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The evaluation of the competitiveness of different agriculture sectors has, traditionally, been based on the measurement of technical efficiency. We focus on the dairy sector because the EU dairy sector is one of the pivotal agricultural sectors in the EU. The dairy sector currently faces several challenges arising from growing EU and global demand, price volatility, fodder crisis as a result of climate change and the fact that dairy farms are highly specialized, which on the one hand may be an advantage, on the other hand a threat due to higher vulnerability to income shocks. Milk production is carried out on mixed farms or specialized farms. In 2012, the share of the sector covered by specialized farms in the FADN, on which this analysis is based, is more than 80% in the EU-15 (EU members until the 2004 enlargement) and around 50% in the other member states. There are big differences in coverage among EU countries: only 17% of milk production in Slovakia and 19% in the Czech Republic, but full production in Ireland and Finland.

The debate on development of the bond market as major channel of industrial finance is gaining traction in many African economies. The secondary arm of the market, aside from the liquidity window it provides for investors in the primary market, additionally creates information linkage by fostering capital formation for prospective investors and producers that require capital to meet their investment opportunities, assisting in the allocation and operational efficiency of the capital market. Except if the market remains thin, overtime, liquidity in the market becomes more visible in the economy’s financial architecture, as it ignites market dynamism in the financial services linkage with other sectors of the economy. Liquidity is a pre-requisite to deepening the bond market, conditioned on information availability to ease asset valuation. The rapidity and randomness of information is what actually distinguishes capital market functionality and efficiency (Wijst, 2013).

After the global financial crisis and the Great Recession, a large and growing body of literature has examined real business-financial cycle linkages. To this end, Claessens et al. (2012) examined a large database of business and financial stress periods, corroborating that financial crisis periods are often longer and deeper than economic recessions and tend to amplify and prolong the latter. Our research aims to contribute to an understanding of the financial stress-macroeconomy nexus by studying the spillovers of US (euro area) financial stress shocks and their macroeconomic effects (i.e. effects on industrial production, inflation and unemployment) into the euro area (USA). This paper asks whether these effects are contingent on the phase of the business cycle. Traditionally, domestic and international financial stress-business cycle linkages have been investigated within the linear modelling framework.

The ubiquitous Internet connectivity has led to the introduction of an ever-increasing list of diverse online services ranging from financial transactions to online gaming and the other e-commerce purposes. For example, with cloud computing on the rise, geographically distant employees of organizations are able to access and share sensitive organizational resources online. The mentioned trend has increased the amount of user authentication processes. The aim of authentication is to decide whether a subject in question is in fact the subject that he claims to be. As an example can be mentioned traditional authentication, when end users authenticate themselves on computers by using the pair of username and password. In the past, many sophisticated authentication methods were developed. Generally, they can by divided to the three basic types of authentication depending on what kind of identification feature is used: authentication by knowledge, authentication by ownership of something, and authentication by biometrics. Each of these ways has its advantages and disadvantages.

The migration phenomenon is complex and difficult to fully understand and summarize. From the perspective of human migration there are numerous studies that have tried to systematize the reasons of migration (Parkins, 2011; Faist, 2011; O’Reilly, 2013; Wickramasinghe & Wimalaratana, 2016). One of the main components of migration is labour migration. Most studies have dedicated an important part of literature to labour migration and many of the migrationist theories have revolved around this aspect: neo-classical theory, New Economics of Labour Migration (also known as NELM), Dual Labour Market Theory (Wickramasinghe & Wimalaratana, 2016). This paper explores the determinants of migration from the perspective of the sustainable development goals (SDG’s) that are related to education, decent work and economic growth.