain (stochastic) monotonicity properties enjoyed by the associated Markovian queue-configuration process. Stochastic monotonicity is a quite common feature of queueing models and can be easily established in the single-class framework (Jackson networks); recently, also for a wide class of McQNs, including first-come-first-serve (FCFS) networks, monotonicity properties have been established. Here, we provide a minimal set of conditions under which the method performs correctly. Eventually, we illustrate the use of our numerical method by presenting a set of numerical experiments, covering both single and multi-class networks

En busca de la belleza, entre espejismo(s) y eficacia(s). El impacto de la publicidad para productos cosméticos adelgazantes: El rol moderador de las estrategias de comparación social

The article discusses how media discourse, particularly advertisers, build some imaginary on the body that, from a psychosocial perspective, have an impact on the way audiences perceive their own physicality. Through the examination of a case-about the construction of female body image-there are examinetes the social comparison strategies deployed about these body media models and how these definitions affect gender identity and female audiences.    El artículo discute el modo en que los discursos mediáticos, especialmente los publicitarios, construyen ciertos imaginarios sobre el cuerpo que, desde una perspectiva psicosocial, tienen impacto en el modo como las audiencias perciben su propia corporalidad. A través del examen de un caso -sobre la construcción de la imagen del cuerpo femenino -se examinan las estrategias de comparación social desplegadas a propósito de estos modelos mediáticos de cuerpo y cómo estos inciden en las definiciones identitarias y de género de las audiencias femeninas

The Spread of Economic Ideas among Romanian People. Case Study: Alexandru D. Xenopol

Alexandru D. Xenopol (1847-1920), a leading figure of the Romanian intellectual tradition of the turn of the century – academician, economist, philosopher, historian, educator, sociologist and writer – has remained in the universal cultural memory as a tireless promoter of the economic empowerment of the Romanian inhabited territories. Encyclopaedic, visionary and lucid mind, Alexandru D. Xenopol dedicated his work to searching the elements of the compatibility of the Romanians with the modernity and globalization in the cultural, educational and economic history of our people. Alexandru D. Xenopol has not remain unnoticed; scientists of this country, such as Nicolae Iorga, paid an homage to his great intellectual value: "educated in the best traditions of the economic school of the mid nineteenth century, and above all, a man with a philosophical mind, comfortable with abstractions and with an endless love for subtle links between them" (Iorga, 1975, p.190). The purpose of this paper is to highlight the importance of the spread of economic ideas in shaping the Romanian economic development stage