Food safety represents a current topic, with significant implications and diverse approaches within the specialized literature. In the context of globalization and integration of agricultural markets, the necessity of guaranteeing food safety is imperative for the functionality of contemporary agricultural systems. The radical transformation of the national agricultural systems as a result of the influences imposed by the convergence with the requirements and directions of the European agricultural model entails a significant change for the markets of agri-food products, affecting the food trade, its structure and, implicitly, food safety. In this context, the main objective of the present paper is to examine food safety in Romania using an econometric approach to the phenomenon. Nine fundamental variables are considered, for which the causal relationship between food safety and the exogenous variables taken into analysis is tested. The time frame for data availability for all the variables is 1990-2011. The obtained results highlight the transformations of paradigm of the national agricultural model from the perspective of the dimensions regarding food safety, confirming results from previous studies.

Among the many types of terrestrial ecosystems, forests have some of the highest levels of biodiversity; they also have many interdependent economic, ecological and social functions and provide ecosystem services. They supply a range of tangible, marketable goods, as well as a variety of nonmarketable and intangible services derived from various forest functions. These translate into social, cultural, health and scientific benefits for people’s quality of life. However, because they cannot be traded on a market, nonmarketable and intangible services are often perceived as free, inexhaustible and, as a result, underestimated. The human–nature interaction has affected both nature (via resource consumption) and society (via development of human welfare and well-being). Decision-makers, both public and private, often manage natural capital for multiple aims. In recent years it has been found that the single, individual approach estimating the value for these goods and services is not able to provide information that generates and supports decisions and policies in complex areas of current relevance such as the constant loss of biodiversity, climate change and global warming in close connection with the need for social development and ensuring an acceptable level of well-being for the greatest part of humanity. An integrated assessment with advanced techniques and methods using a pluralist framework of a heterogeneous set of values is considered a better approach to the valuation of such complex nature of the ecosystem goods and services. This assessment should take into account both costs and benefits trade-off issues among the multiple uses of ecosystem goods and/or services, especially the relationships between them and how they influence or determine the economic, social and cultural development of society. It should also consider the estimation of the complex inverse effect, from society to nature, whose goods and services can be diminished to exhaustion by the extensive and intensive anthropization of natural ecosystems with major impact on the number and quality of goods and services provided by ecosystems. Research has shown that applying an integrative assessment approach that utilizes tools developed by sustainability sciences could be an important component of future environmental policy making.

This study is set out to identify feasible ways for immigrants’ integration into the major ten host countries within the European Union (EU-10) and increased labor market performance. Eurostat, OECD, and United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) official data was mainly used to capture essential international migration indicators (for both dimensions—economic and humanitarian), along with education, socio-economic development and labor market credentials, as key variables for immigrants’ integration into EU-10, compiled for 2000–2017. In this respect, spatial analyses, bootstrap estimations, structural equations (SEM), and Gaussian graphical models (GGM) are applied, to better grasp migrants’ labor market outcomes. Significant positive consequences reflected through a reduction in the unemployment rate of the foreign population are generated by active labor market policies, jointly with an enhancement in the attainment for secondary education, and welfare advances. The opposite, a rise in income inequalities has negative effects, while additional support for R&D activities deployed within the business sector is required to entail migrants’ labor market performance. The passive policies need to be redesigned and tailored to significantly downsize the foreign unemployment, since these are currently acting like a disincentive for an active participation of migrants on the European labor market, thus confining their integration.