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.

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Food safety represents a current topic, with significant implications and diverse approaches within the specialized literature. In the context of globalization and integration of agricultural markets, the necessity of guaranteeing food safety is imperative for the functionality of contemporary agricultural systems. The radical transformation of the national agricultural systems as a result of the influences imposed by the convergence with the requirements and directions of the European agricultural model entails a significant change for the markets of agri-food products, affecting the food trade, its structure and, implicitly, food safety. In this context, the main objective of the present paper is to examine food safety in Romania using an econometric approach to the phenomenon. Nine fundamental variables are considered, for which the causal relationship between food safety and the exogenous variables taken into analysis is tested. The time frame for data availability for all the variables is 1990-2011. The obtained results highlight the transformations of paradigm of the national agricultural model from the perspective of the dimensions regarding food safety, confirming results from previous studies.

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in terms of the EU enlargement from 15 to 27 states, the need to reform the cAP mechanisms was felt more than ever. reorientation towards rural development measures and not towards supporting agricultural production raised a whole issue in which the efficiency criteria of the agricultural policies are concerned. if until now the Union entire attention was directed towards industrial farms, the option to promote family farms, with lower returns but with a high social impact by mobilizing the human resources from the rural area towards this field and preventing migration towards the city and the industrial areas, raised fierce debates. This paper presents a brief analysis of the impact of re�focusing the cAP towards promoting family�farms, mostly of the subsistence type, in the romanian agrarian economy, in the context of an increased globalization of the agricultural relations.

In contemporary agricultural based economies, smallholder farmers are encouraged to organize and reunite themselves into different forms of association, for overcoming major challenges and obstacles imposed by the market functionality and barriers, land grabbing and land fragmentations, ownership rights or reducing transaction costs. But farmers are often resistant to associate, due to the way in which cooperation was made in the previous regime in Romania. The objectives of this paper are to identify both the farmers' willingness to associate in any associative form, considering the current economic context in which cooperatives are established on voluntary bases, and also to highlight the determinants of their willingness to join an associative form from the broad perspective of a short supply chain. The research is specific targeted to for vegetables and fruits producers. The results provide an overview of the intensions of the farmers' willingness to associate and create better comprehension of this situation in the Romanian agriculture. Consequently, the paper points out, that the probability of farmers' willingness to adhere to a associative form or in a short supply chain environmental responsible is often hampering by factors as: age, education level, cultivated area, activity type, year of establishment, opportunities to access financial support which confirms the gap between economic necessity to associate and the traditional restrictions.

This paper presents a heuristic methodology for estimating the possible variation of the liquid biofuel potential of a region, an appraisal made for a future period of time. The determination of the liquid biofuel potential has been made up either on the account of an average (constant) yield of the energetic crops that were used, or on the account of a yield that varies depending on a known trend, which can be estimated through a certain method. The proposed methodology uses the variation of the yield of energetic crops over time in order to simulate a variation of the biofuel potential for a future ten year time period. This new approach to the problem of determining the liquid biofuel potential of a certain land area can be useful for investors, as it allows making a more realistic analysis of the investment risk and of the possibilities of recovering the investment. On the other hand, the presented methodology can be useful to the governmental administration in order to elaborate strategies and policies to ensure the necessity of fuels and liquid biofuels for transportation, in a certain area. Unlike current methods, which approach the problem of determining the liquid biofuel potential in a deterministic way, by using econometric methods, the proposed methodology uses heuristic reasoning schemes in order to reduce the great number of factors that actually influence the biofuel potential and which usually have unknown values.

In completive economies, agriculture represents a vital sector in generating economic growth and provides significant employment for the rural population. Still, the recent transformation of the agricultural sector has generated massive debates on the implication of TNCs in providing sustainability and wellbeing for rural communities. The main aim of the manuscript is to provide a synoptic and integrative analysis of the implication of TNCs in agri-food sector by highlight the challenges, constraints and limits. The article outline a general framework of the main transformation of agri-food sector under the influence of foreign capital and present ways in which the CSR could be applied in agri-food sector for reducing discrepancies and poverty.