Suchergebnisse

The Croatian long-lasting fisheries problem still vivid one year after the Croatian admission to the EU is overfishing in a "common pool resource". After the questionable success of previous policies, the new EU Integrated Maritime Policy devolves some of the mechanisms of the Common Fisheries Policy to the member states. This gives Croatia the opportunity to set policies that reflect its own interests: to rebuild its fish stocks, its fishing fleet and the supporting fish processing, services, and shipbuilding industries. This may be achieved without direct command and control governmental intervention used in the past. The institutionalisation of fishing rights in the general form of Transferable Fishing Concessions and in particular as it is known in the EU: Individual Transferable Quotas, creates a new asset, with benefits to entrepreneurs and entire industries. They may be used as a collateral for fishers during the investment cycle, a source of information, an incentive for monitoring of competitors, and a source of windfall profits. Therefore, we argue that Transferable Fishing Concessions could enable the internalisation of negative externalities across Croatian Adriatic fisheries.

Understanding consumers' preferences has always been important for economic theory and for business practitioners in operations management, supply chain management, marketing, etc. While preferences are often considered stable in simplified theoretical modelling, this is not the case in real-world decision-making. Therefore, it is crucial to understand consumers' preferences when a market disruption occurs. This research aims to recognise consumers' preferences with respect to online shopping after the COVID-19 outbreak hit markets. To this purpose, we conducted an empirical study among Croatian consumers with prior experience in online shopping using an online questionnaire. The questionnaire was completed by 350 respondents who met the criteria. We selected decision-tree models using the J48 algorithm to determine the influences of the found shopping factors and demographic characteristics on a consumer's preference indicator. The main components of our indicators that influence consumer behaviour are the stimulators and destimulators of online shopping and the importance of social incidence. Our results show significant differences between men and women, with men tending to use fewer variables to make decisions. In addition, the analysis revealed that four product groups and a range of shopping mode-specific influencing factors are required to evaluate consumers' purchase points when constructing the consumers' preference indicator.

Civil society is positioned somewhere in the area between business, government, and private sector. As civil society organizations are not profit-oriented, they are often relying on the engagement of volunteers, i.e., workers who are not paid for their effort. Successful management of human resources in organizations that depends on volunteers' work can prove even harder than managing employees' work in business entities. Many factors influence someone's work effort, productivity, and devotion far beyond technical conditions, so it is impossible to separate someone's work from the rest of his/her personality traits. In civil society organizations, attracting, motivating, and keeping volunteers willing to conduct needed tasks and actively participate in the organization's activities might be quite challenging. For this paper, a survey was conducted among 42 organizations of civil society units (CSUs) that use the help of volunteers to fulfill their activities. To analyze relative efficiency of the civil society units, appropriate input and output variables were selected, and analysis was conducted with non-parametric DEA method. It was decided to take 4 inputs and 2 outputs in the analysis. The obtained results show that 69% of 42 CSUs are relatively efficient, 31% relatively inefficient, and 26.19% below the average. The results of the analysis enabled the identification of efficient and inefficient units. The reference set was calculated for each inefficient unit to determine which inputs cause better performance output. The calculated projections can be useful to CSU's managers and serve as a benchmark for detecting the source of inefficiency within their humanitarian organizations. They can also serve as guidelines for improving inputs and thus achieving higher levels of outputs, i.e., duration of volunteering and the number of volunteers. AcknowledgmentThis paper is financially supported through project ZP UNIRI 10/17 by the University of Rijeka.

Local government, as administrative units, performs a broad range of services that require to establish relations with outside partners, including those belonging to the private sector. Public procurement, due to the size of the involved financial flows, is government activity especially exposed to inefficiencies, corruption and dishonesty. There is an everlasting discussion on the ideal size and the range of services to be kept 'in-house' of local government units (LGUs).Transaction Costs Economics (TCE) represents a theoretical paradigm specially designed to interpret the issue of efficiency in inter-institutional relations. However, even though TCE might be envisaged as a tool for building better systems and institutions, practical experience suggests that efficient organization of complex multi-institutional systems is still a goal to be met. Therefore, public procurement procedures at LGU level are suitable to analyze the transaction costs. In an attempt to determine the main organizational features of the existing scope of institutions/entities involved in delivering services to citizens, we provided an overview of the complexity of inter-organizational relations at LGU level.In this paper, we present results of an empirical research of public procurement procedures from the perspective of LGUs in Croatia. Picking up on questionnaire responses from 200 LGUs that reported having held over 350 cases of providing services through contract agreements with 'independent' service providers, we formed an opinion of what could be the consequences of developing more structured public procurement procedures.