According to the European Commission Energy Union strategy from 2015, some of the main objectives are to improve energy efficiency, reduce dependence on energy imports, cut emissions, and drive jobs and growth. Achieving the objectives of the Energy Union requires significant financing, particularly for investments in energy efficiency. Serbia and Croatia included the objectives of the Energy Union in their national strategies and have implemented various investment projects in this area. This paper focuses on the sustainability of energy efficiency projects for public buildings which include not only energy efficiency investment cost but also non-energy efficiency investments. By applying the European Commission methodology for cost-benefit analysis, we assessed the sustainability of several projects in Serbia and Croatia. The sustainability assessment is done by quantifying energy savings, greenhouse gas emission reductions and the social and economic benefits that are related to non-energy efficiency project components. The values of economic performance indicators imply that society would be better off with projects that would contribute to achieving not only the targets set in national energy strategies but also to creating broader social benefits.
Due to the global financial crisis the stock exchange indices of Southeastern European (SEE) countries are stagnating or are slowly recovering. The issuers of securities, namely banks that achieve good business results, may be in a dilemma whether to buy back their shares so as to slow down the share price decrease and manage capital. In this paper, the cointegration tests, Granger causality test and equilibrium error correction model were applied to examine: 1) interdependencies of stock exchange indexes in SEE countries (Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, Republic of Srpska, Macedonia - FYROM and Bulgaria); 2) interdependencies of most actively traded shares in Serbia and the representative index. The main conclusion is that it is not possible to successfully use the share buyback to stop or reduce the share price fall on a shallow capital market of SEE countries. This is opposite to what successful banks can do on deep capital markets. In interpreting quantitative results it is necessary to be cautious because of a small number of banks from SEE which were able to use share repurchase. [Projekat Ministarstva nauke Republike Srbije, br. 179065, br. 47009 i br. 179015]
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