EU Funded Projects: from Financial to Economic Analysis

Investment projects represent the basis of economic and social development of our country. The investment is a cost that will most influence the future, but it is necessary that this influence should be not only positive, but also should exceed the investment efforts. There could be different sources of financing the investment, but lately, European grants are more and more accessed by various economic agents or institutions. To obtain European financing, the project must fulfill certain conditions and must follow certain economic, social and environmental indicators. Also, for some financing lines, is required the economic analysis preparation, in order to demonstrate that the project benefits to society are important and cover the investments efforts. Thus, economic analysis studies the project influence on macro-economic or regional level, and evaluates its contribution to the welfare of the region or local community. The present paper aims to analyze the most important and available theoretical resources and to provide practical examples for carrying out the economic analysis. In conclusion, economic analysis is an useful tool for each project evaluation, but the biggest barriers to its development are the lack of valid data and the reduced Romanian experience. Under these conditions, input data can be incorrectly estimated, resulting illusory and subjective project data. For a proper projects selection based on indicators of economic assessment, it must be developed a national, complete and complex guide.performance Cost-benefit analysis, European funds, externalities, investments, shadow prices.

Specific Features in Accessing European Funding

European Funds are the European Union financial instruments in order to assist Member States in reducing the existing disparities between regions and between countries, and for harmonization with the economic, social and cultural European standards. This paper intends to present some general characteristics applicable to the most important financing programs, and also to outline certain features of the main financing lines, referring to investment projects development and their implementation, based on the Applicant Guides analysis. The paper treats institutional, legal, financial, technical, social and environmental aspects and outlines proposals and recommendations to achieve a better EU funds absorption and also a higher success rate of initiated projects. In knowledge-based economy circumstances, training consultancy specialists, that represent the intellectual capital in this area, will ensure the professional management of the developing process, submission and ongoing competitive projects, and will help enhance the funds absorption at national level. Thus, the European support for investments in ensuring sustainable growth will help overcoming the difficulties encountered by our country, and will sustain the Romanian economy recovery.eligible costs, European funds, investment, knowledge economy, sustainable development.

Smart Governance, the backbone of Smart Planning. A new Strategic Plan for the Cluj-Napoca metropolitan area

Smart Governance is one of the six smart city pillars, as governance is widely considered to be key in ensuring the sustainable development of cities and regions. In the last decades, spatial planning has evolved from a regulatory approach, focused on the delivery of land use plans, to a holistic activity, a meta-governance centred on the coordination of different sectoral policies. According to UN-Habitat, spatial planning is now more than a technical instrument – it is an integrative and participatory decision-making process, a central element in the new paradigm of urban governance. Governance of metropolitan areas is currently one of major concerns for planners all over Europe, major cities (e.g. Berlin, Paris, Rome) are defining schemes for governing this key-scale of action and definition of urban policies. In the case of the European Union, the changes from traditional planning to strategic planning have also been triggered by the fact that strategic plans have often become a prerequisite for accessing structural funds at local level. This was also the case for the Cluj-Napoca metropolitan area, comprising Cluj-Napoca, the second largest city in Romania, and 18 rural communes, with a total population of around 400,000 inhabitants. The metropolitan area, although created through the voluntary association of communes, was an artificial structure, lacking any governance and collaboration mechanisms. In June 2015, we were appointed to design the metropolitan area’s new integrated development strategy for 2016-2020 – a prerequisite for accessing funds from Romania’s Regional Operational Programme. The design of the strategic plan was based on a participative planning approach, already tested as a methodology within the STATUS Project (SEE 2007-2013) . As a result, a series of thematic workshops were held with local stakeholders, ranging from local and county public authorities to decentralised institutions, utility suppliers, NGOs, cluster associations, universities and private companies. The aims of these workshops were twofold: to gather information from the local stakeholders regarding the issues in the metropolitan area and potential solutions, as well as to encourage the collaboration between stakeholders facing similar issues. The ideas expressed in the workshops were distilled by the project team into nine development axes for the strategic plan. We considered governance to be the plan’s central axis, with the success of the other eight sectoral axes (housing, mobility, energy, environment, etc.) greatly dependent on its progress. Our main proposal was the creation of a Metropolitan Task Force, composed of the main stakeholders participating at the workshops, that would be in charge with monitoring the implementation of the plan and ensuring the coordination between the projects in the metropolitan area. The Metropolitan Task Force would function in a Metropolitan Center – a venue encouraging the debate on the future development of the metropolitan area and inviting all interested stakeholders in expressing their ideas on this matter. In the end, we realized a self-assessment of the final strategic plan, rating the innovation and smartness of our proposals (flagship projects, soft projects and complementary projects) for each of the nine development axes. The conclusion was that the governance, housing and social axes were characterized by a great degree of innovation – with proposals such as the realization of a metropolitan housing plan or the creation of CLLD initiatives to combat urban poverty –, while the mobility and leisure/tourism axes were considered to be the least innovative. The strategic plan of the Cluj-Napoca metropolitan area is more than a vision accompanied by a list of projects. It is just the start of a process aimed at fostering collaboration and dialogue between different stakeholders, that need to make the transition now from the co-design of the plan to the co-implementation of its projects. Smart Governance is the backbone of Smart Planning, as our recent initiatives in the Cluj-Napoca metropolitan area – mainly mobility and energy projects – highlight the fact that a wide stakeholder involvement can bridge the gap between industry and public administration and lead to integrated project ideas aimed at fostering territorial development

