The purpose of this paper is to determine how companies in the South-East European countries responded to the crisis caused by COVID-19 pandemic and work from home challenges, and what could be done in the future to overcome obstacles of working remotely. Forced by the pandemic to change the working style, companies needed to find the best possible solutions to ensure a sufficient level of working activities. Since such a challenge was faced for the first time in modern human history, not many companies were prepared for it. A quantitative approach was taken, using an online survey for the research. The findings are discussed and presented with reference to the relevant theories. The study reveals and points out the main concerns and problems related to working separately from the rest of the organization. The study analyzes how certain factors of working remotely such as lack of traditional leadership, physical workspace, isolation, etc. affected the life and work of employees during the crisis. The study is novel as these were the circumstances we had not faced before. The paper contributes to a better understanding of all of the aspects of teleworking, with an emphasis on social isolation and working under lockdown.

Novel technologies are quickly reshaping the industrial environment as well as the labor market in what has been called The Fourth Industrial Revolution or Industry 4.0. As digitalization and robotization quickly become industry standards in many fields of manufacturing, businesses, both big and small companies need to quickly adapt their strategies, workforce and operations to this new reality in order to remain competitive and relevant. Being able to adopt and integrate new technologies quickly will make the difference between being a trend setter or a follower in an increasingly more globalized and more digitalized economy. And there are not just the businesses that need to adapt to this rapid change. The workers themselves will be required to master new skills and be able to operate new machines quickly and proficiently or risk being replaced by one in the near future. This paper aims to look at the new, emerging technologies in the industrial sector, their rate of adoption and their impact on workers, production processes and businesses.

Although the European business environment induces important premises and assures conditions in determining economic growth and social well-being, the determinant and existent connections between the evolution of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), business demography characteristics and the European socio-economic model have been scarcely studied in recent years. The dimensions of the European socio-economic model design a very specific framework in developing business demography and assuring a favorable environment for future SME development. The main aim of the manuscript is to investigate the evolution of the European SMEs sector and the perspective of business demography evolution to converge with exigencies of the European socio-economic model. In order to argue the research objective, eight specific and representative business demography variables were employed, from 12 European Union member states (EU-MS), during 2009–2017. Further, the SMEs’ performances, determined by changing the economic functional paradigm, were assessed. For proving this, an econometric model was designed considering labor productivity as an endogenous variable. Our preliminary analysis shows considerable differences in business demography indicators and SMEs development among all five socio-economic sub-models of the main European socio-economic model, proving a tight connection between European socio-economic models and SMEs’ performance and arguing the necessity of a paradigm convergence. Within some sub-models, there is clear evidence of clustering and convergence in terms of business demography and SMEs future development.

Background: The evolutions of the inputs price and investment indices of the products in agriculture are not only determinant elements in understanding the fluctuations of the food price and the market instability, specific to the agricultural sector but also affects the agricultural production and traceability. Analyzing the European evolutions of the inputs price indices of agricultural products offer the possibility to understand the main trends and tendencies in the agricultural system by reviling the main trend tenancies during a nine year period long. Purpose: The main aim of the study is to investigate the evolution of input price indices of agricultural products in order to underline the specific patterns, trends and implications of the agricultural policies. In addition, the research pays a special attention to the investigation of the Romanian agricultural policy evolution on the most relevant time frame of economic conformity with the European agricultural model. The descriptive analysis is based on the specific annual datasets of price indices of the means of inputs in agricultural production, and the index of real prices of goods and services for investments in agriculture during 2008 - 2017, reported to 2010 as the baseline year. Findings/conclusions: The analyses confirms that the agricultural sector evolution has generated significant input and investment prince changes and unprecedented trend evolutions that led to the massive changes on the agricultural pattern. We strongly advocate and recommend for promoting a solid capacity and durable agricultural production systems and policies through sustainable and long term investments in order to avoid disruptive tendencies in the agricultural market system. Limitations/future research: The research explore the evolutions of the inputs price and investments indices of the products in the European agriculture only form the descriptive analysis without covering an extensive framework or considering other additional variables which consist the main limitation of this study. In a future research the authors will address and extend the research framework by inserting additional variables and items and propose a large and integrative model of analysys.

The main research aim is to investigate and test the long-term existence of a balanced relationship (cointegration) between business demographics and economic growth, expressed in terms of real GDP per capita, and to estimate the econometric models expressing relationships between analyzed variables in European economy. Our The study has focused on ten out of the eleven former communist countries, currently members of the European Union, during the 2006–2016 time period. Croatia was left out due to the shortness of the time series available for it, that the study would have required. These findings have significant implications in designing and shaping the future business models in European former communist countries, and increase convergence. The results obtained confirm the existence of long-term balanced relationships between the variables examined, the forms of which however vary from one cluster of states to another.