Economic resilience and sustainable finance are two interlinked and crucial issues for development and convergence in Romania’s counties increasing cohesion. These issues can contribute to sustainable and balanced growth of local and regional economies and to the reduction of inequalities in regional development. Economic resilience in counties refers to their capacity to adapt and survive in the face of unforeseen economic shocks or challenges, and sustainable finance refers to ensuring responsible management of financial resources to support long-term development and protect the environment. Identifying and understanding the significant variations in economic resilience and sustainable financing between counties is essential for the formulation of regional development policies and strategies. These variations provide valuable information about the vulnerabilities and opportunities of individual counties and guide resource allocation and investment decisions. The research provides new data and relevant information on the significant variations among counties in economic resilience and sustainable financing, using a Markov transition probability matrix and exploratory–visual method. This study on Romanian counties aims to provide valuable information for the formulation of public policies to support balanced economic development across the country. The results showed that economic diversification is essential to increase the resilience of the economy to shocks and fluctuations. Counties that have a diversified economic structure, with multiple sources of income and economic activities, are less vulnerable to the negative impact of economic or natural events. Governance and political stability are key factors in creating a favorable environment for investment and economic development. Well-managed government policies can help maintain macroeconomic stability and increase the resilience of the economy to external fluctuations.

This paper analysed the responses of 242 civil servants collected during a survey for public authorities personnel with management or executive responsibilities. The survey focused on the perception of respondents regarding the key competencies and the utility of the sustainability development expert occupation (SDE). Based on the assumption that the responses were influenced by multiple factors, the impact of perceptual theory, agency theory and sustainability theory calibrated the analysis of the collected data. Cronbach’s alpha was used to test the reliability of the received responses and multinominal logistic regression with a single dichotomous variable (Regulation Awareness) and several continuous predictor variables (Specialization, Knowledge, Attributions and Competence) was employed to determine to what extent the SDE occupation would contribute to the implementation of sustainable development policies. This paper argues that the ‘green’ competency matrix appropriate for the implementation of sustainable development policies should include executive, compliance promoting, ethical and reporting competencies. The creation of a green competency matrix is an important step toward changing the organisational culture of the public or private sectors to achieve sustainable and reliable development. This research can help organizations and public authorities understand where their efforts should be focused to efficiently incorporate sustainability development into their systems.

The target for 2030 of reaching a 32% share of renewable energy in the gross final energy consumption can be achieved by speeding up the transformation pending the implementation of knowledge transfer (KT) policies that foster regional cooperation for the cost-effective development of renewables. The research purpose is the analysis of important factors in the development of the renewable energy sector through knowledge sharing and collaboration across the Member States in a comparable manner. The hypotheses are as follows: Hypothesis 1 (H1) there are synergies between knowledge transfer and economic impact through income and jobs for the renewable energy sector and Hypothesis 2 (H2) the EU countries have different profiles of synergy. The research proposition was established through the employment of a quantitative synergy and trade-offs analysis based on the knowledge transfer indicators and the sustainable development framework. The research method, namely the advanced sustainability analysis (ASA), uses the quantitative assessment tool for the understanding of synergies between two or three dimensions of sustainable development, presuming that the combined effect of the factors is greater than the sum of their individual effects. The current research comprises an evaluation of the renewable energy sector knowledge transfer policy models at the national level for 24 EU countries and four other European states, focusing on the capabilities to create synergies. The results of the study represent a valuable input for the policy makers, allowing for a coherent and sustainable planning and programming of the new electricity market, adopted through the Clean Energy Package, and following a highly dynamic and radically disruptive background, exploiting the ‘successful’ profiles.

We check on the short term if self-employment in Romania influences unemployment and vice versa. Age, education and gender characteristics treat both variables, and self-employment considers both cases with and without employees. The objective is to look at the job creation and unemployment reduction in quarterly variation during the 1999Q1–2017Q3 period. On autoregressive models, we apply the Toda and Yamamoto (1995) procedure, detailed by Giles ( 2011 Giles, D. (2011). Testing for granger causality. Accessed June 18, 2017, Retrieved from http://davegiles.blogspot.ro/2011/04/testing-for-granger-causality.html. [Google Scholar] ), to assess for Granger Causality. We found for unemployment rates a push effect in the self-employment rate for adults and youth with low education level to self-employment without employees’ rate for adults and self-employment with employees’ rate for old adults. We establish a ‘Schumpeter’ effect for the adult with a low level of education self-employment to unemployment, for adults’ males with tertiary education and self-employed, and older adults self-employed without employees to unemployment. We conclude that unemployment work as an inclusion mechanism for some vulnerable groups but inefficient for others. Self-employment with employees is less diversified, indicating a high-risk aversion and low start-up effect. In general, the labour market presents a unidirectional flexibility effect.

The concepts of internet banking and mobile banking have led to changes in people’s financial behavior in terms of earning, consuming, and saving. This new concept, which entered the market quite recently, was used at the beginning of the new digital technology in various types of activities, banking operations, and nowadays these services are used by all people who want to save through banks or create new sources of income, as well as to make quick currency exchanges without going to credit institutions. The main purpose of this paper is to analyze people’s behavior toward new digital technologies, e-banking adoption, and non-banking financial institutions internet services. The objectives pursued are: whether e-banking users are homogeneous in their characteristics in the EU 27 and which users have the most convergent or divergent behavior in the EU 27. Statistical data taken from Eurostat 2023 was used for the Sigma convergence analysis, the time series taken into consideration being from 2004 to 2022. The results showed that the changes in the procedural-fiscal-financial sphere are the ones that fully reflect the two principles underlying the tax evolution: digitization and simplification. These results confirm that people are adopting the new digital technology and change their behavior from consumer to prosumer. The study shows that all most categories adopted e-banking using new digital technologies when it comes to consumption and saving, with few exceptions that should be carefully supported.

The smart, sustainable and inclusive growth adopted by Europe 2020 demands new types of information as it is the land use data as an indicator of the land (a primary production factor) - the building block of any economy. Our method is based the article of Salvati & Carlucci (2014) regarding the Urban Growth and Land Use Structure, we develop an Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis ESDA (Method of Choropleth Maps and LISA, Anselin 2003, 2005) for identification of peri-urban areas in Romania at LAU2 level as lattice data (in Arc Gis, GeoDa) and statistical analysis (in SPSS). The main results of this paper consists in suggesting that the indicator land us changes towards covering with buildings could be used as a synthesis monitoring indicator for the divergent growth effects, allowing the identification of the peri-urban areas, as a result of positive agglomeration process formation based on New Economic Geography theory background. The shapes and locations identified offer a quantitative imagine complementary characterized in a qualitative manner by their higher propensity to be with the highest global competitive performance among the national landscape, in the context of free market main driving force expression