Complex Mechanical Properties of Steel

Whereas considerable progress has been reported on the quantitative estimation of the microstructure of steels as a function of most of the important determining variables, it remains the case that it is impossible to calculate all but the simplest of mechanical properties given a comprehensive description of the structure at all conceivable scales. Properties which are important but fall into this category are impact toughness, fatigue, creep and combinations of these phenomena. The work presented in this thesis is an attempt to progress in this area of complex mechanical properties in the context of steels, although the outcomes may be more widely applied. The approach used relies on the creation of physically meaningful models based on the neural network and genetic programming techniques. It appears that the hot–strength, of ferritic steels used in the power plant industry, diminishes in concert with the dependence of solid solution strengthening on temperature, until a critical temperature is reached where it is believed that climb processes begin to contribute. It is demonstrated that in this latter regime, the slope of the hot–strength versus temperature plot is identical to that of creep rupture–strength versus temperature. This significant outcome can help dramatically reduce the requirement for expensive creep testing. Similarly, a model created to estimate the fatigue crack growth rates for a wide range of ferritic and austenitic steels on the basis of static mechanical data has the remarkable outcome that it applies without modification to nickel based superalloys and titanium alloys. It has therefore been possible to estimate blindly the fatigue performance of alloys whose chemical composition is not known. Residual stress is a very complex phenomenon especially in bearings due to the Hertzian contact which takes place. A model has been developed that is able to quantify the residual stress distribution, under the raceway of martensitic ball bearings, using the running conditions. It is evident that a well–formulated neural network model can not only be extrapolated even beyond material type, but can reveal physical relationships which are found to be informative and useful in practice

Is similarity a constraint for service to service brand extensions?

Are service brands constrained in launching new service offerings? Both research evidence and managerial wisdom suggest brands should extend to similar categories. However, in five studies using real-life brands - four experiments and one large-sample survey - we provide evidence that similarity is less of a constraint for service brands extending to other service categories (service-to-service extensions), compared to cases involving parent brands or extension categories of a product nature. Importantly, we demonstrate that such an effect occurs because service brands possess associations relevant across the spectrum of service categories. Our results suggest that service brand managers have the opportunity to stretch their brands to dissimilar service offerings; yet, they need to ensure the marketing execution does not make the brands’ service associations inaccessible to consumers. The findings suggest that even product brands can build service associations by adding service components to their offering, thus becoming “servitized” and better able to extend to dissimilar service categories. Overall, our work contributes to the academic debate documenting that the principles governing the management of product vs. service brands are not identical.acceptedVersio

Veronica Giosu – la a 80-a aniversare

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Brand extension similarity can backfire when you look for something specific

