Research background: E-government has started from the challenges of new technologies by providing e-services to its citizens and has expanded today in more and more fields, including communication with citizens, budget management, macroeconomic forecasts, etc. If we accept the definition according to which eGovernment (or e-government) is an applicability of information technology for the provision of administrative services, information exchange, communication transactions, integration of various electronic systems and autonomous services between government and citizen (G2C), government and business environment (G2B), government and government (G2G) as well as for the processes and interactions of administrative staff in the entire infrastructure of the administration, and through e-government, government services are available to citizens in a convenient, efficient and transparent way, then we will accept and the conclusions of the same research that considers that in e-government there are no identifiable barriers. Purpose of the article: Through this paper we aim to highlight the current economic realities and how some governments have understood to use technology during the pandemic. Methods: The research methodology is based on documentary analysis. The bibliographic study, the secondary analysis of the data, the observation and the analysis complete the documentary analysis and allowed us to obtain some conclusive results. Findings & Value added: The pandemic health crisis has further pushed the limits of technology, which has been transformed into a true universal panacea for solving relatively vital economic activities for a national economy in a global context. A first finding was that the pandemic accelerated the need for digital governance. However, the modalities of action remain open.

Sustainability and sustainable development are objectives, but also values that must be respected in the field of public procurement. The main objective of this paper is to document the interest in the research area of green public procurement. The research methodology involves the elaboration of a bibliometric analysis (therefore a quantitative research method), in the form of an inventory of the publication activity in the aforementioned field. The analysis was developed by querying the existing database on the Scopus platform, which contains documentation on journals, scientific papers, books and others. The query determined the display of a number of 6,257 scientific documents existing in the database containing the acronym for Green Public Procurement in the title, summary or keywords. The query was conducted on September 25, 2019 and includes publications, regardless of the location or date of publication. The research results confirm the increase of the scientific interest in the field of green public procurement. Since 2010 until the moment of querying the Scopus database, 3,441 documents were identified related to this topic, which represents more than half of the total elaborated documents existing in the database on the same topic, indexed between 1959 and 2009.

The vegetable sector plays an important role in ensuring food security. Vegetable trade flows in Romania have become a major concern due to constant trade balance deficits despite the country’s agricultural potential. Taking into account the paradox between what could be considered an abundance of factor endowments and poor trade balance results, the objective of this research was to study the linkage between vegetable trade flows and chain competitiveness. Spatial panel econometric methods were used to study the impact of the international vegetable market on the demand in Romania, while the Balassa index and Porter’s diamond modelling techniques were used to study the competitiveness of the vegetable chain at both county and national levels. By applying the spatial regression method to the international trade and national production panel data, it was found that an increase in the quantity of vegetables imported into Romania would cause an even greater decrease in national vegetable production. The results show that Romanian vegetable production is highly and negatively influenced by the growing appetite for imports—therefore leading to a national dependence on the global vegetable chain. Porter’s diamond model results confirm that: (a) growing vegetables is profitable in Romania and the average profit margin is higher in this economic sector than in many others; (b) there is a lack of competitiveness caused by the post-communist excessively fragmented agrarian land structure and poor performance of the irrigation, warehousing, and transportation sectors; (c) the national production of vegetables is generally self-sufficient with the exception of three counties that resort to importing and account for more than 70% of Romania’s total vegetable imports; (d) factor endowments cannot be fully harnessed, and this contributes to the deepening of the trade balance deficits. Improvement is possible by fostering competitiveness through increasing the performance of supporting industries and the logistics infrastructure, as well as removing market access barriers for the many small farmers.

This paper focuses on the current environmental issues, more specifically the amount of greenhouse gases humanity is being confronted with at the moment. The research was carried out on a niche of the topic, namely on the carbon footprint of public buildings. The concept of a sustainable university is new and insufficiently explored, and as part of the environmental metabolism, it influences anthropic sustainability in a directly proportional manner. This indicator’s monitoring systems reveal how vulnerable humanity is in front of the latency of an unprecedented and inevitable environmental catastrophe. The ecological effects may be mitigated by the academic community through green urban design. The ecological performance can be expressed in an economically efficient manner, which can, at the same time, create a precious channel of communication within the entire academic community though volunteering for sustainability. Moreover, this research has identified several solutions for optimizing the carbon footprint, which do not hinder the necessary economic development. Within the current context, when most economic activities are leading to ecological collapse, sustainability should be reprioritized with the help of the academic society, through the examples offered by applied research. The premises of this research were represented by bibliometric analyses and the results obtained have proven its importance, as well as the importance of certain scenarios involving solutions for improving the metabolism of nature.

