This paper analyzes post-socialist industrial development and policy in the Western Balkans through the lens of its regional specialization and spatial concentration. Against a conceptual framework ...revolving around place-based industrial policy, and using the Concentration index (modified Herfindahl-Hirschman index) and location coefficients (Balassa index), a comparative analysis over three decades (1990-2020) highlights weak regional diversification and intra-regional integration of industrial activity. The findings offer a new industrial policy that transcends regional specialization and spatial concentration to address regional development, planning and governance. The concluding remarks reveal some basic paths toward effective and pro-European regional industrial policy in the Western Balkans.
Colocasia esculenta (L.) Schott is an emergent aquatic and semi-aquatic species native to Asia, where it grows in tropical and subtropical areas. This species is widely cultivated for its edible corm ...and is considered as alien in various parts of the world, becoming sometimes invasive (e.g., in Spain), and in these areas eradication should be carried out. As part of ongoing studies on Araceae, in 2015 a population
of C. esculenta was discovered in Rome (central Italy), where it grows along ditches. This is the first record of a naturalized population in Italy. A comprehensive view of this species in Italy and Europe was given, with clarifications about its occurrence in the Balkans, where C.
esculenta was excluded from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia, and Slovenia. A morphological description based on the population found and considerations of its ecology and the climatic conditions at the Roman site are provided.
This paper critically interrogates the 'integrative potential' of football by drawing on ethnographic fieldwork that includes 84 semi-structured interviews with refugees, asylum seekers and local ...community organizations, and five interviews with representatives of national football associations across Southeast Europe, a region that has hitherto been under-examined in this field of research. The results show the uneasy and strained relationship between football and integration, characterized by incongruity between micro-level practices and experiences of solidarity and inclusion, and State-sponsored marginality and deterrence taking place in Southeast Europe. We provide empirical evidence for social connections, facilitators (i.e. language and communication, safety and stability), and rights as relevant, meaningful and challenging domains of integration in the context of football. We conclude that foundational rights, and hence dehumanizing policies and discourses, need to be addressed if the proclaimed 'integrative potential' of football is to be realized beyond social connections and sporadic examples of access to decent work through football.
► Results of the Food Choice Questionnaire (3085 respondents, 6 Balkan Countries). ► The most important factors are ‘sensory appeal’, ‘purchase convenience’, and ‘health and natural content’. ► ...Factor analysis reveals eight factors compared to nine factors in the original model of
Steptoe, Pollard, and Wardle (1995). ► Cluster analysis identifies pertinent groups for health communication policy.
Substantial empirical evidence exists regarding the importance of different factors underlying food choice in Western Europe. However, research results on eating habits and food choice in the Western Balkan Countries (WBCs) remain scarce. A Food Choice Questionnaire (FCQ), an instrument that measures the reported importance of nine factors underlying food choice, was administered to a representative sample of 3085 adult respondents in six WBCs. The most important factors reported are sensory appeal, purchase convenience, and health and natural content; the least important are ethical concern and familiarity. The ranking of food choice motives across WBCs was strikingly similar. Factor analysis revealed eight factors compared to nine in the original FCQ model: health and natural content scales loaded onto one factor as did familiarity and ethical concern; the convenience scale items generated two factors, one related to purchase convenience and the other to preparation convenience. Groups of consumers with similar motivational profiles were identified using cluster analysis. Each cluster has distinct food purchasing behavior and socio-economic characteristics, for which appropriate public health communication messages can be drawn.
Despite the long tradition of research on country-of-origin and consumer ethnocentrism, many of the issues remain unresolved in the literature, most notably the relationship between cognitive, ...affective and normative mechanisms in consumer choice behavior, and generalizability of existing research findings to non-traditional emerging and/or small country markets. This study responds to the current gaps in knowledge in that it examines behavioral manifestations of consumers’ choice of domestic vs. foreign products in four transitioning post-war markets in the West Balkans. Data were collected via personal interviews with 1954 adult urban consumers. The model of domestic purchase behavior was tested using SEM analysis. The results for all four country samples indicate that consumer ethnocentrism has affected domestic purchase behavior both directly and indirectly through domestic product appraisal. Moreover, we found consumer worldliness, a controversial construct in previous studies, to be uniformly negatively related to ethnocentrism. On the other hand, the findings related to the role of national identification as an antecedent to consumer ethnocentrism and domestic product appraisal were inconsistent across the samples. The implications of these findings for the validity and generalizability of existing models of consumer behavior in a new cultural context are considered, and implications for marketers interested in exploiting opportunities in the region are discussed.
