Abstract. This empirical study investigates the determinants of self-employment propensity of Polish and Romanian immigrants in Germany. The German economy is an important object of analysis, as it is the most important destination for international migrants in the European Union. In the paper, we use the recently collected M sample of the German Socio-Economic Panel to examine which personal, country of birth-specific socio-economic and cultural factors influence the self-employment propensity of immigrants. The results of binominal logit regression show that the Central European migrants exhibit different self-employment propensity than migrants from former Yugoslavia, Russian and Kazakhstan, Turkey and Italy, with the self-employment aversion especially strong among Romanians. These differences remain substantial even after controlling for social and human capital endowment of the individuals. This study offers important policy recommendations, showing the potential obstacles in encouraging entrepreneurial activity of immigrants. This topic is becoming increasingly important with the current migration crisis in the EU, caused by intensive inflow of asylum-seeking foreigners in 2015.

Following China’s “One Belt One Road” global economic expansion strategy, Chinese small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) along with state-owned, large corporations are increasingly seeking business opportunities internationally. Little is known about the process of small firms’ international opportunity creation and discovery in this particular context. This study examines the role of Chinese SME manager’s global mindset in driving their international opportunity identification through two key activities in their internationalization process: international knowledge based and networking activities. Data were collected from a survey of 191 small and medium-sized enterprises in China. The results of structural equation modelling show that Chinese SME managers’ global mindset has a positive effect on both international networking and knowledge acquisition activities, which in turn have positive effects on the development of international opportunities. The findings suggest that SMEs, while going through the internationalization process, rely extensively on social interaction with foreign business partners to obtain knowledge of the customers and institutions in the foreign market.

The main objective of the paper is to identify and explore patterns and dynamics of transatlantic scientific collaboration in the field of strategic management between the United States (US) and European countries (EUC) during the last quarter century. Scholarly connections between countries, cities and institutions on the basis of co-author affiliations were analysed to determine the knowledge flow from a geographical perspective. This is the first time international scientific collaboration between researchers in the field of strategic management has been studied to such an extent. We employed all sources of relevant data from the Web of Science and Scopus databases and explored 453 results. Utilizing a bibliometric analysis, our study offers a comprehensive and up-todate identification and assessment of the current situation and dynamics of transatlantic scientific collaboration. The obtained results confirm the dominant role of the US in this type of collaboration. Also, the dominant role of several clusters in terms of collaboration, both on country and institution levels can also be observed. The study confirms the weaker position of Eastern and Central Europe countries in this collaboration and provides some recommendations to increase this type of knowledge exchange in the future.

The socio-economic development of economic-territorial units subordinate to administrative-management institutions appears as one of the main tasks. The values of alternative indicators reflecting socio-economic development may differ, which makes it difficult to unambiguously assess the importance of the indicators. The applied available methods are either too receptive or does not provide sufficient accuracy. The proposed FARE-M methodology for determining the importance of indicators is the prolongation of the technique for establishing the importance of FARE (Factor Relationship) weights already used for research purposes. The employed technique is based on the internal balance of system elements that is the essential systemic feature. This allows, unlike in the case of the AHP method, the weights of the indicators to be determined with reference to the first row of the data matrix only.

The main goal of setting energy efficiency priorities is to find ways to reduce energy consumption without harming consumers and the environment. The renovation of buildings can be considered one of the main aspects of energy efficiency in the European Union (EU). In the EU, only 5% of the renovation projects have been able to yield energy-saving at the deep renovation level. No other study has thus far ranked the EU member states according to achieved results in terms of increased usage in renewable sources, a decrease in energy usage and import, and reduction in harmful gas emissions due to energy usage. The main purpose of this article is to perform a comparative analysis of EU economies according to selected indicators related to the usage of renewable resources, energy efficiency, and emissions of harmful gasses as a result of energy usage. The methodological contribution of our study is related to developing a complex and robust research method for investment efficiency assessment allowing the study of three groups of indicators related to the usage of renewable energy sources, energy efficiency, and ecological aspects of energy. It was based on the PROMETHEE II method and allows testing it in other time periods, as well as modifying it for research purposes. The EU member states were categorized by such criteria as energy from renewables and biofuels, final energy consumption from renewables and biofuels, gross electricity generation from renewables and biofuels and import dependency, and usage of renewables and biofuels for heating and cooling. The results of energy per unit of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), Greenhouse gasses (GHG) emissions per million inhabitants (ECO2), energy per capita, the share of CO2 emissions from public electricity, and heat production from total CO2 emissions revealed that Latvia, Sweden, Portugal, Croatia, Austria, Lithuania, Romania, Denmark, and Finland are the nine most advanced countries in the area under consideration. In the group of the most advanced countries, energy consumption from renewables and biofuels is higher than the EU average.