Given Romania’s relatively poor performance from a financial literacy perspective, many public and private entities are currently implementing various initiatives to address this problem. Assuming that financial education projects are a source of insights into broader societal issues, we analyze a sample of financial education projects to discern the issues of societal transformation reflected in their contents. We collected data from financial education websites and analyzed them through qualitative content analysis. We identify and discuss several manifest and latent themes and note the absence of others commonly found in the literature. The emphasis in the manifest themes falls on offering calibrated advice to a public with a relatively low level of financial literacy, prone to unhealthy behaviors such as consumerism, impulse buying, and indebtedness. Several latent concerns concentrate on the changing economic and social landscape, the fear that some traits of national character may hinder the individual appetite for adaptation, and the threat of an economic crisis. The needs of vulnerable groups are rarely addressed, while topics such as the ethical dimension of consumption, environmental and sustainability issues, and gender stereotypes are lacking. We thus find that the financial education initiatives in Romania address an underdeveloped range of topics.

Higher education institutions (HEIs) are adopting sustainable development (SD) in their strategies for the future. The roadmap by UNESCO is the path to follow to reach success. The approach is different for every HEI, thus the objective of this paper is to analyze the current state of education for sustainable development activities provided by HEIs through the eyes of the academic community (responders category: professors, researchers, associate professors). The method to conduct the study was an interview that had 40 enclosed questions and a free part at the end where the responders could bring additional information to the study if they considered it necessary. All the interviews were transcribed and given a code (e.g., RHEI1, RHEI 29) in order to perform the analysis using descriptive statistics with the help of the program MS Office EXCEL. The results showed some areas where the activities provided by HEIs need improvement and also revealed promising aspects through partnerships. Making the values of SD known to the academic and local community will help fulfill the true potential for change and future development. Moreover, the analysis showed the need to educate educators and improve their digital skills and teaching methods/techniques in order to achieve sustainable development. Another result revealed the need for improvements in HEI curricula that will contribute to gaining those skills/abilities that emerging jobs should have.

Corporate governance plays a critical role in strengthening transparency and sustainable performance in emerging European markets. Romania offers a distinct context marked by concentrated ownership, uneven governance adoption and ongoing alignment with EU and OECD standards. Despite recent reforms, limited evidence exists on how governance mechanisms shape firm performance. This study examines the impact of board size, board independence, CEO duality, institutional ownership and audit committee independence on five performance indicators (ROA, ROE, EPS, NPM, PER) for Romanian listed companies between 2016 and 2024. Drawing on Agency, Stewardship, Resource Dependence and Stakeholder theories, this research tests hypotheses linking governance design to operational efficiency, shareholder returns and market valuation. Using an unbalanced panel and estimated GLS with panel-corrected standard errors, the analysis addresses heterogeneity, autocorrelation and cross-sectional dependence. Results show that board and audit independence, as well as institutional investors, improve operational performance, CEO duality yields mixed effects, while board size follows a non-linear pattern. Market valuation responds positively to stronger governance structures. The study offers the most comprehensive evidence to date for Romania and provides practical implications for firms and policymakers.

In the knowledge-based economy, effective public policies and programs that enhance the quality of human capital are an essential requirement for maintaining the competitiveness of the European economy on a global scale. As regional disparities remain to this day, the Structural Funds aim to promote convergence by improving the economic efficiency of the poorest states. It is normal to analyze and determine the effect that European funding has on the development of human capital in those regions. In order to emphasize the significance of European funding and the relationship between the level of support offered through the implementation of European projects and the development of human capital, we have carried out a bibliometric study of the data available in the WOS database. The 479 scientific articles were extracted using the tag "impact of European projects on human resources" by applying specific filters and keywords. The searches were distributed by year, by country, by affiliated institutions, and by the highest word density of the reviewed articles. The stages of the investigation method were based on the PRISMA Statements methodology. The conclusions of the article are a starting point for future analyzes regarding the impact of European funds on human resources, considering that the end of the second programming period of the structural funds accessed directly by Romania was 2023. Our findings show the existence of 4 separate directions of analysis and substantiation of the results.: cluster 1 contains the impact of European funding on the development of human resources; cluster 2 contains systems for distribution, prioritization and selection of potential beneficiaries; cluster 3 contains references to the specific policies of the European Union, and cluster 4 contains articles that analyze models for the allocation, management and evaluation of European funds. For the specific analysis of a certain field of research, we can have as a starting point a keyword found in the 4 clusters with the links within the clusters and between the clusters to find new topics of interest, new interdisciplinary correlations and new methods of approach.

Hydrogen is currently mainly obtained from fossil resources, and the associated CO ₂ emissions in the current production process are very high (10-20 kg CO ₂ /kg H ₂ ). Given its importance as an energy source and for storing excess electricity, new methods for producing hydrogen with low carbon emissions are being explored. The most widespread approach is the electrolysis of water using renewable energy sources. In recent years, numerous bibliometric studies have focused on hydrogen. The present study aims to analyse the scientific community’s perspective on new technologies for hydrogen production with minimal environmental impact, using a systematic bibliometric approach. European trends on green hydrogen were examined for the period 2020-2024, using Web of Science database, the main tag “Green hydrogen production” and secondary tags such as “European Green Deal”, “leveled cost of hydrogen” and “clean hydrogen”. The exported data was processed using bibliometric analysis tools to identify key terms, cluster formation, and interconnections between concepts. The correlation analysis highlights several key findings: • The essential contribution of hydrogen in achieving a sustainable and decarbonized energy future. • The development of efficient, scalable and sustainable systems depends on innovative green hydrogen production processes. • The interconnection of biomass with other terms in Cluster 4 emphasizes its central role in promoting renewable energy technologies. This study contributes to the current literature by providing a comprehensive analysis of research trends and scientific perspectives on green hydrogen production, supporting future advances in this field.

Supply chain disruptions during the COVID-19 pandemic exposed structural vulnerabilities of centrally controlled manufacturing systems, motivating renewed interest in organizational resilience within the context of Industry 5.0 human–cyber–physical systems. This study investigates how organizational decision-making paradigms and crisis-aware artificial intelligence (AI) jointly influence performance, crisis response, and recovery. An agent-based modeling (ABM) framework is developed to compare centralized, distributed, and self-organized organizational structures across 650 simulation runs under a controlled supply side disruption. A crisis-aware Q-learning architecture enables AI agents to shift from efficiency-oriented to stability-oriented strategies when resource scarcity is detected. To avoid baseline-dependent bias, resilience is evaluated using an absolute, capacity-normalized metric. Results indicate that self-organized systems consistently outperform centralized and distributed structures in baseline performance, crisis throughput, and recovery speed. The integration of crisis-aware AI further increases absolute resilience by approximately 10.7% and enables substantially higher throughput during disruption compared to hierarchical control. Enhanced performance is primarily driven by adaptive coalition formation, proactive resource conservation, and rapid post-crisis recovery supported by preserved coordination structures. These findings provide quantitative support for Industry 5.0’s human-centric principles and show that decentralized decision-making augmented by context-adaptive AI offers a robust organizational design strategy for volatile manufacturing environments.