This article redirects extant critiques of the modern problem of war at this problem's underlying logic of deviance. According to this logic, war constitutes a kind of international conduct that ...contravenes behavioural norms and that can be corrected through diagnostic and didactic means. Thereby, war is rendered into a problem falling within the scope of human agency. However, this agency rests on and reproduces this logic's constitutive blind spots. Therefore, it seems imperative to develop ways of problematising war otherwise. The article provides two starting points for (critical) IR scholarship seeking to undertake such a project. Firstly, it combines two Foucaultian tools, the concept of problematisation and the method of genealogy, to direct critique at the logics underlying our evaluative – analytical, ethical, and political – judgements. Secondly, it uses these tools to trace the contingent emergence of the logic of deviance in a crucial example within the wider genealogy of the problem of war: the Carnegie Endowment's commission of inquiry into the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913. Based on original archival research, I highlight different elements of this inquiry's problematisation of war – its frames, assumptions, ways of knowing, and subjects of knowledge – to make them available for reconstruction.
The openness of the economy and its intensive involvement in international trade and economic flows has an important role in stimulating economic growth and development of a national economy. The aim ...of the research is to determine the degree of impact and effects of exports, imports and foreign direct investment (FDI) on economic growth. The applied research methodology is a panel regression analysis on the example of six countries in the Western Balkans region in the period from 2000 to 2018. Three hypotheses were tested in this paper. H1: Exports have a positive effect on economic growth; H2: Imports contribute to GDP growth; H3: FDI has a positive impact on economic growth. The results show that all three variables have a positive, statistically significant impact on GDP. The greatest effect on economic growth in the analyzed sample has exports, which implies the conclusion of the inevitability of more intensive participation of these economies in international trade flows.
Messor is a diverse genus of Myrmicinae with 168 extant species and subspecies. In the Mediterranean, some of its taxa historically were classified as members of the Messor instabilis group (sensu ...Santschi), of which 19 are known from the eastern Mediterranean. Here, the Messor semirufus complex of the Balkan Peninsula that assembles a distinct subsection of members of the instabilis group is defined and treated. In total, five species are recorded, including three that are new. Messor atanassovii Atanassov, 1982 is redescribed and confirmed for Bulgaria (Thracian Plain, Struma, and Mesta Valley, Pirin Mt., and Eastern Rhodopi) and Greece (Epirus, Ionian Islands, Central and Eastern Macedonia, and Thraki). Three species are described as new to science: Messor danaes Salata, Georgiadis & Borowiec, sp. nov. (Cyclades: Serifos), Messor kardamenae Salata & Borowiec, sp. nov. (Dodecanese: Kos, Nisyros, Rhodes, and Tilos), and Messor veneris Salata, Georgiadis & Borowiec, sp. nov. (Cyclades: Milos). The fifth member of the complex, Messor creticus Borowiec & Salata, 2019, maintains its status of Cretan endemic.
The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, it uses the available official Input-Output data for the Western Balkans economies to estimate the output and value added multipliers of the sectors ...identified as being either current or emerging strengths within the context of Smart Specialisation. These multipliers indicate the potential impact of changes in final demand for certain products and sectors. This permits the identification of the industries associated with high indirect and induced effects, and to form ideas about the sectoral interdependencies of the economies. For instance, it appears that many sectors related to construction are promising in terms of economic potential related to demand-side monetary injections in Albania. Second, a Multi-Regional dataset is used to investigate the international integration of the Western Balkans economies in terms of participation in the Global Value Chains. The latter has increased over time in the region, but it appears that some economies are benefitting relatively more than others from it.
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