Given Romania’s relatively poor performance from a financial literacy perspective, many public and private entities are currently implementing various initiatives to address this problem. Assuming that financial education projects are a source of insights into broader societal issues, we analyze a sample of financial education projects to discern the issues of societal transformation reflected in their contents. We collected data from financial education websites and analyzed them through qualitative content analysis. We identify and discuss several manifest and latent themes and note the absence of others commonly found in the literature. The emphasis in the manifest themes falls on offering calibrated advice to a public with a relatively low level of financial literacy, prone to unhealthy behaviors such as consumerism, impulse buying, and indebtedness. Several latent concerns concentrate on the changing economic and social landscape, the fear that some traits of national character may hinder the individual appetite for adaptation, and the threat of an economic crisis. The needs of vulnerable groups are rarely addressed, while topics such as the ethical dimension of consumption, environmental and sustainability issues, and gender stereotypes are lacking. We thus find that the financial education initiatives in Romania address an underdeveloped range of topics.

Sustainability reporting is now a key tool for European energy companies, pushed forward by new regulations and rising pressure from stakeholders. Beyond compliance, sustainability disclosure reflects organisational priorities, strategic orientation, and national contexts. This paper examines how national culture influences sustainability reporting practices within the European energy sector, focusing on companies operating under the same European legislative framework. The study employs a qualitative comparative case study approach, analysing sustainability reports published by ENGIE Romania, ENGIE Italy, and IREN Italy. The analysis combines qualitative content analysis with Hofstede’s cultural dimensions to identify differences in reporting structure, transparency, narrative style, and strategic focus. We examined the data in three ways: we compared branches of the same company, different companies in the same market, and finally, the differences between Romania and Italy. The results show that, although all analysed companies follow European sustainability reporting requirements, notable differences exist in the way sustainability information is communicated. Italian companies usually take a more conversational approach that focuses on their stakeholders, while sustainability reporting in Romania is more formal, centrally structured, and compliance oriented. These differences suggest that national cultural characteristics influence sustainability reporting practices, even within a common regulatory framework. The paper contributes to the existing literature by highlighting the role of cultural and institutional factors in sustainability reporting. These findings can help managers and policymakers make sustainability reports clearer and easier to compare across different countries.

The multifaceted interplay of economic and political factors in the process of euro adoption suggests the opportunity to take a political economy perspective on this complex issue. In this sense, a number of key political-economy related issues can be distilled in relation to the process of euro adoption, which will structure the following analysis. What are the key national winners and losers of this possible event? What role has interest groups pressure played in this process? Under what circumstances may bureaucracies such as the central bank body of experts act as a deterrent for the political end that is the single currency adoption? How are internationally exposed companies expected to behave and to promote their interests in relation to this event? What is the relative importance of the internal politics dynamic for euro adoption? We rely on process tracing to approach these questions for the Romanian case. Policy documents, newspaper articles, academic articles, economic indicators, and elite interviews are used to create an analytical narrative based both on a one-point-in-time description of the situation and on a timeline that lists the sequence of some relevant events. We argue that a specific combination of economic and political factors led to the failed euro adoption in Romania.