All the employees face the challenge of finding the right work–life balance. The ability of employees to deal with the successful combining of work, family responsibilities, and personal life is crucial for both employers and family members of employees. During the COVID-19 emergency situation, many people around the world were forced to work remotely. Initially, there were observed some certain expectations about the possibility of working from home as a positive factor that will promote work–life balance. However, over time, negative tendencies were also revealed, as employees were only one call or message away from the employer, and uncertainty and leisure time with family often created more stress. As many organizations and individuals were not ready for this sudden change, many mistakes were made, which further raised the issue of work–life balance. The aim of the research was to evaluate the flexibility of reconciling work and private life of Latvian employees in various socio-demographic groups during the COVID-19 emergency situation in spring 2020, to investigate how family life influenced employees’ ability to perform work duties, to find out if employees had any additional housework responsibilities and how their workload changed concerning housework amount during the COVID-19 emergency situation. The research is based on the data obtained in the survey of the Latvian employed population, which was conducted within the framework of the Latvian National Research Programme Project “CoLife” in the second half of 2020. As a result, the hypothesis of the research that all groups of employees experienced work–life balance difficulties during the COVID-19 emergency situation has been partially confirmed, i.e., women in the 18–44 age group and respondents with minor children in the household more likely faced difficulties of work–life balance. The scientific research methods that were used in the research are the monographic method, content analysis, survey, data processing with SPSS to determine the mutual independence of the data from the questionnaires.

Activities in the field of agriculture deal with plants and animals constituting biological assets of the sector. From the point of view of accounting and valuation, biological assets is a scarcely investigated topic in Latvia, as well the object of the research only in general terms is reflected in Latvian legislation. That leads to confusion and uncertainty in evaluation and accounting of biological assets in the practical accounting. The subject of the study: evaluation and accounting of biological assets. The aim of the study is to explore and analyse problems of accounting and evaluation of biological assets in Latvia and to propose solutions. One of the research tasks is to explore the current legal base for evaluation and accounting of biological assets provided in the national legislation, to evaluate how it complies with the international accounting standards and to analyse the experience of other countries. The challenging issues of evaluation and accounting of biological assets in Latvia are defined in the research, possible solutions for improving the quality of accounting of biological assets are developed proposing the necessary amendments to the legislation and revisions to the methodological documents. Methods of the research: monographic/descriptive method, document analysis, and graphical analysis.

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Several individual factors like older age and chronic diseases have been linked with more severe symptoms often leading to hospitalization and higher mortality from COVID-19. Part of adults with such factors is still active in the workforce. The objective of the study was to identify measures taken by the employer to protect them and to investigate reasons for low protection of vulnerable workers during the 1st wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Answers from 1000 workers collected via web-survey and results from 10 focus group discussions were analyzed. Only 31.5% of respondents mentioned that their employer had identified existing vulnerable groups and offered specific measures to protect them. Moving vulnerable workers away from the workplace was the most frequent measure (e.g., transfer to the back-office without contact with clients, telework, paid vacations, paid downtime). Most employers do not see elderly workers and workers with chronic diseases as risk groups, thus are not specifically protecting them. Instead, several employers have included workers critical for business continuity in their risk group. Others had not taken measures because of the lack of information due to general data protection regulation. Poor communication and lack of interest of employers to ask their workers if they need special protection is the topic to be addressed at the national level.

This article aims to test empirically two popular hypotheses about territorial economic differences in the modern world. According to the first hypothesis, economic differences between countries in the modern world are not as large as regions' differences within countries. According to the second hypothesis, the decline in the degree of economic differences between countries is due to the relatively faster economic development of capital regions. Investigation of the economic differences on various territorial levels realized applying the method of comparing the coefficient of variation of the income of the population. The source of the empirical data for this research is the Sub-national Human Development Index (SHDI) database created by the Netherlands Institute for Management Research of the Radboud University, which contains such indicator as Income index of SHDI in the inner regions of 161 countries in the world for the period from 2000 to 2017. A comparison of economic differences at different territorial levels revealed that in the 21 st century, neither in the world as a whole nor in the EU regions' differences within countries are higher than differences between countries. However, starting with 2015 the economic differences between inner regions of the EU countries began to outweigh the economic differences between countries themselves, and this is the specifics of the European Union. In the 21 st century, both inter-country and intra-country regional economic differences in the EU countries are significantly lower than in the world as a whole. The economic importance of non-capital regions is gradually increasing in the EU, although for the time being the EU (and probably the world as a whole) still characterized by the economic growth, which is based mainly at the expense of capital regions.