CULTURE FINANCING IN THE EUROPEAN UNION IN COVID-19 TIMES

This paper conducts a comparative analysis at EU Member States level focused on public funding mechanisms for the cultural sector over the period 2014-2019 and in the year of the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic (2020). The analysis conducted and presented in this paper highlights the fact that the vast majority of EU Member States have stepped up their efforts to finance the cultural sector, starting from the lessons learned during the 2008 economic and financial crisis. Therefore, the states continued to implement increasingly coherent cultural policies, as evidenced by the fact that the states that used a mix of financial instruments in 2020 to combat imbalances in the cultural sector are generally the states that in 2014-2019 recorded a relative increase in general government expenditure on cultural services. The paper highlights the development pattern of cultural Europe with two ends, on the North-Center-South axis, by maintaining the gaps in terms of funding for the cultural sector, between the Northern and Central EU states, on the one hand, and the Southern and Eastern states of the EU, on the other hand.

The relationship between ESG and firm value. Case study of the automotive industry

The automotive industry is set to face a series of fundamental changes in the following years. Along with the transition to electric vehicles or production of autonomous cars, companies are also expected to better address sustainability issues, usually divided into environmental, social and governance (ESG) aspects. The present paper aims to explore the relationship between non-financial sustainability, measured by ESG scores, and firm value in the automotive industry, where empirical evidence is scarce. A structural equation modelling (SEM) approach has been taken on a novel dataset of 131 listed companies worldwide across 6 years. Our results indicate a mixed influence of the E, S, G scores on firm value in the analyzed period, with some inconclusive effects, especially from the social score. The findings are beneficial for investors, fund managers and automotive companies' executives. Further research directions are also provided.

Future Online Learning for Public Administration (preprint)

This article analyzes the perspectives of professional training of the public administration staff, from the viewpoint of the sustainability criteria, starting from the experiences of the online courses run in the last two years. In order to understand the nature, type and magnitude of the changes caused by the Covid-19 pandemic in the field of professional training for public administration, we performed a survey among public institution employees, by applying a questionnaire. The instrument included qualitative elements, to allow the framing of statistical results. The article is grounded on the hypothesis that the professional training activities in the last two years were organized preponderantly online and it aims to analyze the sustainability of the new teaching systems/methods. The limitations of the study are given by the fact that each administrative system has structure particularities and its own legal framework regarding the professional training of public administration staff, what makes that the model proposed cannot be applied in all countries. The study provides a model of online professional training for public administration staff, sustainable, based on the experience accumulated in the last two years.