The prevalence of H. pylori infection or atrophy remains high in Latvia. Determining the right cutoff value is critically important for pepsinogen-based atrophy detection in Europe in order to objectively stratify gastric cancer risk.

The agreement was substantially higher for intestinal metaplasia than for atrophy. This could result in discrepancies when the operative link for gastritis assessment and operative link for assessment of intestinal metaplasia staging systems are applied and can be caused by differences in the criteria used to define atrophy.

Over a 6-year period, a collaboration has been developed between a group in Cambridge, UK, and two Latvian Universities, Stockholm School of Economics in Riga and other organisations, including Riga City Council, supported by the British Embassy Riga and the Latvian Embassy in London, enabling structured processes to be developed to identify aspiring entrepreneurs based in Latvia and Estonia and provide education, coaching, mentoring and encouragement first in the home territory, leading to an intense whole-week development venture camp in Cambridge for selected candidates. The programme was extended to provide ongoing business development support for a number of entrepreneurial companies with global potential, and the developing venture camp activities attracted, supported and helped accelerate the evolution in Riga of an innovative ecosystem providing leadership in the Baltics. Practical examples of cross-border knowledge and technology transfers have been recorded as part of the Cambridge–Riga Venture Camp process. This report presents the development, content and outcomes of this innovative project aimed at supporting the emergence of entrepreneurial and innovative capabilities of Latvian delegates to the project. Detailed appendices including data and narrative based survey of outcomes and assessments containing structured feedback from delegates participating in the 2020 Cambridge-Riga Venture Camp are available as the Supplementary material online. This is an interim report, since the activity is ongoing and continuously developing.

In the period 2013-2017 Latvian corporate bond market had experienced the abrupt growth of the number of public Latvian corporate bond issues outstanding. The base of the expansion was formed by the financing activity of Latvian financial sector issuers (FSIs) with their weight in the pool of corporate bond issues listed in Nasdaq Riga at 85%. In 2019, FSIs remain the main issuer in Latvian corporate bond market (64% of the number of issues (Nasdaq Baltic, 2019)). The financing needs and preferences of the FSIs not only shape the segment profitability but also build Latvian corporate bond market sustainability. Academic papers provide broad motivation for corporate debt issuing: an efficient competition to bank funding, long-term financing, improvement of the cash flow by decreasing the cost of debt, optimization of the financial structure, and efficient ownership structure. The existing academic research is modest on the analysis of the FSI segment as the issuer segment in the debt market where academics do analyse the corporate bonds issuance by the FSIs where motivating factors stimulating FSIs to come to the public debt market are seldom separated while size and characteristics of the issuers are mostly scrutinised. The aim of this article is to analyse the determinant of the development of the FSI segment of the corporate bond market in Latvia by defining the factors stimulating the bond issuing decision as made by the FSI segment. This article provides primary data analysis of both survey and in-depth interviews with Latvian FSI segment representatives run in the period June-August 2017. The results of the analysis indicate that bank borrowing is not treated as the funding alternative for FSIs where issuing debt and equity funding are the recognised funding sources of the FSI segment. The growing role of the peer-to-peer platform financing is recognised and will further influence the FSI segment alternative financing. The main factors motivating FSIs to come to the debt market are reputation a company gets as the result of the bond issue, strategical ambition to be present in the public market, cost of funding in the long-term (more than 3 years). The methods used in this article are scientific publication analysis, document analysis, expert survey, in-depth interviews, and statistical data analysis.