In this increasingly globalized era, foreign direct investments are considered to be one of the most important sources of external financing for all countries. This paper investigates the causal relationship between trade openness and foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows in Romania during the period 1997–2019. Throughout this study, Trade Openness is the main independent variable, and Gross Domestic Product (GDP), Real Effective Exchange Rate (EXR), Inflation (INF), and Education (EDU) act as control variables for investigating the relationships between trade openness (TOP) and FDI inflow in Romania. The Auto Regressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) Bounds test procedure was adopted to achieve the above-mentioned objective. Trade openness has negative and statistically significant long-run and short-run relationships with FDI inflows in Romania throughout the period. Trade openness negatively affects the FDI inflow, which suggest that the higher the level of openness is, the less likely it is that FDI will be attracted in the long run. The result of the Granger causality test indicated that Romania has a unidirectional relationship between trade openness and FDI. It also showed that the direction of causality ran from FDI to trade openness.

Inclusive education represents one of the most challenging aspects of modern education. In recent years, a major challenge in achieving inclusivity in education has been to find modern tools that might adapt the teaching process to the needs of children with disabilities. This article investigates the possibility to use virtual reality (VR) technology to improve the learning process of children with disabilities. In this regard, a qualitative study based on the Focus Group method was conducted among 31 specialists who work with children with disabilities, with the aim of identifying potential opportunities and limits of using VR technology in the education of this category of children. The research results reveal that for most of the interviewees the VR application was a new experience; they appreciated that this technology could improve the educational process for children with disabilities and it could become a useful tool to support the education of such children. These results could have a positive impact on the activities carried out by policymakers, academia, and the economic environment in their efforts to implement policies aimed at improving the inclusive education system. To this end, some VR applications could be developed in a collaborative system involving IT companies and universities in the designing and implementation of these applications.

The purpose of this article is to analyse the impact of telework on the work-life balance, productivity, and health of different generations of Romanian employees. Qualitative and quantitative methods provide the means to exploit the richness of data and deepen the understanding of the phenomenon studied. The quantitative data derived from a research instrument was associated with qualitative data collection. Quantitative research was conducted to achieve the stated purpose using the survey method, the number of respondents being 1098 persons. The research tool was an online questionnaire. Results highlight how telework affected each generation of employees. The satisfaction towards teleworking achieved by Generation Z and Baby Boomers is, on average, higher than that of Generation Y and X. The differences between the age groups (Generation Z, Y, X, and Baby Boomers) in terms of telework satisfaction levels were also tested, considering each of the three aspects examined and presented in the article’s title. At the conceptual level, research brings a new methodological approach as an element of originality that can be used for similar future research. Moreover, new concepts on the effects of telework on employees were connected and analysed simultaneously: work-life balance, productivity, and health of employees during teleworking. At the operational level, this type of research can determine the degree of satisfaction of employees in different companies/organizations and identify solutions to increase employee engagement.

This article addresses issues regarding the intention of responsible tourism to increase the accessibility of tourist destinations for children with disabilities and their families. The main objective of this research is to identify the barriers that families with disabled children confront during their touristic experiences and to find ways to diminish these barriers. In this respect, qualitative marketing research based on the focus group method was conducted. The research results revealed that the most important barriers faced by such families are attitude barriers, followed by physical barriers and a lack of information. Starting from these results, we proposed the higher involvement of national authorities and other stakeholders in strategies meant to decrease or remove the barriers faced by people with disabilities and their attendants in order to develop responsible tourism. Such strategies could firstly involve the development of a primary school curriculum by including educational programs that are meant to avoid attitude barriers. Secondly, other stakeholders could use new emerging technologies, such as virtual reality, to offer tourists the opportunity to experience some tourism products and places before they travel.

Tourism has long been recognized as a crime generator. This poses a dilemma in the sustainable development context: is continued tourist expansion sustainable if it generates increased law and order problems? Using the example of Brașov, Romania, this article considers the ways in which criminal justice agencies and the tourism sector have operated in partnership to ensure the security of both local residents and visitors. We argue that the success of the initiative depends on multi-agency working at the local level, but that the involvement of local residents is also crucial. This commitment may be tested as the nature of tourism changes. The research consists of an analysis of primary and secondary data. The results revealed that among the main security issues mentioned by tourists are not only robberies and other social and situational features that contributed to tourists feeling anxious or unsafe, but also the need to have access to good health services and easy access to money changing facilities, information centers, etc. Some improvements are suggested for the local Sustainable Development Strategy of Brașov.

Food security is a complex phenomenon that determines multiple concerns and initiatives worldwide. The research presented in this paper aims to analyze the food security of children in rural areas, following a project funded by the European Union (EU). The main objective of the research is to investigate the opportunity to implement sustainable programs to ensure hot meals for children in schools located in rural areas of Romania. No similar academic studies were conducted in Romania focused on food security from an economic perspective. An exploratory qualitative research methodology was chosen based on in-depth nondirective interviews among experts. The research results highlight the necessity of optimizing the relationship between the needs of children in rural areas and the food resources available to them within families and schools. The results also suggest that serving hot meals in primary schools in needy areas is appropriate, as poor nutrition among children has negative effects on the educational process and on their long-term development. The conclusions of this paper lead to managerial implications for policymakers wishing to assess the impact of projects employed in schools financed by national and EU funds.