Tourism data is crucial for effective tourism management since it enables national and local authorities to shape public policies in tourism and also enables the tourism industry to make appropriate ...business decisions. In 2016 new tourism data information system, called eVisitor, was introduced in Croatia, and this new system significantly eased collection and data processing. The aim of this paper is to assess the quality of statistical data on tourist traffic and to determine whether the technical improvement of the data collection system, which eased reporting on tourist traffic to information providers, contributed to the quality of collected data. This is done by applying Benford’s distribution of first digits, i.e. Benford’s law, to the collected data. Benford’s law is based on the thesis that the first digits in numbers are not uniformly distributed and gives an expected pattern of numbers in the tabular data. Data that is not manipulated, accidentally or intentionally, should follow Benford’s distribution of first digits, and deviations from Benford’s distribution indicate that the data is compromised in some way. The conducted analysis has shown that the introduction of a new user-friendly data system did not affect the quality of collected data, but that the origin of the tourists was more important: data for domestic tourists have shown a statistically significant deviation from the expected Benford’s distribution, so it can be concluded that their quality is lower than the data for foreign tourists.
Wild Animal Attacks on Humans in Croatia Mataković, Hrvoje; Beljan, Karlo; Landekić, Matija
South-east European forestry,
12/2023, Letnik:
14, Številka:
2
Web Resource, Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Contacts between humans and wild animals are common and frequent, but very rarely end in attacks by wild animals on humans. The aim of this paper is to identify the circumstances of wildlife attacks ...on humans in Croatia, while the idea behind the paper is that a better understanding of interactions between humans and wildlife should subsequently lead to fewer attacks. As there is no database on attacks by wild animals on humans in Croatia, the data for this analysis was collected from scientific publications, media, and relevant reports. The variables analysed refer to the type of attacks and the victims of the attacks. The results showed that there were 33 attacks by wild animals on humans in Croatia in the period from 2005 to 2023; the most frequent were attacks by wild boars, brown bears, and grey wolves. The characteristics of the attacks differ depending on the animal that perpetrated the attacks, but there are some common characteristics: the attacks mainly took place in rural areas; the victims were mostly male and over 40 years old; in almost all attacks they suffered minor injuries; and during the attacks the victims were in most cases hunting, walking dogs or herding livestock. The data obtained from this analysis can be used to develop preventive measures and define appropriate behaviour in areas with wildlife.
The COVID-19 pandemic that broke out in early 2020 has a strong impact on human health but also on many other segments of life such as the economy. To prevent the spread of the infection, governments ...are implementing containment and closure measures to limit contact between people and their mobility. One of the direct consequences of limited mobility is a decrease in tourism demand. In this paper are presented the containment and closure measures implemented by the Croatian government to restraint the COVID-19 pandemic, and it is also analysed the impact of these measures on tourism. The government in Croatia had a complex task: with containment and closure measures, they tried to prevent the spread of the infection, and on the other hand, they wanted to attract foreign tourists, who make the majority of overnight stays in Croatia. During the summer tourism season in 2020, containment and closure measures were implemented, and in the summer of 2021, despite a larger number of infected and dead, these measures were not intensified, since the attempts to stop the pandemic, in addition to the containment and closure measures, also involved vaccination. Tourism in Croatia during the COVID-19 pandemic achieved satisfactory results, similar to those from 2019: this is partly the consequence of the optimal level of containment and closure measures, but also the unfavourable epidemiological situation in other Mediterranean countries.
Wildlife-based tourism, including hunting, is attracting interest from governments, the tourism industry, and researchers. Capital investment in renewable resources, like forests, represents spatial ...and temporal management, which is significantly limited by the natural potential of a particular habitat (e.g., volume increment, the quantity of food for wildlife, etc.). Therefore, the return rate expected by the investor is quite fixed and the only tool by which the investor can increase it is by adding further business activities and/or expanding the existing value chain. In the Republic of Croatia, the only forests which can be purchased by individual or institutional investors, and in which it is possible to establish both active forest management and commercial hunting, are private forests. Based on these insights, we analysed characteristics of capital invested in a large-scale private forest, where game management is carried out in addition to extensive forest management. Of the 1,104 hunting grounds in Croatia, the one with the largest percentage of forest cover (92%) and privately owned (61%) was taken as the subject of this case study (name of the hunting ground: VIII/120 “Permani” (10,017 ha)). A theoretical approach was used in which the investor buys all private forests (predominantly consisting of common beech), conducts forest management activities, and makes a profit by selling timber (30-year period). Furthermore, the hunting segment consisting of game management for red deer, roe deer, wild boar and brown bear is evaluated. At the lowest cost of capital (5.41%), the results of the separate forest management revealed an Internal Rate of Return (IRR) of 5.10%, a negative Net Present Value (NPV) (-760,000 €) and a 30-year discount payback period. Joint forest and game management resulted in an IRR of 5.69%, a positive NPV (680,000 €), and the same length of a discount payback period.
