ABSTRACT. Managers are consistently faced with the decision of how to allocate scarce corporate resources in a demanding and highly competitive environment. Moreover, the economic crisis brings the strategic corporate concerns to a new level, where the profitability -social responsibility duality becomes even more controversial. Using regression analysis as in the methodology tested by Waddock and Graves (1997), this paper reports the results of a rigorous study of the empirical linkages between financial and social performance during 2005-2010 in the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) multinational companies of Romania. Aside from biased conclusions drawn by this research, top industries as ICT offer many fruitful opportunities towards sustainable development, especially on a frontier market as Romania.

The main aim of the paper is to analyse the factors which influence the dimension, dispersion and the level of efficiency of Romania's trade flows in the 2001-2015 period. We have conducted a statistical analysis using EViews, which employed the Panel Least Squared method and the Estimated Generalized Least Squared method. We also provided a critical review of the literature covering the gravity model. Some of the questions we touch upon in this paper are: the variables for similarity as predictors of trade flows, the matrix which synthesizes the differences between potential and actual trade flows and the magnitude of convergence at trade flow level. We focused our discussion on the trade flows between Romania and specific countries for a period which stretches for fifteen years. Our primary scientific goal was to provide an overview of Romanian's recent trade flows and to propose some new predictors for the international flows of goods and services. We want to point out that the conclusions which stem from our empirical study are contingent on the relatively short period we examined and that future research may be considered extending the reference period in order to refine the results of the gravity model further.

Current educational systems and processes need to anticipate the challenges of the new millennium and lay the foundations for the future in the economic, social, technological, cultural and relational context. New educational programs must seriously consider a number of conditions such as: entirely new ways of serving existing needs and significantly disrupt existing industry value chains; growing transparency, consumer engagement, and new patterns of consumer behavior; the development of technology-enabled platforms that combine both demand and supply to disrupt existing industry structures, such as those we see within the “sharing” or “on demand” economy. In this paper I`ve started from the assumption that in the specific conditions of a creativity-based economy is necessary to rethink the components of the matrix partnership crossing from `triple helix` to `quadruple helix` logic. This new model becomes necessary because under current regional and international circumstances Mode 3 of knowledge production has become generalized. In this paper I`ve opted for the concept that adds civil society proposing reformulate the analytical model so as to place in balance integration with differentiation to produce suitability for a societal design defined by the self-organization of the sense communication process with respect to the analytical axes of complex systems. The basic idea of the research is to identify the way in which the challenges of internationalization of education, the transformations required by the emergence of this process, and the most relevant redefining that must take place at the level of curricular architectures and learning methods are understood. Based on the research I have made, I recommended few ways to cope with sensitive challenges educational systems are confronted with such as: better connecting theory and practice, teaching a more useful economics, designing the future based on the understanding of the past, minimizing the rhetorical component and maximizing the factual one, testing conformity of different ideas in advance.

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