Austerity is a concept that is often used in the public debate. It refers to fiscal policy measures that reduce government spending and raise taxes for the purposes of closing a government budget deficit. This paper analyzes the concept in the context of the current European economic crisis and...

The paper investigates effects of fiscal decentralization on non-oil sector development in case of Azerbaijan for the quarterly period of 2002 through 2013. Results obtained from Auto-regressive Distributed Lag Bounds Testing approach show that share of local expenditures and revenues in total,...

Do budget institutions play a role in explaining why government effectiveness is higher in some advanced countries than in others? Employing an original panel dataset that spans four different years (1991, 2003, 2007 and 2012) we find that budget centralization has a negative and significant...

After the financial crisis, there has been considerable debate about the role of corporations in society. It has become broadly accepted that corporations - particularly the world's largest publicly traded corporations – need to be governed with respect for the society and the environment....

The cooperative movement gathered, for the International Co-operative Alliance Global Conference and General Assembly “Co-operatives: Putting people at the centre of development”, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on 14-17 November 2017. More than 1,800 delegates from over 70 countries were...

Most Latin American countries bring the theme of regional integration into their respective Constitutions, keeping Simon Bolívar’s dream of Pátria Grande alive. This dream, considering the complex geopolitical and geoeconomic relations of today, results in a series of economic, social and...

In this paper, we examine major trends and potential for cooperatives in the context of four prominent socio-economic issues: the lack of jobs, economic and social inequality, educational mobility, and the priority need for innovations. We present recent data on the amount and types of job...

The Research Workshop “Towards an enabling ecosystem for social enterprises”, organized within the framework of the COST Action “Empowering the next generation of social enterprise scholars” (Empower-SE) was held at the University of Bucharest, Faculty of Sociology and Social Work in...

A short survey of such a vast subject matter cannot be complete. It remains a reasoned but arbitrary collection of ideas, data, facts and figures, biased by the personal experience of the author and his access to sources, inevitably leaving gaps. In the first part of the paper, the...