This paper deals with public health systems of European Union Member States. We try to analyse and compare the public health budget allocation systems in existence in the EU. We analyse their differences and try to explain where the differences come from. We concentrate on the impact of differences in economic estimates in decision making on the allocation of scarce funds. We try to answer the question whether countries with lower income per capita compensate the lack of funds, lower capital endowment, and the impossibility to invest in equipment with larger labour endowment or improvement in human capital. On contraire, we find that some of the former transition countries experience a strong brain drain of medical personnel. Thus, former transition countries with relative stronger health personnel endowments tend to lose their qualified labour force to the more capital-endowed developed nations confirming the brain-drain hypothesis and refuting the hypothesis that labour is a relatively immobile production factor.

Sixty years ago, Samuelson's "Pure Theory of Public Expenditure" expounded the classification of goods, and Bain's "Economies of Scale, Concentration and the Condition of Entry in Twenty Manufacturing Industries" expounded the structure-conduct-performance paradigm. To the present day, rivalry in-and excludability from consumption classify goods, and subadditivity and irreversibility in production classify market structure. Opportunity costs of production in the form of prospective sunk costs incentivise investment and production, and the sunk costs themselves induce subadditivities, specialization and convexity of the marginal rate of technical substitution. Opportunity costs in consumption are determined by the marginal costs of replacement. In light of the recent Nobel price award to Jean Tirole, we revisit some of the forgotten discussions and clarify some of the terminology under a more economic framework of opportunity costs.

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Industries create specific business settings that exert a backward influence on industry prospects. In this paper, the manner in which two industries -the construction industry and the food and beverage processing industry -have behaved during a crisis period is examined and compared. First, the performance indicators available from statistic sources are compared; then, the panel data of the two subsamples of the largest Croatian firms in terms of capital and employment related to construction and food processing in the period 2005-2014 are subjected to comparison. The provided data demonstrate that the five largest business firms in the two industries have a tendency to employ different business behaviors specific to the industry they are part of. The basic idea behind this research was that industry characteristics are created by individual business firms through their adjusting their behavior, i.e. strategies, organizational design and operation models to perceived industry settings. So, in the longer time period, depending on resource availability at the firm level and the market opportunities in the industry, a dominant pattern of the business model will evolve. The research showed differences in the rate of the activity and business demography during the observed period. There is also evidence of different business models being employed in construction and food processing. However, at this stage of our research, we have not been able to establish a relationship between the business model employed and the firm´s or industry performance.

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