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The European Union (EU) countries, as one of the most economically developed regions in the world, are taking increasingly decisive actions to reduce the emission of harmful substances into the natural environment. This can be exemplified by a new climate strategy referred to as “The European Green Deal”. Its basic assumption is that the EU countries will have achieved climate neutrality by 2050. To do so, it is necessary to make an energy transition involving the widest possible use of renewable energy sources (RES) for energy production. However, activities in this area should be preceded by analyses due to the large diversity of the EU countries in terms of economic development, the number of inhabitants and their wealth as well as geographical location and area. The results of such analyses should support the implementation of adopted strategies. In order to assess the current state of the energy sector in the EU and indicate future directions of activities, research was carried out to analyze the structure and volume of energy production from RES in the EU countries. The aim of the study was to divide the EU countries into similar groups by the structure and volume of energy production from RES. This production was compared with the number of inhabitants of each EU country, its area and the value of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). This approach allows a new and broader view of the structure of energy production from RES and creates an opportunity to take into account additional factors when developing and implementing new climate strategies. The k-means algorithm was used for the analysis. The presented analyses and obtained results constitute a new approach to studying the diversified energy market in the EU. The results should be used for the development of a common energy and climate policy and economic integration of the EU countries.

As organic farming gains more popularity across the world, it is important to discuss the underlying trends of its development in Ukraine, who is an important agricultural producer. Organic farming may have lower environmental pressures—therefore, we seek to identify the major trends in the production and sales of the organic agricultural products in Ukraine. In this study, data on the production structure, costs, and selling prices from Ukrainian enterprises are analyzed. Conventional and organic enterprises are contrasted in order to identify the possibilities for the development of organic agriculture in Ukraine. Our results suggest that enterprises that use organic farming in Ukraine tend to produce higher output per hectare, as opposed to those engaged in conventional farming. However, labor profitability remains low in labor-intensive organic farming, especially in larger companies, and organic products remain a low percentage of Ukraine’s agricultural exports. This calls for further study into the development of organic production and consumption in the domestic market, as well as the implementation of appropriate certification practices in order to ensure the growth of organic exports.

This article critically evaluates the concept of labour agency. First, we briefly reprise structure/agency debates in human geography in order to distil how agency is best conceived. Second, we propose a more discerning approach to labour agency that unpacks its many spatial and temporal dimensions. Third, we develop a ‘re-embedded’ notion of labour agency and identify global production networks, the state, the community and labour market intermediaries as key arenas for consideration. The paper argues that worker strategies must always be assessed in relation to these wider social relations, suggesting a constrained, variegated notion of labour agency.

This paper summarises the research findings of the HyFlowJobShop research project. The aim of the research project is to combine the organisation structure of the flow principle with the principle of job shop production since traditional organisation structures alone can no longer meet the increased demands for a growing number of variants and shorter amortisation periods for production systems due to shorter product life cycles. The combination of the job shop and flow principle to form hybrid organisation structures is intended to offer producing companies an opportunity to position themselves in the conflict between the required flexibility and the achievement of production logistics targets as well as the resulting costs. To quantify the advantages of hybrid organisation structures, various system configurations are examined as part of a simulation study to identify interdependencies and influencing factors.

The transformation of production structures has been at the centre of the historical dynamics of capitalist economies since the first Industrial Revolution. The article concentrates on production processes as principal loci of structural economic dynamics along increasing and decreasing returns trajectories. These trajectories are triggered by structural opportunities and constraints embedded in production systems, and their historical realisation is subject to different institutional configurations—production units at different levels of aggregation. The approach envisioned suggests the possibility of governing economic dynamics by structural policies working on the technological and organisational conditions of production as well as on the configuration of production processes within production units. Capitalist economies have to rely on a mix of co-ordination devices across different production units and aggregation levels for capturing structural opportunities and avoiding structural constraints.

The aim of this study is the assessment of the applicability of the Austrian School theory in explaining products’ price volatility at particular stages of structure of production. This assessment was based on the authorial model and the usage of statistical tests. Empirical verification of Austrian School theories is rare in economic literature. The test method used in this study fills the gap in the price volatility research. Proposed approach was not used in regards to the Austrian School theory before. The data analysis of the years between 2010 – 2017 indicated an existence of statistically significant differences in price volatility within various stages of production structure in all analyzed economies, including the euro area, Germany and France. In the analyzed years price volatility of goods was higher at stages of production structure more distant to final consumer goods. The exception was lower price volatility on capital goods stage compared to consumer goods in euro area and French economy.

