Competitiveness has always been a multifaceted illusive concept, which has made it a real challenge for scholars and practitioners to find the most suitable measurement tools to completely encapsulate all the complex nuances of competitiveness. This becomes even more of a challenge when approached in relation to particular economic sectors. The agri-food sector is no exception, especially when considering all its interconnections with the other sectors: water, energy, transport, waste. All of them impact the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Similarly, scholars have been debating the meaning of sustainability for decades, some even arguing that it is a political, subjective, and, in some cases, self-contradictory concept. As far as the sustainability of agricultural competitiveness is concerned, the literature is still developing. It is much more focused on fostering environmental competitiveness, and less attention was paid to the strategies designed to capitalize on sustainable economic competitiveness—a concept that has attracted divergent opinions in the literature, mainly due to ambiguity. Thus, instead of falling into the pitfall of vagueness, this paper was aimed at bringing its contribution to this field by undertaking the research objective of exploring a single facet of sustainable agricultural competitiveness: the economic facet. Hence, this paper proposes the construction of the sustainable economic competitiveness index (SECI) with direct application for agri-food value chains. It consists of three attributes: (a) factor endowments, resource independence; (b) agricultural chain performance; and (c) national agricultural chain strategies and policies. In this study, SECI was tested against the cereal chain for a selection of EU countries, based on the data taken over from FAOSTAT and INTRACEN Trade Map, in the case of the 2011–2020 period. Various statistical and econometric methods were used to test the robustness of SECI. Results stand as proof that building sustainable agricultural economic competitiveness relies on a mix of strategic actions. The key vector in this mix is that trade flow patterns and policies must be calibrated in accordance with national factor endowments in order to achieve high levels of SECI. To add more managerial implications, this paper argues for the smart delivery of agri-food products with high added value instead of focusing on exporting big volumes of raw agricultural materials with little added value.

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.

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.

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.

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.