Anita Čeh Časni

Nowadays, the world is facing climate change and environmental problems due to the increasing use of energy resources and environmental emissions. In order to promote green development, financial inclusion is an important factor in the development process. Therefore, this paper examines the effects of financial inclusion, regulatory quality, government effectiveness and economic growth on green development in the new EU countries for the period from 2004 to 2021. In order to obtain empirical results, the pooled mean group and mean group estimator have been employed to check the short-run and long-run effects on green development. The results show a strong relationship between the variables and CO2 emissions in the long run. The findings support that enhancing the level of financial inclusion and regulatory quality by 1% increases carbon emissions by around 0.3% and 0.4% in the long run. However, government effectiveness and economic growth have a negative effect on CO2 emissions in the long run, while in the short run economic growth has a positive effect on CO2 emissions. Based on the empirical results, policymakers should improve financial inclusion and reinforce stringent regulations to enhance green development.

This chapter examines the state of non-financial reporting among Croatian companies, assessing improvements in non-financial disclosures between 2017 and 2022 and identifying differences in reporting companies and the impact of industry sectors. The research includes a regulation and literature review and detailed content analysis of 80 non-financial/sustainability reports to examine the compliance of the reports with prescribed requirements, looking at both the quantity and quality of non-financial disclosures. The Wilcoxon Signed Rank Test and Kruskal-Wallis Test were employed for further analysis to provide an in-depth understanding of the country’s current state of sustainability reporting compared to the state from the very beginning of mandatory reporting. The analysis has included examining the types of information disclosed and the level of company-specific detail provided. The results showed significant improvements in non-financial disclosure comprehensiveness and quality, comparing disclosures for 2022 with the first obligatory reporting year, 2017. Moreover, significant improvements were found in most analysed disclosure categories observed separately. Furthermore, voluntarily reporting companies provided more comprehensive but not significantly higher quality non-financial disclosures than mandatory reporters. Finally, it was concluded that the industry area also significantly affects disclosure comprehensiveness but not the quality of entity-specific disclosures. The findings highlight progress driven by regulatory frameworks and stakeholder awareness, with areas needing further enhancement.

The OECD urges governments to improve tax systems by studying taxpayers’ behavior to prevent tax non-compliance. This study focuses on individual Slovene taxpayers aiming to investigate the impact of trust in Tax Administration and gender on tax compliance. In the empirical part of the study, trust and tax compliance were the subject of descriptive statistical analysis, exploratory factor analysis and Spearman correlation coefficients. A Mann-Whitney U test and independent samples median test were performed to evaluate compliance gender differences in tax compliance. The findings unveil that trust in tax administration exhibits a statistically significant and positive correlation with tax compliance intentions in Slovenia while the differences in tax compliance between genders were not confirmed. Taxpayers' fairness perception to gain higher trust should be increased through sufficient information about tax laws and regulations.

This paper aims to investigate relationships among nine institutional quality dimensions in order to identify the effect of each quality dimension on the others in an institutional evaluation. The relationships between 9 quality dimensions in 78 institutional evaluations are explored quantitatively using the Pearson correlation matrix. The results show that teaching quality dimensions are interrelated, as are research dimensions, suggesting a clear separation between the teaching and research characteristics of institutions, nationally. However, the analysis points out that full-time faculty adequacy is a good predictor of quality of both teaching and research. Findings of this study contribute to the evaluation of the institutional teaching and research nexus as well as to the discussion on the role of peer review in external quality evaluation schemes. Key words: full-time faculty adequacy; quality assurance; peer review; higher education, teaching, research --- Sažetak Cilj je rada istražiti odnose između devet institucijskih dimenzija kvalitete kako bi se utvrdio međusobni utjecaj svake od njih. Pri tome se kvantitativno analiziraju korelacije 9 dimenzija kvalitete u 78 institucija uz upotrebu Pearsonove korelacijske matrice. Rezultati pokazuju da su dimenzije kvalitete poučavanja međusobno povezane, upravo kao i dimenzije istraživanja. Takvi rezultati sugeriraju jasno razdvajanje nastavnoga i istraživačkoga obilježja institucija u nacionalnom kontekstu. Međutim, analiza pokazuje i da je odgovarajući broj i kvalifikacije nastavnika i dobar prediktor kvalitete obje aktivnosti sveučilišta - nastave i istraživanja. Rezultati ovoga istraživanja doprinose boljem razumijevanju povezanosti institucijskih dimenzija kvalitete, posebice onih koje se odnose na kvalitetu nastave i istraživanja. Ujedno, istraživanje predstavlja i doprinos raspravi o ulozi istorazinske procjene u postupcima vanjskoga vrednovanja kvalitete. Ključne riječi: istorazinska procjena; istraživanje; nastava; nastavnici; osiguravanje kvalitete; visoko obrazovanje