This paper aims at identifying the extent to which Romania has accessed European funds for agriculture and rural development in the 2014-2020 period. During this financing period, Romania has received more than 8.12 billion euros from the European Union budget, more precisely from the Agricultural Fund for Rural Development (EAFDR), through the National Rural Development Programme (NRDP). Five percent of the available amount was allocated to the Leader approach at local level and at least 30% was allotted for environmental protection measures. This paper will analyze the number of projects which were submitted, selected and contracted and the payments made until 2019. Subsequently, an analysis will be carried out of the NRDP sub-measures in order to prove the usefulness and necessity of this type of structural programme. The rate of absorbtion of European funds will be closely correlated with indicators such as the evolution of the GDP / inhabitant, the population and the number of enterprises in rural areas, the employed population and the number of enterprises in agriculture, forestry and fisheries, the development of villages through the construction or modernization of roads, sewage infrastructure, water and gas. To conclude, the positive and negative aspects regarding the implementation of European funds will be listed, especially in the fields of agriculture and rural development in Romania.

The growth in population and economic activities has direct implications on the deterioration of the natural capital, especially when referring to the increase in greenhouse gas emissions. However, improvement is possible by empowering sustainable consumption and production patterns. Through the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the United Nations call for a mix of economic development, environmental sustainability, and social inclusion. The agenda also provides the instruments needed to track progress, as each Sustainable Development Goal has a set of indicators meant to assess various dimensions of sustainability. Energy productivity is only one of many, but still special because it reflects sustainable consumption behaviors and production patterns. The 2030 Climate Target Plan elaborated by the European Commission consolidates and brings its contribution to the aims of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development by adding weight to the importance of the greenhouse gas emissions target. The objective of this research was to study the relationship between energy productivity, greenhouse gas emissions, biowaste recycling and nominal GDP in the EU in order to highlight the key of a smooth transition towards sustainable consumption behaviors and production patterns. The results show that recycling, greening the economy and energy productivity are the vectors of this transition.

Boosting the externalities across the water, energy, food, and waste (WEFW) sectors is challenging, especially considering tightening constraints such as population growth, climate change, resource-intensive lifestyles, increased waste production, sanitary crises and many others. The nexus approach supports the transition to a more sustainable future because intersectoral trade-offs can be reduced and externalities exploited, making imperative for decision makers, entrepreneurs, and civil society to simultaneously engage, with respect to all the components of the nexus. This research addressed intersectoral synergies and trade-offs in the case of the WEFW nexus in Romania, judging from the perspectives of entrepreneurial activity and economic results. The objective of this research was to explore the nexus in-depth by statistically analyzing the financial and economic indicators reported by active enterprises at county-level, based on the Romanian Ministry of Public Finance data. Research results describe the effects of the policies implemented in the fields of WEFW sectors. At the same time, attention was paid to the quality of the entrepreneurial activity, analyzed from the perspective of economic performance. This paper fills a research gap regarding the WEFW nexus by resorting to an economic and entrepreneurial performance assessment in order to find sectoral pathways toward policy cohesion in Romania. Findings suggested the existence of major trade-offs among sectors, owing to the fact that each county has a different development degree.

Agriculture plays an important part in the worldwide challenges, such as sustainable development, climate change, high level of greenhouse gas emissions, food security and safety, overpopulation, social welfare, and natural resource depletion. This chapter examines a panel data approach to determine the contribution of several factors on the agricultural output in terms of value and of yield. Different regression models were established for the analysis at territorial level in Romania. Some findings suggest a negative influence of the excessive drought years on the cereals yield while a statistical relevance could not be found for the influence of the excessively rainy years. Still, further studies should be conducted on analyzing the influence of the environmental and social factors on the agricultural economic output.