CONTEMPORARY ECONOMY JOURNAL

18-26

Authors: Marius GUST

For many banks, the closure of agencies has been, in recent years, a coordinated development strategy, because their objectives are to reduce costs and the number of clients visiting their branch. The increase in alternative payment methods and decline in cash use means that there is little need to visit the bank for transactions. But people still like to visit a banking agency, though less frequently than usual and for other purposes. In today's digital age, in addition to virtual experiences, people also want physical experiences, and visiting a branch may be more appropriate for some clients and for certain services. Clients tend to visit an agency to learn more about banking products and services, such as mortgage loans or more complex investment products, such as pension plans, because they want to receive financial advice. Although most clients start the journey online to find the financial products they need, many of these trips are concluded and completed at the traditional banking agency. Thus, for many banks, the traditional branch remains a crucial point in the relationship with clients, the place of manifestation of its brand/image and all that it represents. Although branch closures have been a major issue in recent years, many banks - including new ones - are opening branches, while others are turning branches into counselling agencies. If the bank branch has outlived its usefulness, why do some banks open new ones while others retain theirs, even transformed. Banks that dispense with their branch networks could be endangering their future.

36-43

Authors: Lucian IVAN

Analysis of data on arms exports worldwide reveals relative stability in the international arms market that increased in 2019 compared to 2018, by about4%, with growth in the United States of 6.6%, equal to that of China. This trend in the United States of America may diminish considerably in the coming period, given the limitation of the increase in the defence budget from fiscal year 2021, and in the case of China, the sars-CoV-2 coronavirus crisis will have effects including in the defence industry. Recent developments resulting from the economic crisis caused by the medical emergency caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, induced by the worldwide spread of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, will also have effects in the defence industry, mainly on the the basis of the contracting of gross domestic product at state level. To overcome this crisis situation in the defence industry, innovative measures are needed to enable the development of state-of-the-art military products adapted to the market requirements and defence needs of resource-enabled States financial support, while accelerating the work of the applied Research and Development sector that will enable such products to be produced.

50-61

Authors: Ion SCURTU, Gicuța SBÎRCIOG, Delia - Cristina CONSTANTIN

Food is one of the vital human needs and everything that is alive. In human nutrition, vegetables play a major role, bringing the body an important supply of vitamins, minerals and fibers. Therefore, horticulture is an important branch of the economy, especially since the Romanian people are one of the largest consumers of vegetables in Europe. Unfortunately, it is noted that the value of vegetable imports exceeds that of exports, although our country has the potential to offer a much higher of vegetables yield. The present research aims to outline some possibilities for increasing the economic efficiency of vegetable growing in Romania. For this purpose, the authors propose a number of possibilities, including increasing areas for growing vegetables in protected areas, gradually increasing vegetable production and export, lowering vegetable imports and bringing prices of exported vegetables closer to those imported.

72-81

Authors: Mihaela DIACONU, Amalia DUȚU, Mihaela BRÎNZEA

In the current context of the dynamics and volatility of the global labor market, the employability of graduates of higher education is a key indicator of identifying the extent to which a university successfully fulfills its assumed mission - education. At the international level, the researchers have proposed different approaches to the concept of employability and have built different models to determine the components of the employability and the ways to increase it. The purpose of this paper is to present the most important models of employability and to introduce a new approach that extends the debates on this concept by involving all stakeholders - students, graduates, employers, university. The paper also identifies the role of the university in supporting the employability of the graduates and introduces a model of curricular development applied to reduce the gaps between the competences provided in the curriculum and those required on the labor market in order to increase the rapid insertion in the labor market of the graduates. The proposed model has been applied and validated within a project funded by the European Social Fund, generating significant results by redefining the practical competences and improving the practical training of the students from 8 degree programs.

91-98

Authors: Carmen-Mihaela BOTEANU, Emanuel RĂUȚĂ, Oana LUCA, Florian GAMAN

The paper aims to carry out an analysis of the performance components of the local development strategies funded under the LEADER Measure from the National Rural Development Program 2014-2020. The article analyzes the Local Development Strategies financed in each development region of Romania from the perspective of the most relevant performance indicators achieved through the implementation of these strategies. The paper emphasizes the contribution of the Local Development Strategies to supporting the bioeconomy, as a smart specialization field, in the National Strategy for Research, Development and Innovation and within the smart specialization strategies adopted by Romania’s development regions. The "bottom-up" approach, specific to the LEADER concept, is highlighted, and the role of the Local Action Groups implementing the Local Development Strategies is outlined, in supporting the development and innovation at the local level, as well as in supporting the areas of smart specialization within the relevant regional and national strategies. The paper concludes that the field of bioeconomy, benefiting from the huge potential of the Romanian agriculture, in the context of a growing food industry, could represent a key sector of ​​development of the Romanian economy.

