Documents Journal of Risk and Financial Management 4 results

"Two decades after the biggest ever enlargement of the European Union, post-transition countries face a series of challenges, posed primarily by de-globalization and growing illiberalism. Declining European competitiveness, as highlighted by the Draghi Report (2024), calls for major restructuring both regionally and community-wide. This invited survey article attempts to solve a puzzle: if Europeanization has not been very successful, how could it promote globalization? Furthermore, Central Europe counts as a success story, both in terms of convergence and in terms of stabilizing west Europe's previously restive neighborhood. Sustaining this success is not automatic. We posit the two main conditions. These are: more focus on Ordnungspolitik (single market, competition policy, and capital markets union) and de-emphasis of re-distrubution (CAP and Cohesion). We also show why and how Central Europe will decide the future of the EU and the ways it can cope with globalization."

This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

"In the European Union, the concern for sustainability has been legitimized by its politically and ecologically motivated discourse disseminated through recent policies of the European Commission and the local as well as international media. In the article, we question the very meaning of sustainability and examine the European Green Deal , the major political document issued by the EC in 2019. The main question pursued in the study is whether expectations verbalized in the Green Deal 's plans, programs, strategies, and developments hold up to the scrutiny of critical discourse analysis. We compare the Green Deal 's treatment of sustainability to how sustainability is presented in environmental and social science scholarship and point out that research, on the one hand, and the politically motivated discourse, on the other, do not correlate and often actually contradict each other. We conclude that sustainability discourse and its keywords, lexicon, and phraseology have become a channel through which political institutions in the EU such as the European Commission sideline crucial environmental issues and endorse their own presence. The Green Deal discourse shapes political and institutional power of the Commission and the EU."

"In 2021, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) issued two emergency temporary standard regulations related to COVID-19 hazards in US workplaces. One regulation covered healthcare sector workers, while the second regulation would have covered workers at firms with 100 or more employees. This paper conducts an original mortality risk analysis for these regulations. Mortality risk analysis evaluates the increase or decrease in expected mortality associated with a new policy, such as a rule or regulation, taking into account economic factors like lost income due to regulatory costs. If we accept OSHA's cost and health benefit estimates at face value, we find that the first regulation related to COVID-19 hazards in the healthcare sector reduces risk initially but increases risk over a longer time horizon. We find that the second regulation would reduce risk according to OSHA's main estimates but may not reduce risk after including some ancillary costs and adjusting the agency's prevented hospitalizations estimate based on more reasonable assumptions. Moreover, OSHA's economic analysis for the two regulations in question does not purport to comprehensively evaluate costs; ergo, our mortality risk estimates probably underestimate countervailing mortality risks stemming from these regulations. We review some of OSHA's underlying assumptions that could change the outcomes of our mortality analysis. These estimates demonstrate that OSHA would benefit from more comprehensive consideration of costs in its economic analysis."

"Recently, there has been an ongoing global debate on the issues of energy safety, energy autonomy, and energy alleviation policies in developed and developing countries. The energy communities can integrate distributed energy resources, especially among local energy systems, playing a decisive role to support people around the world in the transition process towards sustainable development and renewable energy sources (RES). The main research dimensions of such a manifold approach are environmental sustainability, the reduction of greenhouse gases (GHGs) emission, the ordinal exploitation of RES, the social awareness in actions towards global consumerism in an environmentally caring manner, the increase of energy efficiency, and the pollution relief caused by the expansion of urban/built environment worldwide. This review study focused on the roles and the ways of how “energy communities” (ECs) could support contemporary energy management and priorities to ensure energy safety, autonomy, and alleviation, regionally and globally. In this context, a systematic, last-decade publications of ECs was conducted and the retrieved documents were organized in alignment with the following four groups of literature overview. Group 1 covered the dimensions of technology and environment, being coupled with Group 2, covering the dimensions of socio-culture and anthropocentricity (mainly focusing on the built environment). A similar coupling of Group 3 and Group 4 was made, where Group 3 covered the legislative dimension of ECs and Group 4 covered the ECs devoted to Europe–European Union (EU), respectively. The emerging key literature aspects, the proposed measures, and the applied energy policies on ECs were also conveyed and discussed."