Even though community-supported agriculture (CSA) has long been present at the margins of consumerist society all over the world, it has gained more transdisciplinary attention in the past 20–30 years. It has to do with raising awareness among various stakeholders about the need to change food politics, regarding not only securing enough amounts of food to feed the growing world population (food security) but also the most ethical means of achieving this goal (food sovereignty). This awareness resulted in small but growing changes of consumption practices of individuals and their growing interest in being actively engaged in co-creation of food politics, in processes of becoming food citizens. Policy makers, at least in the EU, appropriated some of these, once alternative, efforts into their programmes. In Croatia pioneers of a struggle for achieving food citizenship in the past decade have been initiators and other actors of CSA groups. This chapter provides a brief overview of CSA development in Croatia, especially within the wider context of food citizenship and solidarity economy concepts, aiming at changing dominant food politics or even the dominant economic mode.

Tourism’s positive and negative externalities are of an extreme social and economic importance for the tourism dominant countries. In particular, studying tourism’s impact on housing prices has experienced increased interest over the past decade as it has a relevant influence on real estate economics and housing market development, which spills over the entire economy. Considering the limited existing literature, the objective of this paper is to provide an overview of the previous studies, which summarizes prevailing findings about the impact of tourism on housing prices with respect to three different streams: tourism activity, tourism accommodation capacity and tourism amenities. This paper offers a comprehensive theoretical background and clear-cut insight in tourism’s impact on housing prices, with a great attention to possible issues that may emerge due to tourism heterogeneity across countries. For the same reason, it is beneficiary not only to real estate agents but likewise to decision makers in tourism industry.

The Eastern enlargements of the European Union (EU) since the early 2000s have included post-transitional economies at a lower level of development than the existing member states and thus, have significantly affected the East-West migration flows and labour markets on both sides. This has provided a distinctive opportunity to study the effects of liberalisation and to identify economic factors leading to migration flows with the purpose of enabling better estimations of future migration trends. In this research, a panel data analysis with pair of country fixed effects and time fixed effects is used to explore several pull and push factors of the East-West EU migration flows in the period from 2000 to 2017. Results indicate that emigration rate responds rather quickly to the changes in GDP per capita and unemployment rate of the youth population in immigration country, with statistically significant elasticity coefficients, suggesting that international migration contributes significantly to adjusting the labour supply to fluctuations in economic activity.

Cryptocurrencies are a sweltering topic in modern times of investment strategies. Since the cryptocurrency market is classified as an emerging market, in this paper a portfolio of emerging markets is compiled from the indices of four European Union (EU) countries and one cryptocurrency. The aim of this paper is to investigate how the incorporation of the Bitcoin cryptocurrency into the portfolio affects the performance of the portfolios of these countries. Moreover, by drawing an efficient frontier, the paper identifies where Bitcoin stands relative to other indices in the portfolio. The countries whose indices were used in the analysis are: Croatia, Hungary, Romania and Poland during the period from July 13, 2018 to June 07, 2019. The method used for an efficient frontier formation is Markowitz’s Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT). By applying this theory, the minimum variance portfolio at the efficient frontier was created for the portfolio with and without the cryptocurrency. The empirical analysis indicates that Bitcoin improves the effectiveness of the portfolio in emerging markets of the selected EU countries, where the expected risks of a portfolio that includes the cryptocurrency are smaller and with higher returns than those of portfolios without Bitcoin. From the Markowitz’s theory point of view, the results of the empirical analysis also indicate that Bitcoin is on the efficient frontier. Since all instruments on the efficient frontier according to the modern portfolio theory are efficient, it can be concluded that investments in such instruments depend on investor’s risk aversion.