Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are crucial for local economic development, playing a noteworthy role in job creation, poverty alleviation and economic growth, but they encounter many funding barriers. The purpose of the current paper is to investigate the impact of investments and innovation on territorial economic growth, as measured by turnover, for Romanian active enterprises, especially SMEs, over the period 2009–2017. By estimating several log–log linear regressions, the quantitative outcomes provide support for a positive influence of investments on turnover. The association was confirmed both for all active enterprises at the national level, as well as for micro, small, middle-sized and big companies. As regards expenditures on innovation, a positive impact on turnover was acknowledged for all enterprises and particularly for big companies, but there was an absence of any statistically significant relation in the case of SMEs. The impact of firm size on turnover was positive for all active enterprises at the national level, along with active micro-units. Also, the estimation results show a positive impact of the number of active micro-units on territorial economic growth. The empirical findings are relevant to managers and policymakers in order to stimulate, encourage and offer support to SMEs’ development through their strategies.

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The objective of this study is to explore the impact of electronic commerce on employment rate for a sample covering the whole 27 Member States of the European Union (EU-27), from 2010 to 2019. Moreover, this research explores the clusters of nations with reference to electronic commerce adoption and employment rate dynamics. The outcomes of cluster analysis show that Western Europe reveals the most developed e-commerce marketplace in EU-27, shown by Internet accessibility and high penetration rate of digital tools, and the lowest figures are registered in the Eastern part of Europe. Furthermore, the empirical findings of the panel data fixed-effects and the generalized least squares regressions suggest that electronic commerce influences employment rate positively. By including country-level control variables (real GDP growth rate, research and development expenditure, employed ICT specialists, enterprises with Internet access), the outcomes reveal that one percentage change in enterprises’ total turnover from e-commerce sales, enterprises’ turnover from web sales, and enterprises with e-commerce sales of at least 1% turnover will increase employment rate by 0.205, 0.258, and 0.350 percentage points. Furthermore, the econometric evidence from the method of moments quantile regression models with fixed effects reinforces our findings. Enterprises’ total turnover from e-commerce sales and the percentage of enterprises with e-commerce sales of at least 1% turnover positively influence employment rate for all quintiles, but in the case of enterprises’ turnover from web sales, the effect is positive only for the quintiles ranging from 0.5–0.8.

Reducing road fatalities by Intelligent Transport System (ITS) implementation was an objective of EU Commission through e-Safety plan, initiated in 2004. E-call technology aims to reduce the intervention time for road accidents by sending a Minimum Set of Data (MSD), containing relevant information regarding the position, car identification, time, to nearest Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP) using mobile network. The service chain planned that after MSD is received by 112, a voice channel to be established between 112 and the car, which sent the MSD, in case of ordinary emergency calls, the call initiator being the person in emergency situations. The approaching deadline of eCall implementation, on March 2018, as free European harmonized emergency service, rise a series of technical and operational issues presented in this paper. The Romanian roadmap of e-Call technology adoption is presented, together with national and EU funded project that participated to technical and operational setting for eCall service. Moreover, the adopted Romanian pilot site solution is explained in the context of emergency system organization. Current research, regarding eCall extension to long distance coaches, heavy goods vehicle (HGV), dangerous goods and motorcycles, as result of iHeERO CEF funded project and previous research is also debated