EU-UK relations enter a decisive period

Significance The proposals are ambitious and bring both sides closer on some important issues, such as agrifood trade and customs paperwork. However, the proposals ignore UK demands to remove European Court of Justice (ECJ) oversight in Northern Ireland. This issue threatens to thwart a compromise. Impacts UK triggering of Article 16 would put pressure on Dublin to stop Irish businesses from buying goods from Northern Ireland. The UK government will seek to downplay tensions with the EU over the NIP until after the UN climate change conference in Glasgow. UK regulatory divergence will be a source of tension for EU-UK ties, as London will want Northern Ireland to follow the UK direction. If the NIP is fully implemented, Northern Ireland could become one of the most competitive regions in the United Kingdom.

ANALYTICAL EVALUATION OF THE PROSPECTS FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT OF ENVIRONMENTALLY ORIENTED TOURISM BUSINESS

The purpose of the article is to study the features of the development of the regions of Ukraine, the formation of a model of sustainable development of ecotourism. The bibliographic method made it possible to study the basic concepts,controversial and problematic issues, as well as the experience of solving them, proposed by scientists from different countries in this area of research. The analysis of efficiency has revealed the most competitive regions of Ukraine for conducting an environmentally oriented tourism business. The correlation and regression analysis results showed that the coefficient of determination R-square indicates a 94% correlation between the studied indicators. The growing dynamics of the number of subjects of tourist activity in Ukraine is noted. The primary data for cluster analysis were preliminarily formed, the presence of advantages and risks (anthropogenic effects) in 24 regions was determined, and promising directions for the development of ecotourism were identified. Cluster analysis, carried out using IBM SPSS software, determined the Euclidean distance and grouped the analyzed regions of Ukraine into clusters with the most similar characteristics. As a result of the study, the author’s vision of the essence of ecotourism, the logic of applying the methodology of cluster analysis was substantiated. The hypothesis about the influence of cultural heritage sites on the number of tourists was refuted. Some recommendations are given for further improvement of the quality of ecotourism development as a priority direction in the formation of sustainable development. The study’s practical significance lies in the fact that the results of the work carried out can be used as reference material for those studying the topic.

Multifaced Evidence of Hospital Performance in Pennsylvania

As health care costs and demands for health care services have been rising for decades in the United States, health care reforms have focused on increasing the performance of health care delivery. Competition has been considered as a mechanism to improve the quality of health care services and operational performance. Evidence on health care performance and market competition, however, has not sufficiently been reported to track its progress. The purpose of this study is twofold: First, we measure hospital performance over nine years, using the Malmquist Productivity Index. Second, we examine the impact of market competition on hospital efficiency in Pennsylvania, using a two-stage estimation procedure. The bootstrapped Malmquist productivity indices resulted in noticeable performance improvements. However, no steady performance trends were found during the course of nine years. In examining the impact of market competition, the bootstrapped panel Tobit analysis was applied after computing the efficiency scores with Data Envelopment Analysis. The results of the Tobit model found that hospitals run more efficiently in less competitive regions than in more competitive regions. The finding implies that hospitals underperforming in productivity growth should benchmark best practices of efficient hospitals to improve their productivity level. Another implication is that market competition would not be the best approach to effect the improvement of hospital efficiency in delivering health care services.

Spatially Characterizing Major Airline Alliances: A Network Analysis

An airline alliance is a group of member airlines that seek to achieve the same goals through routes and airports. Hence, airports’ connectivity plays an essential role in understanding the linkage between different markets, especially the impact of neighboring airports on focal airports. An airline alliance airport network (AAAN) comprises airports as nodes and routes as edges. It could reflect a clear collaborative proportion within AAAN and competitive routes between AAANs. Recent studies adopted an airport- or route-centric perspective to evaluate the relationship between airline alliances and their member airlines; meanwhile, they mentioned that an airport community could provide valuable air transportation information because it considers the entire network structure, including the impacts of the direct and indirect routes. The objectives are to identify spatial patterns of market region in an airline alliance and characterize the differences among airline alliances (Oneworld, Star Alliance, and SkyTeam), including regions of collaboration, competition, and dominance. Our results show that Star Alliance has the highest collaboration and international market dominance among three airline alliances. The most competitive regions are Asia-Pacific, West Asia, Europe, and North and Central America. The network approach we proposed identifies market characteristics, highlights the region of market advantages in the airline alliance, and also provides more insights for airline and airline alliances to extend their market share or service areas.

