Deliver Smart, Not More! Building Economically Sustainable Competitiveness on the Ground of High Agri-Food Trade Specialization in the EU.

Competitiveness has always been a multifaceted illusive concept, which has made it a real challenge for scholars and practitioners to find the most suitable measurement tools to completely encapsulate all the complex nuances of competitiveness. This becomes even more of a challenge when approached in relation to particular economic sectors. The agri-food sector is no exception, especially when considering all its interconnections with the other sectors: water, energy, transport, waste.

The Need for Cybersecurity in Industrial Revolution and Smart Cities.

Cities have grown in development and sophistication throughout human history. Smart cities are the current incarnation of this process, with increased complexity and social importance. This complexity has come to involve significant digital components and has thus come to raise the associated cybersecurity concerns.

A Crisis in the Health System and Quality of Healthcare in Economically Developed Countries.

A health crisis caused by a pandemic tested the effectiveness of national healthcare systems by testing both financing and organizational and technical performance of patient care. At that time, the structural flaws in healthcare systems and inequalities in the level of healthcare in its different dimensions and countries due to resource constraints were highlighted. Therefore, the paper concentrates on investigating how the crisis in the health system affects the quality of healthcare services as a result of changes in the availability of financial, material, and human resources belonging to this system.

Do Smart Cities Represent the Key to Urban Resilience? Rethinking Urban Resilience.

The pandemic disrupted all activities, so it became necessary to understand, but also rethink, the complexity of economic resilience to better deal with future shocks. A component that can signal the resilience potential of a socio-economic system is smart city response, using technology to make services more efficient. This paper aims to analyze the relationship between smart cities and urban resilience to determine whether urban resilience is significantly influenced by urban smartness.

Tsallis Entropy for Loss Models and Survival Models Involving Truncated and Censored Random Variables.

The aim of this paper consists in developing an entropy-based approach to risk assessment for actuarial models involving truncated and censored random variables by using the Tsallis entropy measure. The effect of some partial insurance models, such as inflation, truncation and censoring from above and truncation and censoring from below upon the entropy of losses is investigated in this framework. Analytic expressions for the per-payment and per-loss entropies are obtained, and the relationship between these entropies are studied.

Ozone pollution in London and Edinburgh: spatiotemporal characteristics, trends, transport and the impact of COVID-19 control measures.

Air pollution remains the most serious environmental health issue in the United Kingdom while also carrying non-trivial economic costs. The COVID-19 lockdown periods reduced anthropogenic emissions and offered unique conditions for air pollution research. This study sources fine-granularity geo-spatial air quality and meteorological data for the capital cities of two UK countries (i.

The Measurement of Social Capital in America: A Reassessment.

One of the more successful approaches to the measurement of social capital across US counties relies on a two-step algorithm procedure. In the first step, ten variables accounting for the per capita number of various types of voluntary organizations are averaged to generate an Aggregate Index. In the second step, the Aggregate Index and three other factors are used to extract an overall Social Capital Index.

A Cognitive Systems Engineering Approach Using Unsupervised Fuzzy C-Means Technique, Exploratory Factor Analysis and Network Analysis-A Preliminary Statistical Investigation of the Bean Counter Profiling Scale Robustness.

A bean counter is defined as an accountant or economist who makes financial decisions for a company or government, especially someone who wants to severely limit the amount of money spent. The rise of the bean counter in both public and private companies has motivated us to develop a Bean Counter Profiling Scale in order to further depict this personality typology in real organizational contexts. Since there are no scales to measure such traits in personnel, we have followed the methodological steps for elaborating the scale's items from the available qualitative literature and further employed a cognitive systems engineering approach based on statistical architecture, employing cluster, factor and items network analysis to statistically depict the best mathematical design of the scale.

A Parallel Mediation Analysis on the Effects of Pandemic Accentuated Occupational Stress on Hospitality Industry Staff Turnover Intentions in COVID-19 Context.

