The aim of this paper is to evaluate the relative efficiency of commercial banks in three developing countries in Europe (North Macedonia, Serbia, and Croatia) in the period from 2015 to 2019, and to provide targets for improvement for the inefficient banks by using DEA. The variables are selected under the income-based approach. Based on the output-oriented BCC model, unusual results are obtained for a few commercial banks in each country, that is, they are BCC relative efficient, which is contrary to the real situation. In order to identify outliers that can affect the efficiency results, a super-efficiency procedure is applied so that banks with a super-efficiency score higher than 1.2 (outliers) or for which a feasible solution was not found are considered in detail and removed, and then the output-oriented BCC model is rerun. Based on the obtained results, the Macedonian commercial banking system shows the highest efficiency (91.1%), followed by the Croatian (90.9%) and the Serbian (81.9%) banking system. The estimated targets for improvement of the inefficient commercial banks could help their top bank management in better resource allocation and making fact-based and faster decisions by which they can improve the operation of the banks they lead and contribute to the stability of the financial system.

The aim of this paper is, through a comparative analysis of the attitude towards the Jews and later towards the Muslims in the Christian part, and the attitude towards the Jews and the Christians in the Muslim part of medieval Spain, to perceive the capacities for a religious tolerance of both religions in this area. The focus of the analysis is on the conditions regarding the religious tolerance in Visigoth Spain, the Omayyad Caliphate and the Christian principalities in the Reconquista period. The text relies on, for the most part, on the evidence from three classic works of Jewish historiography: The Jews in Moslem Spain by Eliyahu Ashtor, A History of the Jews in Christian Spain by Yitzhak Baer, Jews, God and History by Max Dimont and also The History of Spain by Rafael Altamira y Crevea.The starting point of the analysis is the presumption that the level of religious tolerance is to a large extent conditioned by the economic and political circumstances of the societies where different religious communities live rather than the necessity of these communities to retain their religious distinctiveness or impose it on others.

DEA is a frequently used non-parametric methodology for measuring the relative efficiency of Decision-Making Units (DMUs) that use the same inputs to produce the same outputs. Emrouznejad and Yang (2018) provided a literature survey on DEA with 10,300 peer-reviewed journal articles from 1978 to the end of 2016. Our article focuses on DEA applications in the insurance industry in convergence with the existing relevant literature as Kaffash et al (2020), who have surveyed 132 DEA articles in the insurance industry for the period from 1993 to 2018. We include particular keyword analyses necessary to identify research hotspots in different periods. This article aims to conduct a bibliometric analysis of DEA-published documents (articles in journals and book chapters) in the insurance industry from 1993 to 2021, focusing on identifying research hotspots based on keyword co-occurrence analysis. We have analyzed published documents from relevant databases, such as Scopus, Web of Science, Ebsco and ProQuest. We use descriptive analytics and text mining as the main methods in our analysis. We provide descriptive statistics for articles per year and category of the insurance industry, geographical distribution, top five journals and authors by citations, and citation analysis. An additional qualitative factor of our article is in-depth keyword co-occurrence analysis by using text mining to identify research hotspots in the insurance industry. Our analysis aims to contribute to researchers and insurance practitioners as an empirical and applicative point for initiating and developing research.

The issue of the reasons that led to the exodus of the Macedonians from Aegean Macedonia after the Greek Civil War and the consequences caused by it is treated in this work. With our analysis, based on multiple sources of data, we would like to confirm the assumption that during a long period of time, and especially after the Greek Civil War, Macedonians were -and are still -exposed to various forms of institutional and noninstitutional repression, which presents trauma with consequences on the individual and collective level. The consequences of this repression are felt by the Republic of Macedonia in which a large number of expelled Macedonians -citizens of Greece -have settled. The general attitude of the Macedonian citizens in relation to the name dispute is largely interwoven by feelings of trauma arising from the stated exodus and the contemporary course of policies that shape up the relations between the two countries, but also the international political situation of the Republic of Macedonia, the membership of the UN and in particular the processes of integration in the European Union and NATO.

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