How do Public Policy-makers Perceive National Quality Infrastructure? The Case of Serbia as an EU Pre-accession Country

In this article, we develop a framework for a comparative analysis of policy-making in the EU pre- and post-accession CEE countries (CEECs) in order to create generalized knowledge in some particular areas, such as quality infrastructure (QI). In order to find how public policy-makers perceive QI, we employ a triangulation methodology. The results show that policy-makers are not fully familiar with national QI concepts and seldom rely on experts’ opinion. Moreover, QI legislation is uncritically transferred from the EU.

Critical Infrastructure Protection beyond Compliance. An Analysis of National Variations in the Implementation of Directive 114/08/EC

The Directive 114/08 on the protection of European critical infrastructures (ECIs) aimed to identify a common approach to the protection of those assets which destruction or disruption might have a significant impact across (mostly, neighbouring) Member States. All the Member States have implemented this Directive, but outcomes are strongly uneven and harmonisation of protection is far from being reached. The commitment of Member States to the substantive implementation of the Directive varied widely across Europe. By comparing and contrasting paradigmatic national experiences, this article aims to address the main issues emerging from such a fragmented regulatory framework and to assess its critical hurdles. The article focuses on three national experiences: United Kingdom (UK) and Italy as paradigmatic examples of countries with consolidated national experience in critical infrastructure protection (CIP), but with weak commitment to the European regulatory framework; and Romania as a case of a new accession country with strong commitment to the European policies and a proactive approach to the Europeanisation of CIP.

Enlargement of the European Union – a new economic and social reality for agrobusiness entities

Goal of the paper is to identify opportunities and threats following from the European integration process and influencing the agribusiness entities in the accession country – Slovak Republic. These topics have begun one of the current themes connected with the approaching date of the Slovak Republic accession to the European Union. It is related to the fact, that agrarian but mostly food processing markets have their own specificities, appearing with their typical high sensitivity to the outside environment influence and strong enterprise motivation to competition. In the paper, there are also outlined tasks for business management to analyze external environment, to identify the decisive strengths and weaknesses, to overcome difficulties to adopt European standards and to use opportunities in a wider market place.