108-114

Authors: Evelyne Ingrid MITU, Elena Loredana COMĂNESCU

Interpretation by comparison of human resources management applied between two countries with different application methods and techniques of human resources management, yet with spectacular results in their economies (US and Japan). Despite the differences between Japanese and American management styles, both will have a huge impact on their national economies. In general, in the field of human resources, the labor relations within the organizations are, mainly, characteristics that differentiate the Japanese management system from the other countries, especially the USA.

125-132

Authors: Mariana MANDRA, Valentin ILIESCU, Amalia GURGUI, Alexandru GRIBINCEA

Modern tourism industry is progressing rapidly. Its development contributes to active economic growth of many countries on the globe. The development of tourism industry of a particular state is significantly influenced by world tourism development trends. Today, tourism has become an independent sector of economy, almost 6%of the global gross national product, 5% of all tax revenues and 7% of global investment. The future of tourism is closely connected to the ability of industry to introduce alternative energy technologies and design sustainable development strategies. Sustainable development strategies are a prerequisite for solving problems related to climate change, and play a key role in the implementation of the2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The tourism market is part of national economy. In the case of international tourism, it simultaneously refers to two sometimes very different economic systems, one of which exists within the borders of the source country and the receiving country. International tourism contributes to the design of a new type of spatial connections that reduce risks of regional conflicts, contributing to cultural and technical enrichment of countries and peoples. The World Tourism Organization declared the year 2020the year of rural and ecological tourism. The point is that tourism should develop and bring people financial resources not only in big cities, but also in provinces and in the countryside.

142-155

Authors: Ion CUCUI, Silviu Constantin NASTASIA

This paper empirically addresses the issue of creative accounting in financial reporting, focusing on how it influences the quality of financial statements prepared and reported by economic entities. Creative accounting cannot be automatically classified as legal or illegal, in the absence of an in-depth analysis, but is negatively correlated with the approach of managers or professional accountants to manipulate accounting data to achieve certain objectives or meet certain financial indicators relevant to third parties. The data were collected from open sources, from databases available to the general public, for the study being selected an economic entity based on certain representative criteria, such as economic size, business segment or history. The study revealed that, based on the analysis of the financial statements prepared by the economic entity for a period of two consecutive years, were highlighted elements that suggest a use of imaginative accounting, being likely to mislead stakeholders about the performances registered.

170-177

Authors: Georgiana-Gabriela IACOBUȚĂ

A growing number of businesses seek to become more environmentally-friendly and to employ effective and efficient strategies that include objectives such as decreasing their carbon footprint, reducing their waste and increasing their energy efficiency. In order to make their efforts measurable and to evaluate the implementation of the strategy, environmental key performance indicators (KPIs) are increasing in popularity for the companies’ strategy. However, the number of KPIs used in business strategies is rapidly increasing. Therefore, more and more companies and researchers are presented with the dilemma of selecting the most relevant, useful and important environmental KPIs. In this paper, we analyse the literature concerning environmental KPIs, discuss different criteria used in the selection of such KPIs, and make proposals regarding this criteria.

184-186

Authors: Lucian Gheorghe NĂSTASE, Maria Georgiana PONEA

Blockchain technology is used by entrepreneurs as an innovative tool in online trade so that they can handle the problem of traceability of the product in the management of the supply chain. This research want to be a cross-border between blockchain, ecommerce all made in the entrepreneurial environment. In the end it will be a set of methods and algorithms that are developed for the information encryption and for anticounterfeiting. There will be presented algorithms and methods to show a complete and working solution, which are evaluated by applying to several typical problems and attack cases. The effectiveness, extendibility, security, implementation and governance issues of applying these algorithms, methods, solutions are also discussed. This research contributes to the theoretical and practical literatures on blockchain technology, cross-border e-commerce and supply chain management research fields.