Lela Ristić
This paper aims to present the current level of sustainable rural development in the Republic of Serbia, the development potentials and the problems identified in this area, as well as to bring to attention the necessity of sustainable rural development modernization as a significant part of the EU accession process. The mentioned issues are examined in accordance with the specific characteristics of the rural areas in the Republic of Serbia and the generally accepted principles of sustainable development (the economic, environmental and social ones), taking into account the interests of present and future generations. The paper analyzes the necessity and possible directions of the sustainable rural development of the Republic of Serbia. In this regard, the paper points to the significant role of the official state development policy in solving the problems of rural areas by establishing appropriate priorities and specific guidelines for future sustainable rural development. The conclusion is that the comprehensive and continuous work on the revitalization and development of rural areas is essential and must be in compliance with the principles of sustainable development. It is vital that the efforts towards sustainable rural development include significant investments, education programs, initiatives and activities of all development actors at the national, regional and local levels, as well as people directly involved in agriculture and agricultural production.
Violeta Todorović
The functioning of banks in a deregulated and competitive market environment involves taking growing and complex business risks. Inadequate risk management on the part of bank managers leads to the emergence of problem banks and banking crises. Practically speaking, banking crises stand for an integral part of the development of banking systems in the modern business environment that can be characterized as complex, dynamic, heterogeneous and unpredictable. The negative effects of the bankruptcy of individual banks on the economic system require the timely establishment of adequate regulatory frameworks and undertaking interventionist measures for the rehabilitation of banking problems. The issue of managing banking crises, which has been discussed in the professional domestic and foreign literature for years, has been brought back into focus with the emergence of the global Subprime crisis. Therefore, the paper makes an attempt at a comprehensive analysis of the causes and ways of resolving banking crises. In addition to identifying the causes and substantial differences among the analyzed banking crises, the paper will review the relevance of the applied interventionist measures and the existing regulatory policies.
Darko B. Vuković
The identification and analysis of the indicators of regional competitiveness is the most important phase of the process of measuring competitiveness. However, prior to the measurements, it is necessary to determine whether there is a high correlation between the selected indicators or not. The aim of this paper is to determine whether there is a high correlation between the most important indicators of regional competitiveness or not. The subject of this paper are the indicators of competitiveness in Serbia’s regions, whose values are measured in the 2011-2013 period. For the indicators unrelated to each other or those having no logical mutual influence, no correlation was revealed. On the basis of these results, it turns out that there is a high correlation between the GDP of the region, the number of companies in the region, the number of employees, the extent of the cluster, investments in innovation and confidence in business institutions. The Pearson correlation coefficient statistical method has been used in the estimation. These data, whose measure cannot be achieved through quantitative measurement, have been obtained in the survey.
Danijela Tadić, Aleksandar Aleksić
In the last few decades, the concept of organizational resilience has been developed, and in that manner, it represents an adequate management method for enterprises operating in the conditions of the economic crisis. In this paper, the problem of organizational resilience factors prioritization (ORF) is considered, which represents the first step in the determining of improvement strategies. The ORF ranking is set up as a task of a multi-criterion optimization inclusive of qualitative variables. Management teams at the level of every company assess the relative importance of each pair of business processes and the preference of the ORF within each business process using predefined linguistic expressions. The modeling of linguistic expressions is based on the theory of fuzzy sets. The aggregated values of the considered variables are obtained by applying the fuzzy ordered weighted averaging operator. The vector of a combined ORF priority was determined by using the fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process. The proposed model is illustrated by an illustrative example where the used data is obtained from the process of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) operating in central Serbia. It is shown that the developed model is very suitable for making decisions on changing business strategies in order to increase organizational resilience.
Slavica P. Petrović
Issue 3 of Volume 15 of the Economic Horizons scientific journal contains three original scientific and two review papers and a book review. Also, given the fact that, within Volume 15, this issue represents the final one of the Journal, it includes the Subject Index of the papers and the List of the Authors and Titles of all the contributions published in Economic Horizons during 2013.
Dragan Stojković
Zlata Đurić
The operation of business insurance companies, based on assuming risks of different profiles, is accompanied by fluctuations in the business environment. The complexity of predicting a financial effect for claims in non-life insurance lies in the structure of insurers’ liabilities, whose amount cannot be determined at the time of payment of the premium. By analyzing the key insurance processes, risk theory focuses on modeling claims as the financial consequences of unforeseen events. In addition, it provides the answer as to how much of a premium to charge in order to avoid bankruptcy, which makes it a complex and topical research area. The paper presents the main results of the collective risk model for the key business processes of nonlife insurance companies: the claim number process and the claim amount process. In risk theory, these are treated as stochastic processes, which offers a wide range of possibilities for the modeling and simulation of specific business problems.
Dragan Petrović
The subject of this paper is to analyze the evolution of approaches to the problem of the “state failure”. This phenomenon arose from the concept of “market failures”, which in economic theory can be seen in the context of searching for new strategies of the political and economic mechanisms of resource allocation. In this regard, special attention will be focused on the identification of the components of the institutional impact on the efficiency of economic processes, which first involves a general review of the role of the state in the economy. A multidisciplinary approach to the study of such a complex issue requires, among other things, that all information problems in the analysis of the economic functions of the public sector be taken into consideration, that the possibilities of financing public policy measures be appreciated, that the role and influence of the political process and the rent-oriented behavior of public officials be adequately evaluated, and ultimately that an attempt to identify the negative external effects caused by the absence, but also by the presence, of the state coordination in the economy be made.
Jasmina Bogićević
Due to the internationalization of business and frequent fluctuations in exchange rates, information about the impact of changes in exchange rates on individual companies’ and multinational groups’ financial position and profitability has become increasingly important. Data on the translation effects of both foreign currency transactions and foreign subsidiaries’ financial statements, a company’s exposure to different types of foreign exchange risks and taken currency hedging measures enable many users of accounting contents to obtain a better picture of an entity’s financial position and its profitability. The key issues relate to the choice of the exchange rate to be used in accounting data translation and the financial reporting presentation of translation effects. While the effects of the foreign subsidiaries’ financial statements translation can be shown in the balance sheet and the income statement, the effects of foreign currency transactions translation are incorporated in the income statement. This paper discusses the accounting aspects of the foreign currency transactions translation, an enterprise’s transactional exposure to a currency risk, and the use of financial derivative instruments to hedge against foreign exchange risk.