The “innovation–trade” interrelation has been a subject of research for decades. Nowadays, in the context of the growing importance of sustainable development, the role of eco-innovation is essential for promoting a rapid economic growth in each country. In this sense, eco-innovation influences the level of intra-industry trade stimulating international trade to adopt environmentally-friendly technologies. In general, the evaluation of eco-innovation in EU countries is done through indicators of their degree of performance and their impact on the welfare of nations. Using Eurostat data and WITS (World Integrated Trade Solution) database for the period 2010–2018, the authors of this paper give empirical evidence of a linkage between the two indicators. The Grubel–Lloyd index is selected as an appropriate tool to show that socio-economic performance has a significant weight in eco-innovation scoreboard measurement. The results confirm that intra-industry trade of each EU country is closely related to the level of its eco-innovation index. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to test for such a type of interrelation and to show that by verifying the usefulness of eco-innovation performance in EU countries through an intra-industry trade indicator (IIT) such as the Grubel–Lloyd index.

Purpose: Identifying the barriers that hinder the circularity in the wine industry in Bulgaria and proposing a preliminary circular economy (CE) index for ranking in order of importance the barriers for providing a suitable and replicable model through the contextualization of the study applied at the territorial level.Design/methodology/approach: The article adopts a Fuzzy AHP methodology based on 6 main barriers and 19 sub-barriers to find the weights of the barriers and rank them. The study was conducted in Bulgaria, and it consists of a questionnaire with pairwise comparisons to ask for expert opinions of members of the Executive Board of the National Association of Bulgarian Vinegrowers and additional members of the regional vine and winegrowing chambers.Findings: The study identifies training and education and environmental barriers as the most important among the main barriers whereas, economic barriers are assessed as low impact. Considering the sub-barriers, lack of consumer awareness and interest, unclear taxation for CE, lack of knowledge about environmental emissions (carbon, water etc.) within the supply chains, and lack of digital trends are determined as the most significant sub-barriers.Research limitations/implications: The preliminary CE index can be practically used and tested, when necessary, by each winemaker according to their understanding and opinion of CE barriers and sub-barriers. The ranking within the CE index can lead winemakers also to decisions related to the company's social policy.Originality/value: The study uses the Fuzzy AHP methodology with expert opinions to analyze and weigh the main barriers to achieving CE at the micro-level.

This study examines whether the Romanian equity market exhibits persistent risk regimes, whether these regimes can be forecast at short horizons, and whether such forecasts can improve portfolio allocation. The analysis uses daily BET index data over 2016–2025 and applies a two-step empirical framework. A Hidden Markov Model is first used to identify latent market states based on returns and realised volatility, followed by an XGBoost classifier that predicts regimes one day ahead using market, volatility, domestic macro-financial, and global indicators. The results reveal three distinct regimes, interpreted as calm, stress, and panic, each reflecting different levels of market risk. The forecasting model performs well in the calm and stress regimes, while predictions for the panic state are less precise but remain informative from a risk-management perspective. Most classification errors occur between neighbouring regimes rather than between extreme states. The economic evaluation shows that a regime-probability portfolio strategy with volatility targeting outperforms a passive Buy-and-Hold investment in the BET index, generating higher cumulative performance and lower drawdowns. Overall, the findings indicate that risk regimes in the Romanian equity market are persistent, short-term predictable, and economically useful for systematic portfolio allocation.

Electronic commerce, e-trade platforms (e-marketplaces) and Internet have been growing parallelly and continuously in the last more than three decades. In our paper we conduct a bibliometric study on data from the Web of Science (WoS) database for the period 2000-2025 (730 sources with 19947 references and 11.63 average citations per document). Revealing the evolution of the notions about e-marketplaces over time, we observe a remarkable regularity of research matching the maturing of the market itself and Chinese authors having emerging and growing importance. Core topics in the research group around three areas - strategy, business aspects and organisation of commerce, covering both business and technical aspects of e-commerce.