Challenges in human resource management in the culture industry in Latvia

The culture industry and its human resources have been little researched in Latvia, yet research on the culture industry is important, because the industry makes a significant contribution to economic growth by promoting employment and the development of competitive regions. The culture industry encompasses libraries, folk art, theatre, music, museums, the creative industry and other sub-industries, yet in recent years those working in all the culture subindustries faced various challenges, including: a low remuneration and insufficient monetary and non-monetary bonuses, resulting in lower job satisfaction and a high personnel turnover. Accordingly, the aim of the research is to develop recommendations for hiring and retaining human resources by examining challenges in managing human resources in the culture industry. The authors conducted a survey among the personnel of the Board of Culture of Jelgava municipality. The survey found that the main challenges faced by the administration of the Board of Culture were an uncompetitive remuneration, the aging of the personnel and generational change as well as inefficient and insufficient motivation for working. The research has developed two scenarios for recruiting: ‘promotion of creativity and non-monetary motivation’ that aim to publicly appreciate human resources, so that they would feel important and significant as well as facilitate creativity, innovation and collective solidarity, while for the purpose of retaining human resources in a long-term and decreasing their turnover, the second scenario ‘competitive remuneration and the differentiation by position category’ aims to gradually raise the remuneration and differentiate it for all categories of personnel.

An Optimization Management Model for Countries with Mutually Competitive Regions

It is difficult to manage resources allocation and pollution in a multi-regional country with mutually competitive relations. This work therefore intends to propose an optimal control model for the management problem. Through introducing the union utility function to model competitive interactions, we construct an integrated economy, resource, and environment macroeconomic model according to the social practices in the country with some competitive regions. Numerical procedures are proposed to search for the optimal energy policy and antipollution strategy of the model. As shown, an optimal fair tradeoff between efficiency and equity can be balanced for each region in the country. More important, the model verifies the importance of the role of government for management problems in a country with complex internal competitive relations

Assessing the competitiveness of Kazakhstan regions: creating an index

Today there is no single universally accepted method for assessing the competitiveness of the country’s regions. For this reason, the research created a methodology for assessing competitiveness at the regional level for Kazakhstan. The three-factor model of Huggins for ranking the regions of Great Britain by the level of competitiveness was used as the basis, and then the model was expanded on the example of a study assessing the competitiveness of the regions of the European Union countries. All data for assessing the competitiveness of the regions of Kazakhstan were collected from the official website of the Committee on Statistics of the Ministry of National Economy of the Republic of Kazakhstan. In the article, 14 regions and 2 cities of republican significance were ranked in terms of competitiveness. As a result, the most competitive regions of Kazakhstan were Almaty city, Atyrau region and Nur-Sultan city, the worst indicator was found for the North Kazakhstan and Zhambyl regions.

The dual logic of Russia's party system nationalization

The article attempts to identify major factors of the nationalization of the vote in contemporary Russia using the two level approach: the between- and within-region. The former compares regions as units of analysis while the latter additionally takes into account voting in municipalities to obtain levels of voting homogeneity within the regions. The study uses data from the last 2012e2016 national-regional electoral cycle investigating both federal and regional election results. Following Ishiyama (2002) for the between-region level of analysis the Regional Party Vote Inequality index has been utilized. The Party Nationalization Score proposed by Jones and Mainwaring (2003) has been applied to the measurement of voting territorial diversity at the within-region level. The results show that regional political factors may be still considered as major drivers of the nationalization of the vote as it did in the 1990s. The difference is that in politically recentralized Russia non-competitive regions headed by politically strong governors provides between-region inequality rather than contributing to nationalization. At the same time, the similarity continues in the ability of governors' “political machines” to contribute homogeneity of the vote, but only within their regions.

Is Silicon Valley a global model or unique anomaly?

A boundary-spanning regional innovation model of permeability among university, industry and government is abstracted from Boston, Silicon Valley and Research Triangle and used to assess Newcastle Science City. Early history may provide a better guide for aspiring regions than abstracting elements from the contemporary Silicon Valley ecosystem with its multiple interactive technology and business paradigms. Inducing permeability in academic boundaries is a first step to creating an entrepreneurial university, the motive force of the most successful regional innovation clusters. After a high-tech cluster is achieved, the generative source of its firms is often forgotten, their origins obscured by highly visible artefacts and symbols, like science parks or branding. The increasing dependence of Silicon Valley on external sources of human capital and innovation is a potential Achilles heel, if competitive regions achieve ‘stickiness’ and retain their assets. Paradoxically, Silicon Valley is both unique and replicable.