Firms are driving forces of economic and social development; therefore it is important to understand what is their primary goal or purpose. The aim of the paper is twofold. First, the paper presents baseline theoretical concepts on the firms' purposes. Secondly, the paper presents the results of the empirical study in Slovenia with which we tried to determine how firms' purposes are perceived by their managers and how they see their responsibility to owners and other stakeholders. The empirical study was based on a survey that was sent to the management of 1400 Slovenian mediumsized and big companies, of which about one third responded. The survey questionnaire was pre-tested through interviewing five top managers in five Slovenian firms with different ownership structure. On the basis of the empirical study it is possible to conclude that, on average, Slovenian firms put the interests of all stakeholders before the interests of only shareholders. So it seems that the majority of managers follow the stakeholder approach in the governance model.
The purpose of this article is to show that the current European Union (EU) legal framework is unnecessarily restrictive and unduly suppresses economic and developmental initiatives in many stagnating regions across Europe. More innovative industrial policies, instruments and measures should be adopted in a highly decentralized manner across the EU. Between the ‘laissez-faire’ and ‘dirigiste’ approaches, there is significant room to maneuver for more pro-active industrial and development policies. New forms of industrial policies could and should be reinvented and implemented across the EU – not to harm or distort competition, but rather to further enhance it. More than one form and framework exist for a Single Market and for the competition policies.Modern industrial policy presupposes high-quality public institutions with highly competent administration. It requires autonomy and accountability of the public administration to counter the pressures of various interest groups. The proposal to revive and articulate modern types of industrial policies across the EU is a call for comprehensive economic and social restructuring. The task of modern industrial policy is to organize and strengthen capabilities of restructuring in the direction of high-productivity activities.
The ongoing European crisis has revealed many deficiencies in the existing European institutional architecture. One of the crucial deficiencies is the unsustainable European regional disparity between the most developed European regions and those regions that are falling behind—a gap that is growing. This pattern of development creates an unsustainable pattern for the future development of the EU. The gap between the advanced segments of society with access to up-to-date knowledge, skills, technology, capital, and other resources and the excluded segments of society is also growing within the advanced European regions. Such observations indicate the need for far stronger anti-dualist economic, social, and legal policy at all levels of European polity. The EU’s response to the crisis has been inadequate as it has ignored the diversity of needs as well as opportunities for local and regional populations across the EU. Instead of focusing the economic, social, and legal reconstruction on a “one size fits all” model imposed from the top, the EU should spur local and regional innovations, initiatives, and development dynamics from below. Thus, in the EU, we need more policy space as well as more opportunities for economic, legal, social, and political innovations at the local, regional, and national levels. We need to create an EU that supports—not suppresses—diversity, sustainability, plurality, and the co-existence of institutional models. The idea of subsidiarity, diversity, and initiatives from below should be revived in order to create a more sustainable future for the EU.
The network of international economic, political, and social organizations established at the initiative of the first world constitute a nascent global state whose function is to realize the interests of the powerful states to the disadvantage of third world states and peoples. The evolving global state formation may therefore be described as having a neo-imperial character.
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