Search

This paper assesses three sustainable development strategies -- the European Union's Sustainable Development Strategy in its revised version, the Mediterranean Strategy for Sustainable Development and Slovenia's Development Strategy -- according to the level of sustainability these strategies provide. Deriving from three diverse sustainable development regimes, selected strategies are scrutinised for the presence of the five general principles of effective sustainable development strategies promoted by the United Nations and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Building on George and Kirkpatrick's (2006) framework for analysis, we concentrate on principles of strategic planning and sustainable development, and a coordinated set of measures to ensure their implementation. The results reveal that the major differences between the assessed strategies are present in the sophistication of the theoretical bases and the integration of three main pillars of sustainable development (i.e. environmental, economic and social). In general, the assessed strategies reflect a high degree of inclusiveness of a variety of interests. However, there is a common weakness among them in terms of implementation, be it in the provision of adequate resources, the guarantee of adequate implementing capacity of the institutions designated for implementation or the precise definition of the institutional framework responsible for the implementation of the strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The issue of public investments became a very challenging subject for public decisionmakers since it incorporates the question of state performance, the quality of public finance and their effects on growth. The quality of public finance is a multidimensional concept. It may be regarded as representing all the arrangements and operations regarding the financial politics that sustain the macroeconomic objectives, particularly the longterm economic growth. Financial policies at European level highlight the fact that a concentration of the public expenses in areas that stimulate the economic growth and a more efficient use of the public resources are key methods for sustaining the economic growth. The empirical proofs seem to support the assumption according to which certain types of public expenses can supply incentives and other can negatively influence the economic growth. The paper tries to reveal the effects of capital spending on economic growth (GDP per capita) for the European Union member states. The GDP per capita and the capital expenses (functional classification of public expenses - "COFOG") have been obtained by considering the Eurostat statistics, the measurement unit for both variables is Euro, while the period of analysis is of 7 years (2000-2006). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This papers aims to examine the experience of the four "Cohesion Countries" of the EU-15 -- Ireland, Spain, Portugal and Greece and to identify their best practices as well as a series of drawbacks in the implementation of the EU structural assistance. The resulted conclusions can be taken as useful lessons for the EU's New Member States with regard to their efforts to absorb the EU funds and to reduce the discrepancies between their development level at national and regional scale and the EU average (the so-called "catching-up" process). A special emphasis will be put on the case of Romania, considering the authors' research results in this field and their recent calculations focused on the absorption of the pre-accession funds, especially the Phare assistance. Their findings will be the source of several considerations and proposals for increasing Romania's absorption capacity in the 2007-2013 programming period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]