Understanding the industrial structure of a national or regional economy is one of the central issues in economics. The triangulation of an input-output table (IOT) can be employed to understand the production structure of an economy. Inter-temporal and inter-regional comparisons of multiple IOTs have addressed interesting and important issues pertaining to international trade, economic growth, and inter-industry relationships in the economy. Rank correlation coefficients between sector rankings obtained by solving optimization problems have been utilized to quantify similarities among production structures. However, it is well known that calculated rank correlations might be weak even if underlying structures are similar because the optimization problem inherently has multiple optimal solutions, thus leading to erroneous interpretations. This paper proposes a new method to triangulate IOTs based on mixed integer programs (MIPs) for comparing the production structures of multiple economies. The proposed new method does not suffer from non-uniqueness of optimal solutions and is consistent with maximization of the Kendall rank correlation coefficient. The application of the proposed method to the Japanese economy demonstrates stability of the Japanese production structure during 1995 - 2005. Comparisons of triangulated IOTs further reveal similarities in production structures of the Chinese, Japanese, and the U.S. economy for the year 2009.

This article uses data from the Census of Agriculture 2014 pertaining to the Department of Boyacá. It connects the production performance at the municipal level to a set of rural determinants, which encompass the exploitation of the agricultural potential. This approach highlights features of the agricultural sector in Boyacá: the predominance of annual crops, the break-up of agricultural units, family arrangements to supply labor input, and the lack of a widespread export stuff, inter alia. The methodology employs a spatial approach that seeks to identify spatial patterns in the agricultural output, using the municipality as the spatial unit. We resort to spatial econometrics to model the determinants of the agricultural output, and to point out a better spatial structure according to the pool of data. The econometric results confirm a kind of spatial dependence in the error, suggesting the influence of common shocks affecting the agricultural output, everywhere the municipalities of Boyacá. Throughout the region, the traditional production profile, based on annual crops to satisfy the national consumption, prevails. This type of production depends on typical rural conditions: small plots of land, little mechanized production, family work and precarious wages. El artículo se inspira en los resultados del Censo Agrícola 2014 para Boyacá. El propósito es relacionar el desempeño puramente productivo con los determinantes de economía campesina que sirven de contexto a la producción en toneladas. Entre estos últimos se destacan la especialización en cultivos transitorios, la fragmentación de las unidades de producción agrícolas, la provisión familiar de trabajadores, la ínfima importancia de la oferta exportable, etc. La metodología adopta un enfoque espacial que persigue identificar los patrones espaciales de la producción, definiendo el municipio boyacense como la unidad de análisis en el plano geográfico. La econometría dilucida cuál es la mejor estructura en el espacio que modela los datos básicos. De esta manera se convalida el modelo de error espacial, que da lugar a la presencia de shocks comunes a todos los municipios boyacenses, afectando en todos ellos la producción agrícola. La interacción entre dichas unidades geográficas permite modelar la producción volcada mayoritariamente hacia el mercado nacional, la cual es explicada significativamente por determinantes típicamente rurales: la fragmentación de las unidades agrícolas, las técnicas de producción escasamente mecanizadas, la relevancia del trabajo familiar como factor de producción, y las precarias remuneraciones.

Recent research on international trade focuses on firm-product-level heterogeneity and the role of uncertainty in shaping international trade. This article contributes to the literature by examining product-level dynamics within firms in the context of Mexican trade integration under NAFTA. The data show intense product churning within firms and confirm the existence of within-firm product heterogeneity. The data indicate that new exporters enter foreign markets with a small number of varieties, most of which were previously sold at home, and with a small export small volume. The data also suggest that export discoveries are relatively rare and are imitated within a short period of time.

Contrary to the traditional approaches for the evaluation of human capital, this study proposes the assessment of human capital through its qualitative characteristics (knowledge, skills, abilities, and working activities). To investigate the knowledge content density in the Greek production structure for the year 2018, the methodology followed concerns a sectoral analysis of the economy and the matching of each occupation with four knowledge items from the O*NET database. The findings indicate that the prevailing knowledge characteristics (66% of total) of the Greek production structure of 2018 concern a simple rather than sophisticated knowledge background which is reflected in the economic structure and in middle and low specialization of the workforce. This study contributes to the literature by providing an original and robust way to evaluate the knowledge content in total within the economy without being based on model forecasts but sectoral data. Furthermore, it provides policymaking insights for the intervention in specific areas of the knowledge content which could “nudge” economic growth of the existing production structure. The grounds for policymaking concern education, reskilling, and especially lifelong learning programs.