Silvia Maican

This study examines short food supply chains (SFSCs) in the V4 countries (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia) through a systematic literature review using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) method. It focuses on the participation of small farms, their forms of involvement, and the key drivers and barriers influencing engagement. The article fills the research gap in the assessment of the influence of agricultural structures of the V4 countries on the development and functioning of SFSCs. The results indicate that all countries show growing potential for SFSC development, although the share of participating farms remains relatively low in Poland and the Czech Republic compared to Hungary and Slovakia. Beyond agrarian structure, factors such as production specialisation, labour inputs and farmers’ marketing attitudes play an important role. Similarities are observed in distribution methods (mainly direct sales), dominant products (fruits and vegetables), motivations (higher prices) and barriers (time constraints). The review shows that while SFSC development across the V4 countries is driven by similar economic motivations and constrained by comparable organisational barriers, important differences stem from farm structures, production specialisation and institutional conditions, particularly between Hungary and the remaining V4 countries. These findings have implications for agricultural and rural policy.

European Union (EU) countries are struggling with the high costs of operating healthcare facilities due to energy consumption. The rational use of resources, including renewable energy sources (RESs), is a goal of sustainable development in terms of solving environmental problems. There are few literature studies that analyze the impact of the use of RESs in the healthcare sector on the achievement of sustainable development goals in EU countries. This study examines the potential of RESs to address environmental challenges in EU healthcare systems and their impact on the Healthcare Index (HI). A quantitative analysis explores the relationship between the Environmental Performance Index (EPI), Environmental Health Score (EHS) and HI. Data were taken from Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy (YCELP), European Environment Agency (EEA), and the Numbeo. This study assessed the relationship by using SPSS 29. This study concluded that RESs should be prioritized in healthcare facilities to increase environmental performance and thus meet sustainable development goals. The use of RESs affects environmental performance and improves HI. The results indicate significant positive correlations, highlighting the benefits of RES adoption for both environmental and health indicators.

The study aims to analyse factors that influence the market value of small farms in Romania. The research methodology involved a Gibbs sampling and updates of the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm. Findings demonstrate distinction in the estimated market values of small farms and their features across households and explain the role and influence of socio-economic, institutional, and marketing factors. The impact of the independent variables shows that the level of education, support for agri-environmental activities, unfavourable areas and sales to processing plants, have positively influenced the estimated market value of small farms.

Economic overview of the distribution channels used by Eastern European small farms for their agricultural products | Vladimir Ristanovic, Aleksandra Tošović-Stevanović, Silvia Maican, Andreea Muntean | Agricultural Journals

This article proposes a complex approach to the phenomenon known in the literature as the consumption of user-generated multimedia content (UGMC) in the context of the effects generated by the pandemic on the consumption of tourist services. Thus, it analyzes the ways in which the creation and consumption of multimedia content affect the flow experience and the ways in which consumption experiences related to tourist services are transferred to other consumers. The pandemic crisis has fundamentally affected the ways in which consumers interact online with different types of multimedia content. In particular, consumers of travel services have developed behaviors that promote the transfer of trust in safe tourist destinations based on connecting to various forms of multimedia content (pictures, videos, blog posts, etc.) created and distributed online by other consumers who share their own positive consumer experiences. Based on a sample of 673 respondents, we validate a theoretical model that confirms the influence of the different dimensions of the consumption experience of tourist destinations (sensory, emotional, cognitive, conative, and relational). The influence is exerted at the level of the flow experience and exploratory behavior—the experience lived as a combination of elements, of which the emotional dimension is among the strongest, due to the anxiety caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

One of the issues determining the economic situation of farms is the scope of their market integration. It can be therefore assumed that higher market integration leads to an improvement in the economic performance of households. The article has two aims. The first is to indicate the relationship between the degree of market integration of small-scale family farms and their economic condition. The second objective is to discover the determinants of the market integration of farms. The explanatory variables include economic (production value, total farm area, labour input, specialization of production) and demographic (farmer age, education level) factors. The novelty of our paper lies in in depth comparative analysis based on primary data from questionnaire surveys taken in 2018 and 2019 in five countries of Central and Eastern Europe: Serbia, Moldova, Lithuania Romania, and Poland. The results indicate is the existence of a statistically significant positive correlation between the degree of market integration and economic performance. Factors that favorably influence the level of market connection include the scale of production, specialization and, to some extent, level of farmowner’s education. The remaining variables are inconclusive or not statistically significant.

