The study analyzes the performance levels achieved by Romanian wholesaler SMEs from Hunedoara County and to advance some practical courses of action designed to support local entrepreneurs in improving efficiency and in embracing circular economy (CE) practices. We employed cluster and discriminant analyses with a focus on providing an accurate classification of trade SMEs, according to their performance. Three distinct classifications of SMEs resulted in: (i) a class of enterprises displaying high levels of the rates of return, whose business owners exhibited an increased risk appetite and applied investment policies focusing on future development by means of incorporating digital instruments; (ii) a class of SMEs displaying average levels of rates of return, which manage to survive in situations of crisis through maintaining the position previously gained on the market; and (iii) a class of SMEs exhibiting a precarious financial position and employing defensive strategies, with managers who are reluctant to take risks in the innovation processes. Furthermore, we present a cloud computing solution which was tailored for one of the companies from our sample that appeared to be the most likely to carry out the transition from the average SME performance class to the higher class. The main advantages that are brought about by the IT solution in terms of environmental sustainability consist of: improvements in energy efficiency, the decrease in carbon footprints, the lowering of operational costs and the diminishing of the amount of e-waste.

Entrepreneurship can provide a creative, disruptive, problem-solving-oriented approach to the current economic, environmental, and social challenges of the world. This article aims to provide an analysis about the way universities can have an impact on developing entrepreneurial competence in students through extracurricular activities. The research relies on a questionnaire survey of students at the University of Petrosani, who participated in a range of entrepreneurial activities both online during the COVID-19 pandemic and face-to-face afterwards. The methodology consisted of applying principal component analysis to reduce the dimensionality of the indicators, followed by classification of the respondents through cluster analysis and training of a feedforward neural network. After finishing the network-training process, the error was minimized, resulting in three classes of respondents. Furthermore, based on the three classes, follow-up conclusions, policies, and decisions can be issued regarding the perception of entrepreneurship at the societal level, which is beneficial for academia and entrepreneurs, as well as for future research undertaken in this field. The key conclusion of our research is that entrepreneurship education is a real facilitator of the transition to sustainable entrepreneurship. Students perceived meeting successful entrepreneurs as being among the most effective extracurricular activities, assessing online activities as useful, and the field of study proved to be an important factor in their entrepreneurial intention.

The article addresses the issue of disclosing Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) issues by corporations in Romania, under the influence of recent changes in the legislative framework imposed by the adoption of the EU Directive 2014/95/EU on non-financial reporting by large corporations exceeding 500 employees. The goal of our study consist in determining the relevant factors that influence the level of the Romanian companies’ OHS disclosure. To this end, we have compiled a sample of 35 organizations that have elaborated and published non-financial reports during 2016–2017 and we have analysed the impact of some relevant determinants upon the reporting phenomenon. With the aim of providing a clear picture of the regional context of our study, we put together many pieces of information regarding the corporations that played the trend-setters role in Romania, by disclosing corporate social responsibility (CSR)/sustainability reports between 2003 and 2017, although this practice has been characterized by a voluntary and unsteady approach in many cases. The importance of outlining the regional context of the Romanian reporting companies is given by the urge to raise the local managers’ level of awareness towards sustainability issues and to use the recent legislative changes as opportunities to catch up with more advanced EU countries. The research methods used in order to identify the interdependencies established between the key factors involved in the disclosure practices included a mixed quantitative-qualitative approach, and referred to: content analysis of sustainability reports; descriptive analysis of the statistical variables which were taken into consideration; correlation analysis of numerical variables; and the ANOVA method for investigating the interdependencies between the categorical and numerical variables. Among the influencing factors that impact with a greater or lesser intensity the quality of OHS reporting performed by the local companies, the following were highlighted: the corporations’ market share, their field of activity, and the ownership structure.

Our study addresses the issue of telework adoption by countries in the European Union and draws up a few feasible scenarios aimed at improving telework’s degree of adaptability in Romania. We employed the dataset from the 2020 Eurofound survey on Living, Working and COVID-19 (Round 2) in order to extract ten relevant determinants of teleworking on the basis of 24,123 valid answers provided by respondents aged 18 and over: the availability of work equipment; the degree of satisfaction with the experience of working from home; the risks related to potential contamination with SARS-CoV-2 virus; the employees’ openness to adhering to working-from-home patterns; the possibility of maintaining work–life balance objectives while teleworking; the level of satisfaction on the amount and the quality of work submitted, etc. Our methodology entailed the employment of SAS Enterprise Guide software to perform a cluster analysis resulting in a preliminary classification of the EU countries with respect to the degree that they have been able to adapt to telework. Further on, in order to refine this taxonomy, a multilayer perceptron neural network with ten input variables in the initial layer, six neurons in the intermediate layer, and three neurons in the final layer was successfully trained. The results of our research demonstrate the existence of significant disparities in terms of telework adaptability, such as: low to moderate levels of adaptability (detected in countries such as Greece, Croatia, Portugal, Spain, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, Italy); fair levels of adaptability (encountered in France, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovenia, or Romania); and high levels of adaptability (exhibited by intensely digitalized economies such Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Belgium, etc.).

Research background: The transition towards a green economy, seen as a visible alternative to climate change and the need to ensure this opportunity to future generations, is a major challenge for all of the nations of the world, regardless of their status as developed, developing or emergent. In order to highlight the current state or progress towards a green economy, the reports and research of certain institutions, as well as of the academic medium, have focused on identifying the most relevant influencing factors and choosing the quantification methods capable to generate complete and useful interpretations. Purpose of the article: The purpose of the paper is to construct an instrument that enables to measure the progress of countries in terms of the transition to green economy, where Romania is considered as a case study. In this respect, a composite index (green economy index — GEI) is being proposed, achieved by aggregating some indicators for measuring sustainable development. The method underlying the calculation of the value of the GEI aggregate index allows not only to determine the current state of greening of the economy, but also provides information on the contribution made by each of the three dimensions of sustainable development (economic, social and environmental), as well as by each indicator individually, to this progress. Methods: Constructing the aggregated index was based on an additive aggregation of three partial indicators: the economic indicator, comprised of 8 individual indicators, the social indicator, comprised of 8 individual indicators, and the social indicator, comprised of 10 individual indicators. The collected data covers the interval of 2010–2021. Findings & value added: Calculating the Green Economy Index — GEI value for each of the 12 years under analysis has permitted not only the identification of progress regarding the green transition, and the underlying of each indicator’s contribution to this evolution, but has also confirmed the results obtained by similar studies carried out by the GGGI or European Union. We consider, as a result of the selection of certain indicators considered relevant in the economic, social and environmental field, that the newly-formed aggregate index represents an effective tool that can be used to measure progress in terms of achieving the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development goals, by easily adapting to the particularities of other states or regions.

In this paper, we first bone up on the literature as regards the relationship between universities and the business environment and its role on the development of entrepreneurship as an engine of economic growth. We continued the paper by presenting this relationship in the context of introducing projects related to entrepreneurship within the University of Petroșani. In the methodology part, on the one side, the university - business entity partnerships are statistically analyzed and on the other side, the results of a enquiry that was applied to entrepreneurs during 2019-2021 within the POCU project ”EU - ENTREPRENEUR - increase of students participation from vulnerable categories to undergraduate study programs through entrepreneurial innovation ”POCU Contract /379/6/21. The paper brings to interesting conclusions about the relationship between universities and entrepreneurs and how it can intensify the efficiency of this collaboration from the perspective of increasing the entrepreneurial skills of students.