The purpose of this research was to analyze how different effects of the COVID pandemic, expressed through pandemic accentuated occupational stress, perceived job insecurity, occupational safety and health perception and perceived organizational effectiveness, may impact turnover intentions of the personnel in the hospitality industry. Our research team designed an online questionnaire which was analyzed with network analysis to depict the relationship between factors, and, then, a confirmatory factor analysis was employed to confirm the distribution of the items to the envisaged five factors. Based on a sample of 324 randomized Romanian hospitality industry staff, the results of our cross-sectional study revealed that occupational safety and health perception, perceived organizational effectiveness and perceived job insecurity in the pandemic accentuated occupational stress to indirectly and significantly impact hospitality industry staff turnover intentions (TI).

Particularities of Telework Applicable to the Health System in the Context of the COVID-19 Pandemic.

The paper aims to highlight how physician-patient relationships have evolved amid the COVID-19 pandemic by considering telework implementation into the healthcare sector. The article presents the peculiarities of using telework within the medical system given the recent epidemiological context, by pointing out the advantages and disadvantages of its adoption. To achieve this goal, a qualitative marketing research was conducted to identify physicians' opinions and perceptions on telework.

Development of a Mobile App for Self-Care Against COVID-19 Using the Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, and Evaluation (ADDIE) Model: Methodological Study.

Background: Mobile apps have been shown to play an important role in the management, care, and prevention of infectious diseases. Thus, skills for self-care-one of the most effective ways to prevent illness-can be improved through mobile health apps.

Objective: This study aimed to design, develop, and evaluate an educational mobile-based self-care app in order to help the self-prevention of COVID-19 in underdeveloped countries.

The Nexus between Pollution and Obesity and the Magnifying Role of Media Consumption: International Evidence from GMM Systems Estimates.

The aim of this paper is to uncover the associations between air pollution, media consumption, and the prevalence of obesity. Based on data availability, this study draws on an unbalanced panel of 28 countries and develops and extracts relationships through robust System-General Method of Moments (Sys-GMM) estimators that account for the dynamic nature and high persistence of the variables of interest. In light of previous findings, economic development, trade openness, and government consumption are included as controls in the dynamic panel models.

Environmental Uncertainty, Environmental Regulation and Enterprises' Green Technological Innovation.

This paper examines the impact of environmental uncertainty and environmental regulation on enterprises' green technological innovation, using a panel data of Chinese A-share listed companies in Shanghai and Shenzhen from 2005 to 2019 to conduct an empirical study using an OLS model and Poisson regression model. We employ environmental complexity and environmental dynamism to measure environmental uncertainty, and we have the following findings: first, both environmental uncertainty and environmental regulation promote enterprises' green technological innovation, while environmental regulation has positive moderating effects on the relationship between environmental uncertainty and enterprises' green technological innovation; second, environmental complexity positively affects enterprises' green technological innovation, while environmental dynamism has negative effects on enterprises' green technological innovation; third, environmental regulation accentuates the relationship between environmental complexity and green technological innovation, while it weakens the relationship between environmental dynamism and green technological innovation.

A review of the sustainability of vaccine funding across Europe and implications for post-COVID policymaking.

Background: Approaches to routine vaccine funding and the underlying budget-setting process vary greatly across European countries. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has put enormous pressure on healthcare systems, affecting resilience of the overall vaccine ecosystem.

Methods: This article reviews how vaccine budgets are structured across 8 European countries (England, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, Romania, and Spain).

Children-Robot Friendship, Moral Agency, and Aristotelian Virtue Development.

Social robots are increasingly developed for the companionship of children. In this article we explore the moral implications of children-robot friendships using the Aristotelian framework of virtue ethics. We adopt a moderate position and argue that, although robots cannot be virtue friends, they can nonetheless enable children to exercise ethical and intellectual virtues.

Predictors of Economic Outcomes among Romanian Youth: The Influence of Education-An Empirical Approach Based on Elastic Net Regression.

Young people have to be provided with opportunities to access prosperous, resilient and fulfilling lives. Investing in education and skills is considered one of the most important ways to support young people's well-being and to enable them to enjoy good career prospects. Using the framework of human capital theory, we explored the role of education among the factors explaining wage variation among Romanian youth.

Health risks of airplane boarding methods with apron buses when some passengers disregard safe social distancing.

