Review of Innovation and Competitiveness - A Journal of Economic and Social Research

5-24

Authors: Mirela Alpeza, Aleksandar Erceg, Sunčica Oberman Peterka

Franchising is very popular growth model but despite the wide application of franchising in the developed countries of the world, its impact on the Croatian economy is still marginal. The purpose of this research is to identify the obstacles and challenges to a wider application of franchising in Croatia and generate policy recommendations for removing the identified obstacles. Obstacles and recommendations are identified on the basis of a conducted longitudinal qualitative research, the first phase of which was conducted in 2006, and second in 2014. The overall results of this research were presented in a form of PEST analysis and compared with the results of the 2006 research aiming to detect changes (improvements/ deterioration) in individual areas of the research political, economic, legal and technologic factors of influence on the development of franchising in Croatia. Based on the detected changes, conclusions and policy recommendations were identified.The obstacles can be divided in two categories: franchising specific barriers and general business related obstacles for doing business in Croatia. Without removing most of these obstacles, it is unrealistic to expect high growth of franchising activities in Croatia in near future.

45-62

Authors: Natalija Nikolovska, Daniela Mamucevska

This paper deals with the essential problems of the current economic crisis in the European Union analyzed from the aspect of the core – periphery development model. In the first part of the paper theoretical concepts are presented for explanation the reasons for divergence in the economic development among regions. In the second part of the paper special attention is given to the real convergence among the selected EU member countries. Regarding this, the paper arises the dilemma thus the stabilization programs, will be successful recipe for solving the problems of the current crisis.

81-102

Authors: Stefania Vignini

The aim of our research is to verify if Italian listed companies financial statements provide adequate information about the capitalization of costs related to intangible assets and if the information provided are reliable. Moreover, we investigated if they merely comply with law or provide additional information on cost capitalization and reveal if internal control systems (especially managerial accounting systems) or other information systems are applied to support the measurement process and the cost control, thus guaranteeing the verifiability and representational faithfulness of the information disclosed. This paper is an empirical analysis and is concerned to investigate the financial statements of 250 Italian listed companies.

115-136

Authors: Ana Ježovita

The paper includes analysis of financial ratios for evaluating a financial position. It is possible to assess the financial position of a certain company by using and combining liquidity, solvency and activity ratios. Preferable values of financial ratios should be related to the different factors, including industry, geographical position, size of a company. For research purposes appropriate parametric and non-parametric statistics is used. The research includes analyzing differences between financial ratios related to the size of companies in Croatia. Obtained results of the conducted research shows existance of statistically significant differences between financial ratios for evaluating financial postition for different companies sizes.

161-176

Authors: Ružica Bukša Tezzele, Raffaele De Amicis

Human participation and the use of technology are considered as key factors for smart and sustainable urban development. Over the past decade, governments, academic community and organized civil society have been turning their attention to solving urban problems with the new tools of advanced technology. Based on three years of R&D, this paper aims to identify crucial factors for citizens’ involvement in development and adoption of smart city services. It will bring out the results of citizens’ involvement in the i-SCOPE project and explore why some European communities have succeeded in involving their citizens, and the others have not.