In the aftermath of Angola’s civil war, strong economic relations developed between the country and the People’s Republic of China. Our study addresses China’s investment risks in Angola, considering an infrastructure-for-petroleum partnership between these two countries. The main working hypothesis is that the recovery of Chinese investments made in Angola is has translated into thousands of barrels of petroleum being imported daily from Angola. We analyzed the main economic, social, and political indicators that describe the situation in Angola that could impact the recovery of Chinese loans in the form of oil exports. Data processing implied involved regression-based imputation, MinMax data normalization, the use of the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP), and econometric analysis, next to the construction of a composite risk indicator. The results of the econometric analysis highlighted that an increase in the composite risk indicator of 1% leads to a decrease in the quantity of petroleum exported by almost 6377 barrels per day. Because, at least in the short run, the economic diversification in Angola is weak, and the most important asset is its oil, the partnership with China will continue to exist. This cooperation model represents a source of economic growth and infrastructure development for Angola and a source of energy that fuels China—one of the most powerful economies in the world.

Nowadays, over 10% of the population of the European Union is facing energy poverty. Energy poverty is defined as the situation where a consumer cannot access energy services in his household up to a socially and materially necessitated level. Although Romania is characterized, according to official European statistics, by a high number of persons at risk of poverty or social exclusion – 40.3% in 2014 – as compared to the other Member States – 24,4% for EU27 – recent studies of the European Commission show that only 12.3% of Romanians were suffering in 2014 of energy poverty. Still energy poverty is considered by several national and international institutions a major problem in Romania, just like in the other “new” EU Member States. So we ask ourselves what is energy poverty and what are the drivers of energy poverty in Romania. Energy poverty has recently drawn the attention of both academic research and policy makers, fact that has led to an mainly uncoordinated excess of national and international studies regarding this topic. This article aims to restrain the concept of energy poverty from the perspective of national and EU policies and regulations by reviewing the existing knowledge and critical approaches in this field. Also the study aims to analyse Romania’s development linked to the development of national and EU policies, laws and regulations in order identify the appropriate measures to reduce energy poverty, with regard to its main drivers and effects. Further, the paper explores possible policies that could be implemented to reduce the number of people affected by energy poverty, tailored on the specifics of the Romanian energy sector and Romania’s overall economy. Based on the findings, recommendations are drawn. The research relies on the current body of literature as well as on data available at national and at international level in this field.

People have always been interested in improving their quality of life. But how is this possible when the population is constantly growing, and the planet’s resources are dwindling? The efficient use of resources is not only believed to increase the general quality of life but also to contribute to the creation of a cleaner environment. But what is the relation between resource efficiency and a cleaner environment? The European Commission and the United Nations have been dealing with this key issue for many years now and the EU has forced member countries to meet certain targets. This paper presents some of the UN and EU’s policies with regard to climate change and resource efficiency and offers an independent evaluation of the achievements of Member States. We assumed that the implementation of the objectives of the EU climate and energy package improves the resource productivity and reduces its negative impact on the environment, relation analysed with the help of a linear regression model. Further, we have performed a critical study on the performance of EU-member states in meeting their GHG-emission targets correlated with the resource intensity of their economies, modelled using Microsoft Excel. Resource efficiency and the low-carbon economy have emerged as central themes in global discussions on the transition to a sustainable economy, and this paper sheds new light onto the connection between the two subjects.

The current volatile economic environment and the evermore shorter technology cycles impact the way business is done today, especially in an emerging field like the renewable energy sector. Business modelling proves itself as an instrument, which may impact decisively the success or failure of a business. The aim of this article is to identify and present the key elements defining entrepreneurial models in the renewable energy field, as resulted from a synthesis of the recent literature available in journals indexed in international databases of mainstream publications about business models and entrepreneurial models as well as from empirical research performed in the past five years. The research result consists in a systematisation on past approaches on business modelling and the development and adaptation of the entrepreneurial model’s definition specific for the biogas sector.

The paper explores the links between capital relocation and soft locational factors addressing the quality of the business environment and the quality of life within the European Union. System competition is viewed as a competition between countries for the mobile factors capital and labour. The issue of systems competition is topical and insufficiently explored by contemporary literature. The scarcity of scientific papers describing the links between system competition theories and contemporary corporate geography theories, especially of the ones including the analysis of soft location factors, is a challenging aspect, which motivates the choice of this subject. This paper’s primary aim is to deliver an overview of the basic corporate geography conceptions, stressing the importance of soft location factors in today’s competition between systems for the mobile factors capital and labour. The paper further contains an analysis of the correlations between indicators regarding the institutional design of countries as developed by the World Bank (Ease of Doing Business), the Happiness Scale and the latest available data of FDI Stocks for the EU countries (2016). The relevance of such a study is based on the evidence that the contemporary business education relies on an extensive knowledge of the business environment. In the circumstance of similar infrastructural conditions, the main difference between locations is made by soft location factors. Since developed economies are characterised by a high degree of ubiquity of soft factors, the paper concludes that developing and emerging economies should foster the development of their soft location factors.

The efficiency of resources is a current issue that can be of great interest to anyone, especially since it is often associated with economic performance, at both - micro and macro level. Therefore, it can be useful to evaluate the resource availability of countries and to understand how a country’s economic development is connected with its resource abundance. Our study examines whether the availability of resources can be viewed as an indicator of the economic development of a particular country by analysing the correlation between the total resources rent, as calculated by the World Bank, and the gross domestic product and its development in 45 countries worldwide. We found that natural resources rents are linked to both GDP per capita and GDP growth, leading often to strong positive or negative correlations. The particular cases need to be further addressed, by looking into additional parameters on country and regional level.