Research background: Enterprises manage earnings in an effort to balance their profit fluctuations to provide increasingly consistent earnings in every reporting period. Earnings management is legal and very effective method of accounting techniques and may be used to obtain specific objectives of the enterprises involving the manipulation of accruals. Therefore, there is a need to analyze it in the context of group of countries, while the issue of their detection in the new ways appears.  Purpose of the article: The analysis of annual earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT) of 5,640 enterprises from the Visegrad Four during the period 2009–2018 confirms that the development of earnings management in these countries is not a randomness. Thus, the aim of this article is to determine the existence of positive trend in earnings management and to detect the change-point in its development for each Visegrad country. Methods: Grubbs test, Mann-Kendall trend test and Buishand test were used as appropriate statistical methods. Mann-Kendall test identifies significant monotonic trend occurrence in earnings manipulation in every country. Buishand test indicates significant years, which divides the development of EBIT into two homogenous groups with individual central lines. Findings & Value added: Based on the statistical analysis applied, we rejected randomness in the managing of earning, but we determined the trend of its increasing. The positive earnings manipulation was not homogenous in the analyzed period, however, a change-point was defined. Year 2014 was identified as a break-point for Slovak, Polish and Hungarian enterprises considering the earnings manipulation. Year 2013 was detected as a change-point in Czech enterprises. The methodical approach used may be very helpful for researchers from other countries to determine, detect and understand earnings management as well as for the investors to make decisions based on a specificities of an individual country.

Earnings management is one of the most challenging, debated and controversial topics in finance and financial management. Organisational, legislative, and social norms regarding the ethics of earnings management may vary significantly, with the views of top management and economic environment playing significant roles in shaping the organisational social norm. Thus, the aim of this research is to assess if earnings management is the common practice of enterprises within V4 countries. A novel approach of the selection process to assess the ability of selected earnings management detection models was applied. To highlight discrepancies and similarities among the countries, the non-parametric alternative of analysis of variance was applied. The research confirmed that enterprises do manipulate earnings, typical is upward manipulation. Furthermore, the research unveiled the extent of manipulation with earnings in unique country samples and thus emphasised the importance of both corporate and national ethical principles and managerial decisions, which affect corporate financial reporting quality. However, it is increasingly challenging to identify various aspects and incentives which forced enterprises operating at the global level to smooth and inflate earnings to improve earnings presented in the financial statements and to misinterpret financial results.

Abstract:The recent transformation of the national economies has raised numerous theoretical and practical aspects in measuring economic growth, welfare, environmental performance, and competitiveness, representing a challenging research topic within the context of economic paradigm transformation. Despite its importance, a fully operational model to be used in any context has not yet been designed. The main aim of this paper is to evaluate and analyze the macroeconomic dimension of the three determinants of sustainable competitiveness: the economic environment, the social environment, and the natural environment, at both the European and Romanian levels. This paper used the Hierarchical Clustering methodology, aiming at evaluating the global competitiveness in terms of a sustainable development model, using four indices: Human Development Index, Environmental Performance Index, Global Competitiveness Index, and GDP per capita. The clusters were designed on the basis of the role of the indices in assessment of the sustainable performances of the countries and also of the possible convergences between them. The results could sustain the conclusion that these indices are not able to offer an exhaustive image of the sustainable performances assessment. A new complex indicator could be considered in order to design a convergence model for the EU member states.

Analysing the impact of agricultural performance on foreign trade concentration and competitiveness defines an important step in identifying the opportunities, challenges and proactive measures in designing a functional and marked based agricultural model. The scope of this study is to investigate the evolution of Romania’s the foreign trade competitiveness and its concentration on main destinations during 2007–2016. In this context, in the paper are identified and investigated some of the competitiveness’ mutations arisen from the Romania’s trade flows concentration and restructuration in relation with 26 of the European Union member states. It was used a unique dataset on agro -food trade output and concentration across EU countries to construct measures of trade competitiveness. The results obtained suggest the existence of a dual relationship of the Romanian agriculture competitiveness and its dependence on the EU economic area, by the concentration of the commercial relationships.

Environmental taxation represents a key influence on sustainable development in post-transition countries. Romania has experienced important transformations of environmental policy, including taxation, due to sustained reliance on traditional energy sources to satisfy its energy needs. The aim of this paper is to show a possible causal relationship between the Romanian GDP and several explanatory variables related to taxation of environmental damage and energy generation and consumption in the country. In order to do this, the authors make use of several statistical tests to verify the existence of a meaningful relationship between economic variables expressed in time series. The study has also attempted to identify the influence of environmental taxation on ensuring green economic development, starting from the premise that for emergent economies these taxes provide both a GDP increase and prevent environmental degradation by decreasing the pollution and environmentally harmful supplies and practices.