Throughout the planet, the medical challenges posed by the pandemic caused by the SARS-Cov-2/COVID-19 coronavirus have overlapped, inter alia, with the necessity to continue the academic process on every level. Romania was no exception. With the new vaccines against COVID-19, the hope of resuming face-to-face activity, considered as ‘normal’ before 2020, has emerged. In these circumstances, not at all far-fetched, certain questions have arisen, such as: should and must the online university education be completely removed? Should this form of education be continued? If so, to what extent? We have used econometric methods related to ARDL (auto regressive distributed lag models) such as pooled mean group (PMG) and mean group (MG) and used different tests for unit roots for the stationarity check of the series implied. The results show the positive effect of digitalisation on tertiary education and also the positive impact of the latter on sustainable development, as a base for future stimulation in public policies. The present study also aims to harness the university experience of these times, from some of the main Romanian university centres; the method used was a quantitative and qualitative research based on a questionnaire, which was answered by a number of 258 university teachers and 1569 students from prestigious public and private universities. The results of this analysis allowed us to conclude that most of the participants in the university educational process have adapted to the online activity, and the latter ‘saved’ the academic years 2019–2020 and, respectively, 2020–2021. The present study is useful for tertiary education institution and policymakers in terms of formulating strategies and policy recommendations to support teachers and students during any future pandemics.
The aim of this research is to highlight the specificity of fiscal sustainability in some developing EU countries by analyzing the implications of fiscal rules on governments’ fiscal behaviors. We employ a panel data analysis to evaluate developing EU countries for the period 2000–2014 and we investigate the status of convergence of fiscal responsibility coordinates by computing the convergence score of fiscal responsibility. The research is based on interdisciplinary coordinates and helps to consolidate judgments from both legal and financial perspectives, making a contribution to the literature that investigates the relationship between the legal framework related to government decision-making and public finance sustainability. The choice of the study sample in relation to developing EU countries represents a contribution and a point of reference for the literature that investigates the sustainability of developing EU countries and highlights the importance of fiscal risk management and control mechanisms in enhancing the performance of the public sector and fiscal sustainability. The results suggest that it is important to reinforce the interaction between the legal framework and the institutional one by identifying good practices for designing and operating effective independent fiscal institutions, making them capable not only of advising the government on fiscal policy matters but also of promoting sound fiscal policy and sustainable public finance.
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