Employment

Employment policies continue to present formidable challenges to policy makers and governments, especially due to their intersections with industrial and innovation policies in the context of longer term structural transformations. Today, employment policy actions and reforms are urgently needed to stimulate job creation and ensure a sustainable job-rich growth, encouraging and matching labour market needs for existing and new skills, while preventing a build-up of social and fiscal costs in the longer term. In countries or regions suffering a prolonged …

Governments have been undertaking reforms to become more efficient, transparent, responsive and citizen-oriented. Public administrations are becoming more flexible and performance-focused, adopting a forward-looking approach in their planning and budgeting. The process and organisational changes that have been introduced increasingly focus on end-performance results and on the quality of services offered. Public administrations have progressively substituted the direct provision of some services with either outsourced ones or in partnership with private sector entities, focusing mainly on the creation and regulation …

The Financial Institutions Sector has undergone rapid changes in recent years due to socio-economic, regulatory and technological developments. In many cases, financial services are either understood to be at the origin of the world financial crisis in the post-Lehman world, or having been involved in the aftermath of the sovereign debt crisis. The immense pressures exerted either on the national economy via the banking sector, or on the financial institutions themselves, as a result of the severe economic downturn, have …

Challenges

Energy, water resource management, waste management, as well as environmental protection and preservation schemes exhibit dynamic trends and, therefore, complex challenges due to their direct relation to development, as expressed through growth and competitiveness rates.
Increasing the sustainability of development by de-coupling growth from natural resources is of crucial importance. Companies around the globe encounter today’s challenges such as the changing energy generation mix and efforts to de-carbonize, securing fuel and supply at reasonable prices, complying with global regulations on emissions, and optimizing operational efficiency and customer …

The defence and security sector is in a transitory phase as the global financial crisis has affected budgets, and major conflicts of the past decade have gradually come to a close. Under fiscal pressure, the public sector is undertaking major restructuring initiatives in order to create more lean structures. Defence procurement is changing as states adopt affordability as the main criterion for selection of systems. Furthermore, the creation of the single market for defence products in the European Union is …

The broadest sectors of the economy are those involving the operation of retail networks and the exercise of commercial activities with consumers or other businesses, maintaining a pivotal role in the execution of transactions and the circulation of economic flows among large parts of the population.
On the other hand, the current economic situation and the emergence of factors that may fundamentally alter the underlying business model of retail and commercial activities, drive specific needs of sector actors, mostly in the …