International female and male students’ segregation per academic fields of study designates an important challenge for educational equity, diversity, and gender equality in tertiary education institutions worldwide. This study probes the determinants of study field choice among 984 students from 57 countries who enrolled at the University of Oradea, Romania, during 2022–2023. By incorporating gender approaches and concepts within broader economic and cultural theories, we utilized the bivariate analysis and multinominal regression models to scrutinize how students’ preferences for STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), AHSS (arts, humanities, and social sciences), or medicine are influenced by their gender, and the more general cultural and economic attributes of their home country. Our findings enrich the knowledge and understanding of gendered patterns of academic study field choice, providing a cross-cultural and integrative viewpoint that enables us to set forth recommendations to bridge higher education gender gaps.

This study assesses the relation between foreign aid and the contribution of civil society to the consolidation of democracy in Romania. Drawing on questionnaire data as well as internal documents the study specifically looks at the impact of international assistance on the participation of advocacy groups in the governmental policymaking process. On the one hand, it is shown that international assistance enhances the capacity of NGOs to mobilize advocacy coalitions and this in turn increases the effectiveness of their participation in influencing policymaking. But on the other hand, democracy assistance programs have a rather paradoxical effect by impeding NGOs’ civic engagement with their domestic constituencies. Hence, international assistance has a mixed impact on the contribution of civil society to the consolidation of democracy: it fosters advocacy groups’ “link-up” to the governmental decision-makers while in the same time it hinders their “link-down” to ordinary people.

The guide aims to contribute to a better understanding of civic rights and to promote the active participation in community life and decision-making process, by

Declining levels of youth participation in conventional politics raise concerns about the future of representative democracies. Based on statistical analyses of public opinion survey data, this paper examines youth civic and political disengagement as symptoms of social exclusion. Our findings point out that youth are a heterogeneous group and vulnerable young people living in the European Union face the risk of multiple exclusions that mutually reinforce each other: from the labor market, from education and from the democratic life of their societies. Thus, youth who are neither in education, nor in employment or training (NEET) tend to be the most politically marginalized group of young people in European democracies. Acknowledging the interplay between various dimensions of youth social exclusion provides valuable theoretical, methodological and policy insights for reducing youth marginalization and breaking the vicious circle that perpetuates it.

This study examines the determinants of post-crisis tourism performance by comparing 207 Romanian tourist destinations in 2023, the first post-pandemic year, with their pre-pandemic performance in 2019. Grounded in Destination Competitiveness and Attractiveness Models, this study employs a negative binomial regression to analyse how recent investment projects, the expansion of accommodation capacity, and historical, pre-pandemic destination performance influence current tourist demand. Our results indicate that strong pre-pandemic tourism performance and strategic investments in tourist destinations are significant predictors of increased overnight stays, highlighting the role of pre-existing competitiveness in post-crisis tourism recovery. Accommodation capacity’s impact is more complex, as an expanding lodging supply raises overnight stays overall, but its effect differs sharply between regions. Ten additional accommodation establishments correspond to an estimated 34.9% increase in the north-east against 3.2% in the south-east region, and this contrast is statistically significant. Returns to capacity expansion, therefore, vary by an order of magnitude within a single country, challenging the assumption of a universal tourism development model and indicating that such returns depend on whether unmet demand exists locally. The findings support place-based, sustainable and resilience-oriented tourism policies that address regional disparities and direct investment where it can generate sustainable demand.