is among EU countries where the growth of the sector could be qualifi ed as dynamic. The number of organic producers increased from 72 in the year 2000 to 2775 in 2008. Romania declared to provide further support to the improvement of quality in the organic sector. Organic food will be processed minimally in the future. The specifi c taste and traditional regional specialties will be more appreciated [Rural Europe, 2009]. But biologically active substances in organic food are interesting for the consumer and food industry as well [Ivanišová et al., 2013]. Important approach is health safety of organic products, e.g. pesticide residues were confi rmed only at crops grown on conventional farms, at organic grape bunches no residues were confi rmed [Turgut et al., 2011]. The decision-making process of consumers buying organic food is infl uenced by several cultural, social, personal and psychological factors. Psychology of the sale is a key area of consumer behavior and consists of several factors. The psychological factors include perception, learning or knowledge, opinions and attitudes, as well as motivation. An integral part of these are thought processes that determine purchasing decisions.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed new aspects of sustainable entrepreneurship and the resilience of SMEs in the conditions of individual countries. This empirical study contributes to entrepreneurship sustainability literature and business resilience literature by estimating the impact of various utilized internal crisis management tools and state compensation measures on retaining the pre-crisis levels of employment after two waves of the pandemic on the conditions of a V4 country. The study adopts an econometric approach towards assessing the influence of key factors of mitigating the problems caused by the pandemic, and the results suggest a crucial role of digitalization, internal policies optimizing variable costs, and utilization of direct governmental supportive measures to compensate for restrictions in force for employment retention in knowledge-intensive SMEs. According to the results, knowledge-intensive SMEs appears to have increased resilience towards economic shocks due to the capability to swiftly change the management of ventures to adapt to a crisis.

Informal economy is rather difficult to define and demarcate in the methodological context. International Conference of Labour Statisticians in 2003 adopted a set of guidelines regarding definition of statistical categories of informal employment. These include for example employed unregistered own-account workers, contributing family workers, persons who work based on oral agreement, etc. Informal economy is a contentious topic in many developing countries as it brings about many elements that from several aspects adversely affect the development. The most commonly stressed are the fiscal implications (associated with tax revenue loss) and some social concerns. However, in some parts of the world informal sector went from being considered as a negative occurrence to be tolerated as a partial solution to some of the challenges that hinder development of rural regions and communities. The aim of the paper is to determine the relationship between informal economy and level of development and quality of life in Ukrainian regions. The paper examines the role of informal economy in regional structure of Ukraine, while confronting the findings with regional divergence in relevant indicators of development and quality of life. There are statistically significant differences in the size of the informal employment among different types of Ukrainian regions (by rural-urban typology). With increasing share of informal employment in the regions, the income level of households decreases significantly even when we take into consideration the level of unemployment.

The presented paper deals with the regionalization of the electoral support of the Czech Pirate Party (Pirates) in regional elections using methods and techniques of spatial data analysis. The aim is to answer the question whether the territorial distribution of Pirate electoral support allows this party to participate in governance at the regional level and thus influence the form of regional policy in individual regions. The results of the analysis show that the spatial distribution of Pirates’ electoral support in regional elections differed quite significantly not only from the pattern found in the elections to the Chamber of Deputies of the Czech Parliament and elections to the European Parliament, but also between individual regional elections. This suggests the current lack of anchorage of Pirates’ electoral support in regional politics, but at the same time, it may have its origins in the second-order character of regional elections and the candidacy of many local and regional entities in regional elections. On the other hand, the results of the regional elections in 2020 meant that the Pirates received seats in all regional councils, but especially in nine of the thirteen regions they joined the regional government (similarly to two years earlier when they joined government of capital city of Prague), gaining the opportunity to influence, with regard to its priorities, the form of regional governance in most Czech regions.

In this paper, we aim to describe and explain the regional disparities in economic resilience in Slovakia in the period 1997–2017. We focus on the effects of economic structure in combination with the vertical (potential accessibility) and horizontal geographical location. Since the early 1990s, Slovak (non-)metropolitan regions exhibited deep changes in the sectoral structure of the economy that were followed by sharp unemployment increases. Due to the FDI-fueled economic growth in the last two decades, however, considerable progress in regional economic growth and reduction in unemployment were was recorded. Therefore, Slovak non-metropolitan regions provide valuable lessons for the analysis of regional economic resilience in a long-term period. We ask if, and to what extent were, the prospects of regional renewal after economic crises associated with the geographical location, economic diversity, firm size and sectoral structure of the economy. We employed spatial regression models to test the effects of the potential accessibility, horizontal geographical location and industrial diversity, and sectoral (agriculture, manufacturing) and firm size structure. The dependent variable, Economic Resilience, was measured by the Regional Development Index, combining the indicators of demographic ageing, net migration, income per capita and registered unemployment rate. Potential accessibility and horizontal geographical location were the key predictors of regional economic resilience. Districts with tertiarized and diversified industrial and firm size structures scored, on average, higher in RDI than specialized districts with large firms and/or a high share of agriculture/manufacturing in total employment.