Lela Ristić, Nikola Bošković and Danijela Despotović
Sustainable development is one of global imperatives and it involves the harmonization of economic, environmental, and social development goals, with an appropriate institutional support. There are plenty of resources pertaining to the sustainable development of agriculture and tourism, as numerous studies and practical examples worldwide confirm. The paper highlights the example of the Republic of Serbia and can be of use for other countries with similar resource potentials and developmental constraints. Namely, agriculture and tourism in the Republic of Serbia are distinguished by abundant natural and cultural-historical resources, but what mostly lacks are funds for serious investment, as well as a modern and holistic approach to development, so the available resources are insufficiently used. Accordingly, the research aims to point to the necessity of a more creative use of agro-tourism resources, i.e. to the more promising directions of the integral development of agriculture and tourism on sustainable grounds. The paper results highlight the extreme importance of institutional support to agriculture and tourism networking within the concept of sustainable development.
Slavica Manić, Ljubinka Joksimović and Siniša Zarić
The gender role hierarchy in the Republic of Serbia is an inspirational topic on several grounds: first, this is a specific issue within a wider gender equality problem, which has recently become the priority of structural reforms; second, it is a separate segment of gender segregation, the research issue unjustifiably ignored by the domestic academic community; finally, it is just a piece of the “puzzle” that reflects the situation in the gender inequality field, but exactly the one which neither national nor European statistics provide detailed information for. The above-mentioned reasons represent the basic motivation for writing this paper. In order to determine whether the position of women in science varies according to their position on the career scale, as it usually happens all over Europe, we shall examine the situation in the higher education system in the Republic of Serbia. That is why we apply the methodological procedures of descriptive statistics to the micro-data obtained from the Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development in order to calculate the following relative indicators: the teaching staff structure by gender and grades across different fields of science and the glass ceiling index. We believe that such a relatively precise insight into the range of vertical segregation could be useful in conceiving future initiatives aimed at the systemic introduction of a gender perspective in the adoption, implementation and monitoring of public policies.
Stanislav Zekić, Bojan Matkovski and Žana Kleut
By acquiring the conditions for the usage of the pre-accession funds of the European Union, concretely the instrument for rural development (Instrument for Pre-accession Assistance in Rural Development – IPARD), The Republic of Serbia (RS) will have a chance to improve the position of its agricultural farms and the conditions of its rural areas. Agriculture is specifically important for the economy in RS, and the rural population makes up almost one-half of the population, which additionally enlarges an interest in these funds. In addition, the objective of the research is to identify the effects of the usage of the IPARD funds on the development of the rural areas, respectively the socio-economic progress of the rural population. A qualitative descriptive analysis on the basis of the empirical data was used. The basic conclusions are that, thus, structured funds will have a limited impact on the reduction in the development inequalities and the achievement of the parity living conditions between the rural and the urban areas. Namely, the dominant focus of the IPARD funds on the investments in agricultural farms and enterprises, and not in rural households, limits the level of their impact on the rural development in RS.
Nenad Janković
The concept of a twin deficit relates to a budget deficit and a current account deficit. In the literature, there is no unique answer to the question of what the causal relationship between these deficits is. In any case, the existence of these deficits indicates that the spending of a country is higher than its production and investments are greater than savings. The form of financing could be a potential problem, as well as the manner of the use of these funds. Crisis situations contribute to the increasing importance of the issue. In these situations, those countries where a budget deficit chronically appears and which do not have enough domestic savings to finance excessive government spending will be in a worse position. The Republic of Serbia (RS) belongs to the group of countries where a budget deficit is a chronic phenomenon financed by external sources; therefore, the paper will analyze the issue of a twin deficit.