Economic sustainability plays an important role in shaping conditions for economic growth and social development. The importance of answering the question about the level of sustainability of family farms results from the fact that the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, apart from exceptions (e.g., the Czech Republic and Slovakia), are characterized by a fragmented agrarian structure. Hence, the main goal of this article was to answer two questions: (1) whether the countries of Central and Eastern Europe differ in the level of economic sustainability of small family farms; and (2) whether the same socioeconomic factors impact similarly on the level of economic sustainability of small family farms from countries of Central and Eastern Europe. The study was based on surveys conducted in small family farms: in 2018 from Poland (672 farms) and in 2019 in four other countries (Lithuania; 999 farms, Romania; 834 farms, Serbia; 523 farms, Moldova; 530 farms). The publication includes a critical analysis of the literature, structure analysis and correlation analysis. The results show the occurrence of large differences between the economic sustainability of small family farms from the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. The research indicates that the larger the area of a small-scale family farm, the greater its economic sustainability. The productivity of these farms increases with their economic sustainability. The results also prove a negative relationship between the age of the farmer and the economic sustainability of their farm in all analysed countries. These trends were found in all analysed countries of Central and Eastern Europe. The results of the analyses support the conclusion that agricultural policy instruments aimed at increasing the economic sustainability of small family farms should lead to: land consolidation, a decrease in the age of farm owners through generational changes, and a decrease in employment in agriculture, which would lead to a reduction in labour input in the agricultural sector.

The agricultural sector ensures food security and is a major source of employment, income, and economic activity in rural areas. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) considers that family farms are the key to a sustainable future in Europe and Central Asia. In Romania, small farms represent the pillar on which Romanian society has been developed. Although the trend has been a reduction in the number of small farms and an increase in the number of large farms, the Government of Romania understands the importance of small farms and therefore supports them through policies involving direct payments, rural development instruments, special initiatives, and loans and outstanding obligations, among others, which focus on increasing their economic performance. The aim of our research was to determine the relationship between farmers’ motivation, their job satisfaction, and the farm economic performance in the case of small Romanian farms. The research sample consisted of 900 small farms (utilized agricultural area (UAA): under 20 ha; standard output (SO): under EUR 15,000). The data obtained after applying the questionnaires were analyzed using SPSS 20.0 and Amos 24.0. For the exploratory factor analysis, values of Bartlett’s test of sphericity, the Kaiser–Meyer–Olkin test, and Cronbach’s alpha coefficient were calculated for each dimension of the proposed model. The hypothesis that motivation, job satisfaction, and farm economic performance directly and positively influence each other was confirmed. An important finding was that the correlation coefficient between farmers’ motivation and farm economic performance was ρ = 0.78, while that for the relation between farmers’ job satisfaction and farm economic performance was ρ = 0.53, which was similar to the correlation coefficient calculated for the relationship between farmers’ motivation and farmers’ job satisfaction. This result allows us to conclude that the influence of farmers’ motivation factors on farm economic performance is stronger than the influence of job satisfaction in the case of Romanian farmers on small farms. This might explain why, although work in agriculture is considered to be worse than an office job and the people that work in agriculture are sometimes stigmatized and receive lower incomes, there are still very strong motivators for Romanian farmers to continue their work in agriculture. This is proven by the fact that Romania has the highest number of small farms in Europe, and this number is not decreasing.

E-commerce’s latest trends, highlighted by the global phenomena of the COVID-19 pandemic, explicitly show substantial changes in the online consumers’ behavior as well. More and more specialists are talking about the emergence of a new paradigm in consumption, and of possible evolutions toward sustainable consumption. The purpose of this research is to investigate how the antecedents of e-loyalty have changed their effect on consumer attitudes and perceptions of e-commerce sites. The results, obtained through a structural model of 523 validated questionnaires of Romanian consumers of electronic and household appliances, show the importance of the effect of website accessibility, a factor that, until recently, exerted an influence mediated by other elements grouped either under the umbrella of site quality or site design. The model validated after the analysis shows the direct effect of the accessibility of the websites on e-loyalty, satisfaction and trust of the consumers. Based on the results, the value of this study lies in the fact that it presents arguments on how the boost of e-commerce systems leads to sales processes’ sustainability improvement and, to the same extent, the improvement of the ways for reporting sustainability using IT tools (online databases with customers, software integrated into e-commerce platforms, electronic financial management).

The purpose of the article was to indicate selected distribution channels in groups and organizations of fruit and vegetable producers in countries with different agrarian structures and cultures of horizontal organization, as well as identify differences in preferred distribution channels. Based on the literature review, changes in the supply chain of agri-food products were presented and the growing importance of retail chains was pointed out. Using the data obtained from the European Commission, the weight of individual distribution channels was presented, and by Ward agglomeration cluster analysis using Euclidean distances, 3 disjointed clusters of countries with different characteristics of fruit and vegetable producer groups/organizations were selected. The first cluster consisted of few producer groups/organizations from Great Britain, Denmark and Romania, whose members engaged in a relatively large area of land and dedicated (65%) their production to retail chains, thus obtaining, on average, higher effects (measured by sales value) attributable to both the group/organization and hectare of land. In contrast, the third cluster included producers from countries that are leaders in the production of fruit and vegetables in Europe, that is, from Spain, Italy, France and Poland. What was characteristic for them was that many members possessing a relatively small area of land joined groups/organisations. They dedicated their production (25%) to retail chains, and their advantage, which may affect the largest share of the average value of sales per member, is the processing of raw materials as part of their own operations.