Suchergebnisse

The European Union declared the year 2009 – The Year of Creativity and Innovation. Creativity and innovation can move society forward toward prosperity. In this context, we analyzed in our paper the innovation, research & development potential and performance of the Romanian enterprises. After presenting the conceptual framework and statistical sources in EU for innovation and a general overview of Europe seen as a place for research activities, we examined in details the Romania case: a country still in the group of catching-up countries, but one of the growth leaders among this group. In the last part of the paper we focused on research and development data analysis for the 2003-2008 interval, at enterprise level, also with commentaries about the economic and financial crisis impact.

Im Rahmen dieser Arbeit wird auf unterschiedlich komplexen sozialen Ebenen nach denjenigen Faktoren gesucht, die im Zuge der Transformation den unternehmerischen Erfolg in rumänischen Wirtschaftsorganisationen beeinflussen. Hierfür werden verschiedene gesellschaftliche Ebenen aus der Perspektive mehrerer verwandter Wissenschaftszweige beleuchtet. Mittels einer solchen Betrachtung sollen Faktoren aufgedeckt werden, die für eine positive wirtschaftliche Entwicklung rumänischer Unternehmen als bedeutsam ausfallen. Entgegen der üblichen Forschungspraxis, wird hier nicht auf Unternehmensebene nach Möglichkeiten der Innovationsentstehung gesucht, um später auf die Ebene der Volkswirtschaft zu schließen, sondern die hier angewendete Vorgehensweise setzt zum einen an den sozialen Routinen und den vorherrschenden gesellschaftlichen Praktiken an. Zum anderen wird die politische Entwicklung dargelegt, welche die in Rumänien gewählte Wirtschaftspolitik begründete, wobei angemerkt werden soll, dass die Wirtschaftspolitik auch in Abhängigkeit von bestehenden internationalen Beziehungen definiert wurde. Die Auswirkungen der bestehenden sozialen Praktiken sowie der eingesetzten Wirtschaftspolitik wurden auf volkswirtschaftlicher Ebene weiterverfolgt. Dadurch konnten zusätzliche, begrenzende Entstehungsbedingungen von Innovation identifiziert werden. Erst in einem letzten Schritt wurde auf die Unternehmen eingegangen. Auf Unternehmensebene wurde das organisationskulturelle Kapital ermessen und mit der Innovativität einzelner unternehmerischer Subsysteme in Zusammenhang gebracht. Die vorliegende Arbeit verbindet also die betrachteten sozialen Ebenen, indem sie die Auswirkungen der gesamtgesellschaftlichen Transformation auf den Entwicklungspfaden der untersuchten Unternehmen der rumänischen Gas- und Maschinenbaubranche beispielhaft verfolgt. Die unterschiedliche Entwicklung der Unternehmen beider Branchen soll mit Hilfe eines Vergleiches nachverfolgt werden. Dabei können im Falle der Gasbranche eben jene spezifischen Faktoren aufgedeckt werden, welche der Wirtschaftspolitik zugeschrieben werden müssen. Im Gegensatz zur Gasbranche konnte sich die Maschinenbaubranche frei entfalten und unterlag keinem staatlich definierten Transformationsprogramm. Empirisch basiert diese Arbeit auf der Untersuchung von 24 Subsystemen aus der Gas- und 26 Subsystemen aus der Maschinenbaubranche. Um zwischen den besonderen Bedingungen, denen die rumänische Gasbranche ausgesetzt ist, und den rumänienspezifischen Aspekten trennen zu können, wurden auf betriebswirtschaftlicher Ebene die Subsysteme der rumänischen Maschinenbaubranche analysiert.

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the opportunities for adopting robotic applications, through a marketing mix perspective, as well as depicting the current state of industrial robot integration in Romanian enterprises and the labor market, in contrast to other economies of the European Union. In this research, we highlight the impact of industrial robots within enterprises, while also considering the perceived standard of living through GDP per capita. For this, we conducted exploratory research based on secondary data regarding the evolution of the robotics sector in Romania, in connection to the dynamics of the global and European Union robotics market. We also performed a principal components analysis, which revealed the main factors that contributed to the dynamics of nation-level enterprise statistics. Our analysis revealed that a higher integration of industrial robots contributed to the reduction of employment rates amongst all six EU countries considered, while also having positive correlations with the GDP per capita and apparent labor productivity. Mixed results were only observed for the impact of industrial robots on remuneration growth, suggesting the potential adverse effects automation could have on incomes.

The impact of information society – as a factor of organizational change (Dovenport, 2003) on performance of firms is increasingly approached and measured – by means of statistical indicators – in the specialty literature, developing in a fast pace and influencing all business sectors, from industrial, services, either touristic, medical, educational or public administration. Within the EU – 28 countries positive evolutions were registered in 2014 compared with 2010 related to adoption of e-business technologies in enterprises. In Romania, the development of indicators concerning information society compared to that of EU-28, have registered growth rates much higher than those of EU-28, EU-27 or Euro area, especially following the post-accession to the European Union. The average values of IT&C indicators for Romania - according to Eurostat – are much more different compared to EU-28 and, in this study we have applied statistical testing methods as regards these differencies by means of the Student t test. The results have shown that for two of the seven indicators of information society there are significant differencies, for share of enterprises' turnover on e-commerce and enterprises having received orders online (at least 1%), respectively.

Social enterprises are embedded in the local context, their organizational characteristics and operational strategies being influenced by the institutional settings, political culture and historical traditions and events. Similar to other European countries, Romania has included the modernization of the welfare systems in the development agenda of the last decade. One of the areas of interest was to better understand and promote the dynamics of the social enterprises as economic, social development actors and facilitators. From a neo-institutionalist perspective, this paper aims to explore the role of social enterprises as a component of Romanian welfare system. It starts with an overview of the history of the Romanian social enterprise, its roots and drivers; it continues with the identification of the roles, challenges and development processes of the social enterprises as welfare services. Keywords: social economy; social enterprise; welfare system.

Global economic growth is based on increased consumption of electricity both from renewable resources, such as water and wind and non-renewable resources, such as coal (lignite), natural gas or petroleum. Coal continues to represent an important energy source in the European Union, particularly in Germany, France and Spain, where it accounts for 15% of the primary energy, out of which 80% is used in electricity supply. The coal (lignite) mines from the Oltenia region contribute significantly to generating power in Romania. The study aims to show that an increase in production within the coal (lignite) mining industry can be determined by increasing direct and indirect costs or by increasing variable costs and profit. We also examine the non-linear relation between variable costs and production on the one hand and between profit and production on the other hand. Our results show that there is a concave relationship between variable costs and production, and also a concave relationship between profit and production, which indicate that Romanian coal enterprises have an optimal production level that maximises both variable costs and their profitability. In addition, a robustness check of our results confirms that variable costs and profitability decrease as they move away from their optimal level.

We construct and analyze a unique database with 1992-99 information on privatization transactions and labor productivity for the entire surviving population of initially state-owned industrial corporations in Romania. The data permit us to describe the post-privatization ownership structure and to test the effect of alternative privatization policies on firm performance in a panel framework. The results of OLS, LAD, and fixed-effects estimations consistently show a positive, highly significant effect of private ownership share on the level and growth of labor productivity, the estimates ranging from 13 to 32 log points for the level, and 9 to 16 for productivity growth. The strongest estimated impacts arise from sales to foreign and domestic blockholders, but insider and mass privatization are also estimated to have positive, although smaller, impacts on firm performance.