Many airlines instituted social distancing practices to keep passengers safe during the pandemic. The practices include keeping the middle seats empty, reducing the number of passengers taking an apron bus from the terminal to the airplane, and prescribing that passengers maintain 1 m social distance of separation from other passengers in the aisle while advancing to their seats. However, not all passengers comply with a prescribed 1 m aisle social distance.

A Bibliometric Analysis of Research Publications of the Bucharest University of Economic Studies in Time of Pandemics: Implications for Teachers' Professional Publishing Activity.

The epidemic has forced the academic world, regardless of nation of origin, to unify to find a response to the economic and social difficulties we confront as quickly as possible. This paper investigates how academic performance in terms of scientific publications, especially during the pandemic period, may constitute the premises for boosting professional well-being. The analysis focuses on the researchers and professors of the Bucharest Academy of Economic Studies, analysing in a comparative way the academic performance during the pandemic as a fundamental side of their professional career.

Exploring the Moderation and Mediation Effects in Addressing the Main Determinants of Income Inequalities in Supporting Quality of Life: Insights from CEE Countries.

Income inequality has become an increasingly pressing economic and social problem in Europe, especially in emerging countries with more significant inequalities than the EU average. The high-level inequality persistence can decrease well-being by accentuating the shortcomings at the household level, increasing poverty and social exclusion, generating political instability, leading to a decline in social cohesion, and, finally, a weakening of the Union as a whole. In this context, the paper aims to identify the main determinants of income inequality across the CEE countries and their significant implications in supporting the quality of life and well-being, highlighting the mediation and moderation effects.

Green Jobs-A Literature Review.

In the past two decades the topic of "green jobs" has drawn particular attention, resulting in a widely diverse and relatively large number of published papers. Although a determinant for the increase of knowledge, the heterogeneity of these studies may raise the issue of a systematic documentation of the key contributions in this field. In this context, the present research focuses on analyzing the scientific literature published in the last five years on the topic of "green jobs" with the aim to identify definitions and meanings associated with the concept of "green jobs", the connected terms, areas of research interest and the main theoretical and practical results.

Does Circular Economy Contribute to Smart Cities' Sustainable Development?

The purpose of this research paper is to investigate and identify the factors which can support the development of one characteristic of smart cities, namely, the smart environment. More specifically, the main goal is to measure the extent to which air pollution may be reduced, taking as determinants several circular economy, fiscal, and environmental factors. The Ordinary Least Squares, the Fixed Effects, and Random Effects regression models using balanced panel data were employed, over the 2011-2019 period, for 28 European states.

Our experience with 80 cases of SARS-CoV-2-Clostridioides difficile co-infection: An observational study.

Beside the changes in the gut microbiota in context of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection, the increased use of high-risk broad-spectrum antibiotics during the actual pandemic raises concerns about a possible increase of Clostridioides difficile infections (CDIs). We retrospectively analyzed 80 consecutive patients, with SARS-CoV-2 pneumonia and CDI. The mean length of hospitalization was 19.

New Wave of COVID-19 Vaccine Opinions in the Month the 3rd Booster Dose Arrived.

Vaccination has been proposed as one of the most effective methods to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. Since the day the first vaccine, with an efficiency of more than 90%, was announced, the entire vaccination process and its possible consequences in large populations have generated a series of discussions on social media. Whereas the opinions triggered by the administration of the initial COVID-19 vaccine doses have been discussed in depth in the scientific literature, the approval of the so-called 3rd booster dose has only been analyzed in country-specific studies, primarily using questionnaires.

Casorati Inequalities for Statistical Submanifolds in Kenmotsu Statistical Manifolds of Constant -Sectional Curvature with Semi-Symmetric Metric Connection.

In this paper, we prove some inequalities between intrinsic and extrinsic curvature invariants, namely the normalized δ-Casorati curvatures and the scalar curvature of statistical submanifolds in Kenmotsu statistical manifolds of constant ϕ-sectional curvature that are endowed with semi-symmetric metric connection. Furthermore, we investigate the equality cases of these inequalities. We also describe an illustrative example.