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to show that high similarity between a parent brand and an extension category can have a detrimental effect on how a brand extension is perceived to perform on specific attributes. This happens because similarity influences the perceived positioning of a brand extension: lower similarity extensions can be perceived as “specialized” products, whereas high similarity extensions are perceived as “all-in-one” products not performing exceptionally well on any specific attribute. Design/methodology/approach The authors test the hypothesized effect through three experimental studies. The authors manipulate similarity both within subjects (Study 1a) and between subjects (Study 1b and Study 2). Further, the authors test the effect for specific attributes that are physical/concrete in nature (Study 1a and Study 1b) as well as attributes that are abstract/imagery-related in nature (Study 2). Findings High compared to low similarity improves perceptions of overall performance (i.e. performance across all attributes). But as expected, the authors also find that a high similarity brand extension is perceived to perform worse on the attribute on which a low similarity brand extension specializes, even when the parent brands of the extensions possess that attribute to the same extent. This perception of attribute performance carries on to influence brand extension purchase likelihood. Practical implications The degree of brand extension similarity has consequences for how brand extensions are perceived to be positioned in the marketplace. Although high similarity extensions receive positive evaluations, they might not be suitable when a company is trying to instil a perception of exceptional performance on a specific attribute. Originality/value The authors demonstrate a consequential exception to the marketing wisdom that brands should extend to similar categories. Although the degree of brand extension similarity has been repeatedly shown to have a positive effect on brand extension evaluation, the authors document a case when its effect is actually detrimental. This study’s focus on the dependent variable of perceived performance on specific attributes is novel in the brand extension literature

Brand extension similarity can backfire when you look for something specific

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to show that high similarity between a parent brand and an extension category can have a detrimental effect on how a brand extension is perceived to perform on specific attributes. This happens because similarity influences the perceived positioning of a brand extension: lower similarity extensions can be perceived as “specialized” products, whereas high similarity extensions are perceived as “all-in-one” products not performing exceptionally well on any specific attribute. Design/methodology/approach The authors test the hypothesized effect through three experimental studies. The authors manipulate similarity both within subjects (Study 1a) and between subjects (Study 1b and Study 2). Further, the authors test the effect for specific attributes that are physical/concrete in nature (Study 1a and Study 1b) as well as attributes that are abstract/imagery-related in nature (Study 2). Findings High compared to low similarity improves perceptions of overall performance (i.e. performance across all attributes). But as expected, the authors also find that a high similarity brand extension is perceived to perform worse on the attribute on which a low similarity brand extension specializes, even when the parent brands of the extensions possess that attribute to the same extent. This perception of attribute performance carries on to influence brand extension purchase likelihood. Practical implications The degree of brand extension similarity has consequences for how brand extensions are perceived to be positioned in the marketplace. Although high similarity extensions receive positive evaluations, they might not be suitable when a company is trying to instil a perception of exceptional performance on a specific attribute. Originality/value The authors demonstrate a consequential exception to the marketing wisdom that brands should extend to similar categories. Although the degree of brand extension similarity has been repeatedly shown to have a positive effect on brand extension evaluation, the authors document a case when its effect is actually detrimental. This study’s focus on the dependent variable of perceived performance on specific attributes is novel in the brand extension literature

No I won’t, but yes we will: driving sustainability-related donations through social identity effects

Shifting consumers towards sustainable behaviours is difficult, with an attitude–behaviour gap persistently reported. This study proposes a route towards sustainable behaviours that does not depend on individual attitudes or values: social identity forces within novel online brand-convened consumer groups. A field experiment using a fictitious fruit drink brand demonstrates that by assembling an online consumer group and providing it with sustainability objectives, consumers will engage in a sustainability-aligned behaviour, namely donating to social or environmental charities at the request of the firm, irrespective of their individual attitudes. Furthermore, this behaviour is accompanied by an improvement in brand attachment. As these effects are found within a newly-formed online group, practitioners may be able to achieve sustainability objectives through this mechanism even in the absence of well-established brand communities. The study contributes to social identity literature by demonstrating the impact of group identity effects in a consumer context, and by showing a mechanism by which the negative side of group identity – out-group derogation – can be avoided

ome Considerations on the Demographic Structure of Migrants from Botosani County

Publicat în: Economica : Revistă ştiinţifico-didactică / Academia de Studii Economice a Moldovei ; redactor şef: Grigore Belostecinic. - Chişinău : ASEM, 2016. № 3. - P. 111-125. - Bibliogr.: p. 125. - Categoria B, ISSN 1810-9136Acest studiu își propune să analizeze particularitățile structurale ale emigranților din județul Botoșani, privind modelul de prezentare a structurii pe grupe de vârstă și sexe, poate unul dintre cele mai importante elemente în găsirea unor explicații și motivații a plecării populației din județul Botoșani. Totodată, modificările acestei structuri demografice din județ prezintă consecințe destul de vizibile prin creșterea ponderii vârstnicilor și reducerea ponderii tinerilor, fapt evidențiat și prin reducerea forței de muncă active. JEL: J6