Pandemia COVID-19, która wybuchła na początku 2020 roku, ma silny wpływ na zdrowie ludzi, ale także na wiele innych obszarów życia, takich jak gospodarka. Aby zapobiec rozprzestrzenianiu się ...zakażenia, rządy wdrażają różnorodna rozwiązania, aby ograniczyć kontakt między ludźmi i ich przemieszczanie się. Jedną z bezpośrednich konsekwencji ograniczonej mobilności jest spadek popytu turystycznego. W niniejszym artykule przedstawiono przedmiotowe środki wdrożone przez rząd Chorwacji w celu powstrzymania pandemii COVID-19, a także przeanalizowano ich wpływ na turystykę. Rząd Chorwacji miał do wykonania skomplikowane zadanie: za pomocą środków zapobiegawczych próbował powstrzymać rozprzestrzenianie się zakażenia, a z drugiej strony chciał przyciągnąć zagranicznych turystów, którzy najczęściej korzystają z bazy noclegowej w Chorwacji. Podczas letniego sezonu turystycznego w 2020 roku wdrożono środki ograniczające rozprzestrzenianie się pandemii, a latem 2021 roku, mimo większej liczby zakażonych i zmarłych, nie intensyfikowano tego typu działań, ponieważ pandemię, poza wyżej wspomnianymi środkami, próbowano powstrzymać także za pomocą szczepień. Turystyka w Chorwacji COVID-19 osiągnęła podczas pandemii zadowalające wyniki, podobne do tych z roku 2019: było to częściowo konsekwencją optymalnego poziomu środków zapobiegawczych, ale także niekorzystnej sytuacji epidemiologicznej w innych krajach śródziemnomorskich.
Peace, safety, and security are the primary conditions for successful tourism development and security threats such as terrorism, crime or potential war conflicts can strongly affect tourism. Of ...these threats, crime is the most widespread. Certain types of crime are seasonal and some criminal offences are more often committed at a particular time of the year, week or day. The aim of this paper is to determine whether there is a connection between the seasonality of crime and tourism in Croatia. In order to achieve this aim, the correlation analysis was applied on monthly data from 2007 to 2018, using Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient to measure the strength of the relationship between crime and tourism. The analysis covered reported criminal offences that may be related to tourism. The conducted analysis found a statistically significant correlation between the tourist arrivals and stays and almost all types of reported criminal offences, and this correlation was stronger for property crimes and weaker for violent crimes. The obtained results can help law enforcement agencies to allocate police officers in specific periods of time and thus to provide adequate resources to respond to crime, such as additional police officers during the summer or other seasons.
Money has a symbolic and practical value in political competition and just because the money is important in politics, it can threaten democracy if its role is not adequately regulated. The basic ...features of party finance regulation will be shown in this paper: causes, instruments and impact. The regulation of party finances began in 1960s and the causes of the party finance regulation were different: in addition to the prevention of corruption scandals related to political parties and party finance, regulation of party finance has also been introduced to strengthen fair political competition, empower voters and strengthen political parties as effective democratic actors. To achieve this whole range of policy instruments was developed, whose scope extends from ways of regulating the possibility of buying votes, to limit election campaigns expenditure costs. However, impact of party finance regulation is not unambiguous since, due to the regulatory traditions and cultural attitudes, similar instruments of party finance regulation produce different results in different political systems.
Background: The Framework Programme (FP7) is the main instrument of the EU for financing research, and participation in the programme benefits greatly to countries’ technological development.
The aim ...of this paper is to assess the participation of Croatian organisations in FP7 in terms of specific programmes, funding schemes and the coordinator organisations.
In order to assess this participation, two analyses have been done: the first is the analysis of participation itself analysing the basic characteristics of Croatian participation in FP7 using participation data. The second analysis is the analysis of external conditions for participation, i.e. a framework that influenced the quantity and the quality of participation in FP7.
Participation of Croatian institutions in the FP7 has the following features: the positive rate of the national and the EU financial contribution; an unequal regional distribution; a small number of projects coordinated by Croatian participants; a low success rate and rare participation in large research projects.
Support should be provided to researchers in order to increase the participation in future funding programmes. First, researchers should perform only research and not the project administration since it requires well-educated and trained administration staff. Second, participants in future projects, especially coordinators, should be financially rewarded.
Scientific productivity is one of the engines of development in the 21st century. The most common way of its measurement is through publication in peer-review articles. Current research indicates ...that there is a strong connection between country's development and its share in the world publication of scientific articles. Transition countries are still catching-up with the most developed countries in terms of scientific productivity, which is especially evident in Western Balkan countries. As one of the rare attempts to assess obstacles to scientific productivity in transition countries, this study investigates different factors and their effects to the scientific productivity. The obstacles are the results of the historical reasons, inadequate systems for advancement in the scientific community, and problems with the development and/or implementation of strategies for scientific development of the particular country. In addition, without efficient measurement of scientific productivity, it is hard to analyse its behaviour. Papers written by authors from transition countries are often published in local journals that are covered insufficiently by the Web of Science. Therefore, up-to-date systems for tracking scientific publications in transition countries are of the highest importance.