Towards a balanced contribution of household credit to the economy. CEPS-ECRI Task Force Report, May 2015

While policy-makers are creating conditions to strengthen recovery, the debate on the role that retail finance should play in this respect focuses on corporate loans rather than on household credit. The improvement of financing conditions for firms in order to support further investment spending is certainly essential to ensuring sustainable growth. However, a significant part of EU growth will depend on the behaviour of households and on their ability to secure funding for their consumption and investment. It is therefore essential to place further emphasis on the different options available to stimulate household credit, in particular consumer loans. Nevertheless, in order to avoid past mistakes, regulators should continue to develop a framework where consumer loans (and by extension household credit) contributes to the economy in a balanced way. To achieve this, five main issues need to be addressed further.

A Differentiated, Balanced and Patient Approach? The EU’s Involvement with Georgia’s Secessionist Conflicts beyond the August 2008 War. EU Diplomacy Paper 06/2015.

The August war in 2008 between Russia and Georgia caught the world by surprise but nevertheless brought the European Union (EU) to the forefront of the international efforts to end the hostilities, and the EU became the leading international actor involved with the conflict resolution process. However, in the years following the armed conflict, the conflict resolution process lost pace, and the impact of the EU beyond the immediate aftermath of the August 2008 war has been put into question. By undertaking a qualitative case study, this paper aims to explore to what extent the EU has impacted on the conflict resolution process of Georgia’s secessionist conflicts in 2008-2015. It will argue that the EU’s policies have only to a limited extent impacted on this conflict resolution process, which can be related to the objectives, priorities and time perspectives of the EU’s conflict resolution policies. The EU’s efforts have significantly contributed to the objective of conflict prevention, but the profile of the EU in the field of international conflict management weakened its position in the area of conflict transformation, where the lack of progress in turn limited the EU’s impact in the areas of international conflict management and conflict settlement. The main conclusion put forward is that in order to have a true impact, the EU needs to undertake a differentiated, balanced and patient approach to conflict resolution.

Balanced Scorecard: aplicação prática à empresa Movida Empreendimentos Turísticos S. A.

O ambiente competitivo tem-se alterado de forma rápida e imprevisível. A necessidade das empresas de se adaptarem às mudanças é cada vez maior. Os tradicionais sistemas de controlo de gestão tornaram-se ineficazes e obsoletos face a esta nova realidade. O Balanced Scorecard (BSC) surge para dar resposta a estes desafios e pretende dotar as empresas com um sistema de gestão integrado que permite definir e concretizar a estratégia. Este projeto tem por objetivo descrever a implementação do Balanced Scorecard no Palácio do Gelo Shopping, um dos maiores centros comerciais do país. O estudo mostra a importância de adoção do BSC no alcance dos resultados esperados, pois apenas o bom desempenho financeiro da empresa não será suficiente. Este estudo é apenas um primeiro passo de um longo caminho a percorrer.

MRTAB: Stata module to compute one- and two-way tables/graphs of multiple responses

mrtab tabulates multiple responses which are held as a set of indicator variables or as a set of polytomous response variables.