With the massive economic development and vast environmental degradation over the last decade, "sustainability" and "sustainable development" have become primary concepts in governments" agenda. Sustainability has three pillars, namely environmental, economic and social, the latter gaining attention relatively later than the others. Some organizations evaluate the world countries for social sustainability using indices such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Better Life Index, Human Development Index and Social Society Index (SSI). SSI is used to rank world countries and evaluate their level of sustainability. SSI is a scoring system developed by Social Society Foundation to measure human wellbeing, environmental wellbeing and economic wellbeing every 2 years. In the evaluation process, SSI calculates scores using 21 indicators and publishes the actual situation on sustainability, progress over time and differences in development per region and per income class. In this paper, human wellbeing indicators of SSI are used to cluster world countries with k-means algorithm to assess social sustainability. Human wellbeing indicators are grouped into basic needs, personal development and health, and well-balanced society, all of which are measured with 3 indicators. The clusters obtained are compared with SSI rankings and the results are elaborated.

Abstract

Health care is ever more important with the aging population and with the increased awareness of the importance of the medical systems due to the corona crisis that showed the capacity of the health care infrastructure, especially in terms of numbers of health care personnel such as doctors, was not sufficient. Assuming that the number of doctors per patient is one of the determinants of patient satisfaction, optimal investments in new doctors, specialist doctors and foreign doctors are analyzed. Optimal Control Theory is employed to determine the optimal investment strategy for new doctors (new graduates), specialists and foreign doctors to maximize the net (of costs) patient satisfaction over a fixed time horizon. It is found that a nation with an insufficient number of total doctors and specialist doctors at the beginning of the planning horizon should increase the investment in new doctors as a quadratic function of time, increase the local specialist doctors linearly, while employing foreign doctors as to equate their cost to the marginal satisfaction of patients.

No abstract

Financial crisis of 2008 and the ongoing pandemic are continuing to have a negative impact on the economies of all countries even tough interest rates have been decreased significantly. This paper attempted to view the problem from a micro point of view to suggest more effective incentives for growth. The specific objective of the study is to determine and examine the effects of these incentives on economic growth in Central European countries.