The concept of sustainable tourism development is imposed as an inevitable way of improving the tourism industry as a whole. This study tries to offer an adequate inclusion of sustainable factors in overall tourism development efficiency results. Through the detection and estimation of potential sources of efficiency, the paper will do the efficiency benchmarking of tourism services on the level of countries as destinations. In order to complete the task, data collection was focused on 27 EU countries and five Western Balkan countries over the period from 2011 to 2017. This paper utilized an output-oriented data envelopment analysis (DEA) procedure to estimate efficiency scores for each country, and a panel data Tobit regression model to emphasize the (in)significance of each individual tourism development indicator. The results in the first stage show relatively high-efficiency scores, particularly in the case of EU 15 countries and with room for improvement in the case of the others. The second stage reveals positive and significant effects on relative tourism efficiency by the sustainability of tourism development, the share of GDP, tourist arrivals and inbound receipts, as well as visa requirements and rate of use. Policymakers should gradually take control of the mentioned variables to protect the interests of all relevant stakeholders involved in the tourism development process.

The increasing trend of food scandal crises is not well followed in recent studies of spatial price transmission. This paper analyses the impact on the domestic market of an Aflatoxin M1 outbreak in the Serbian dairy sector during 2013/2014 using a spatial price transmission approach. Monthly farm milk prices in Serbia for the period 2007/2014 were contrasted with leading dairy exporting countries New Zealand, USA and Germany, which did not have a food scare in their dairy sectors. To estimate the impacts a Markov-switching vector error-correction model was utilized. For all four dairy markets the model identified two price change regimes: standard and extreme. Although it was predictable, an extreme regime was not identified during the Aflatoxin M1 crises in Serbia because of some specific characteristics of its dairy production. The results suggest that the Aflatoxin M1 outbreak ‘froze’ the Serbian dairy market and temporally disconnected it from the world milk market. Farmer’s prices fell below their long-run equilibrium levels. The total loss of the Serbian farm-level dairy sector during the crisis reached up to 96.2 million EUR. These ‘missed opportunity’ significantly slowed investment in the dairy sector.

Abstract. The paper contains a description of four different block bootstrap methods, i.e., non-overlapping block bootstrap, overlapping block bootstrap (moving block bootstrap), stationary block bootstrap and subsampling. Furthermore, the basic goal of this paper is to quantify relative efficiency of each mentioned block bootstrap procedure and then to compare those methods. To achieve the goal, we measure mean square errors of estimation variance returns. The returns are calculated from 1250 daily observations of Serbian stock market index values BELEX15 from April 2009 to April 2014. Thereby, considering the effects of potential changes in decisions according to variations in the sample length and purposes of the use, this paper introduces stability analysis which contains robustness testing of the different sample size and the different block length. Testing results indicate some changes in bootstrap method efficiencies when altering the sample size or the block length.

Since the beginning of the application of the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) model in various areas of the economy, it has found its wide application in the field of finance, more specifically banks, in the last few years. The focus of this research was to determine the sustainability of the intermediate function of banks, especially in recent years when interest rates on deposits have been at a minimum level. The research was divided into two parts, wherein the first part determined the efficiency of the intermediate function of banks in the countries of the Western Balkans in the period from 2015 to 2019. The second part approached the regression analysis in which we determined the influence of the bank size, type of bank, and mergers and acquisitions (M&A) activity on the defined efficiency. In the first stage we applied the output-oriented DEA model using deposits, labor costs, and capital as input variables; on the other side, we used loans and investments as output variables. We used data from the revised financial statements of the banks operating in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Albania. The results of our study showed that there is a difference in efficiency levels between countries and within countries in the considered time period. Furthermore, Tobit regression analysis showed a significant and negative influence of the bank type and M&A on relative technical efficiency of banks, and a positive and significant relationship between bank size and relative efficiency. These findings suggest that large commercial banks can sustain on the West Balkan market. It is to be expected that less efficient small banks will be taken over by large and more efficient banks.

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