The digital world requires the implementation of new technologies and customer-driven business transformation. As the tourism sector may experience unanticipated ways of developing new technologies due to the current global health crisis, the standard travel experience could be changed. The main aim of this study was to analyze the influence of digitalization and tourists’ preferences in terms of accommodation and economic well-being implying sustainability. This paper applied a regression analysis and principal component analysis to achieve the above objective. Research exposed the fact that tourists’ preferences towards green destinations and ecological accommodation establishments, as well as Internet use in travel planning, may have a significant influence on the sustainability of tourism. This study identified behavioral models of 30 European countries from the sustainable tourism and digitalization perspective and made recommendations on economic and social policy measures to ensure the sustainable nature of tourism activity.

The perspective of ecological footprint, which is a tool for measuring and monitoring the sustainability of the new information society and the higher degree of openness in the European economy powered by the globalization process, was approached from the viewpoint of accelerated technical, scientific, and innovative progress. This research aims at identifying and forecasting patterns of environmental footprint behavior in European countries, depending on factors reflecting the innovation activity, the degree of economic freedom, and EU membership status. In the article, three factors are identified that explain to a large extent the variation of the ecological footprint values: employment in foreign controlled enterprises, eco-innovation index, and region. The statistical and econometric methods used in the analysis are aimed at applying a Proportional-Odds Cumulative Logistic regression model in order to verify the existence of the association between the statistical variables and to forecast the likelihood of changing the ecological footprint from a lower to a higher score under the impact of selected factors by quantifying their influence. The results have led to the conclusion that, by applying the model, both the share of the employed population in the foreign-controlled enterprises and the eco-innovation index will have a significant direct influence on the variability in the ecological footprint (through the odds-ratio). Referring to the EU membership, the model shows that non-EU member countries or newer EU member countries are predominantly assigned low ecological footprint scores.

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The complexity of the challenges faced by the world economy over the past decades is a clear indication that the linear economic model that starts with the exploitation of resources and ends with the disposal of waste is almost reaching its limits. These limitations are obvious in the following areas: resource exploitation, environment, economic added value of a unit of consumed resource, and also on the labour market. Under these circumstances, the circular economy model, which provides feasible solutions for all of these areas where the linear economic model shows its limitations, becomes an alternative to be taken into account. Although these challenges are global in nature, it is obvious that a functional global circular economy can be built incrementally starting from the interconnection of national circular economies that rely on interconnected regional circular economies. Using this hypothesis, in this paper we propose an indicator that can be used for a multi-criteria evaluation of the potential for developing a circular economy at national level, for the case of Romania. Our proposed approach allows the assessment of the county's potential based on a six-dimensional indicator and on 16 individual variables, built on a methodology similar to the one used for the indicator measuring the potential of an economy to attract foreign direct investment proposed by UNCTAD (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development) in WIR2012 (World Investment Report 2012). Thus, using the 16 variables collected for the period 2008-2014, the circular economy potential indicator was calculated based on the NIS and NTRO databases. Among the most important empirical results are the identification of the concentration poles, which, in 2014, are represented by the city of Bucharest and by the counties: Brăila, Constanta, Mureş, Alba, Sibiu and Maramureş and the identification of areas with low potential, which are Oltenia, Muntenia and the central and north-eastern area of Moldova.

The contemporary lifestyle, based on unsustainable consumption patterns, leads to an orientation of the society towards the development and application of sustainable development strategies and policies. The comparative analysis of the ecological footprint and biocapacity allows one to study the interaction between human activities and environment, through the biocapacity reserve or deficit. In this context, this article carries out a complex analysis of the biocapacity reserve/deficit, as a latent variable that quantifies sustainability, viewed through a selection of determinants, from which three main components have been extracted: A component of education and social exclusion, a component of economic development, innovation, and environment, and a demographic component. These were transformed—through a multiple linear regression model—into exogenous variables with high explanatory power over the variation of the biocapacity reserve/deficit and constituted the tools in identifying behavioral patterns of the European countries and a set of measures leading to the sustainability of the ecological reserve.