The present challenging environment determines organizations to differentiate themselves from their competitors finding creative solutions. Business Excellence Models (BEMs) is the appropriate instrument for organizations to create authentic competitive advantages. In dynamic and changing environments characterized by technological changes, a sustainable advantage requires strong dynamic capabilities and integrated elements of BEMs. A comparative analysis of BEMS evolution presented in the paper reflects the challenges and opportunities for further improvement in organizations. Excellence models have been used successfully also in business education. Business education reflects the added value to sound economic development, balancing social and economic interest (Emiliani, 2004). In general, it refers to competitive and motivated academic staff, quality of teaching and learning activities, leadership and management commitment, sustainability of university-business relationship, internationalization strategy and comprehensive curriculum adapted to business environment. There are a lot of environmental forces in different national environments that are placing the excellence dimension on higher education agenda. At the same time, limitations of BEMs models and the nature of higher education institutions put a lot of challenges on leadership and management of these organizations. The objective of the paper is to present and analyse the application of excellence models in higher education institutions and identify creative solutions for management performance.

The energy sector is particularly important in the national economy as a whole, while the electricity sector is its main component. The developments in this area have strong economic and social repercussions. This article makes an overview of the electricity sector, illustrating the monthly evolution of consumption and production of instantaneous electricity in Romania in the past few years. Further on, the paper presents the monthly evolution of instantaneous consumption and production of electricity in Romania, the annual structure of electricity production and the depiction of some basic indicators of centralized electricity markets managed by OPCOM. The quantitative analysis presents the monthly evolution of weighted average prices on the competitive markets managed by OPCOM and a linear correlation analysis of the spot market prices in the Eastern European region. The conclusions of the article are in line with the research in the field and show that the electricity markets have registered important evolutions in Romania, both in terms of size and prices, evolutions based on both structural and behavioral factors. It also showed that spot market prices had relatively similar developments over the period analyzed in several countries in the region, with price correlations that seem to be even stronger as the interconnection of electricity grids is higher. Therefore, the results confirm the economic theory, namely that increasing the interconnection of electricity markets can lead to energy prices being brought closer, but also to mitigating the shocks affecting these markets.

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When talking about the future of Europe we also think about alternative energy sources. It is up to national governments to decide how to encourage investments in this field in order to contribute to the 20-20-20 EU-objective. Until the network delivery cost for electricity produced from renewable sources will be comparable to the cost for energy from traditional sources ("grid parity"), the development of businesses and markets for electricity from renewable sources is going to be driven by support schemes. The state of the grids and the facility of grid-access constitute another two key factors influencing the development of this sector. Last but not least, the question of policy consistency is raised within the business community. Over the past years some support schemes have proved to be more effective than others, and grid conditions have also evolved. Policies supporting the development of renewables also changed at EU-level and at national levels. Based on statistics, scientific literature and the feedback of the business community, this study aims to analyse the development of renewable energy sectors in the European Union by comparing Germany’s and Romania’s experience. Also this study describes the current and expected future market situation in these countries relying on data gained from questionnaires and interviews with specialists in the renewable field.

People have always been interested in improving their quality of life. But how is this possible when the population is constantly growing, and the planet’s resources are dwindling? The efficient use of resources is not only believed to increase the general quality of life but also to contribute to the creation of a cleaner environment. But what is the relation between resource efficiency and a cleaner environment? The European Commission and the United Nations have been dealing with this key issue for many years now and the EU has forced member countries to meet certain targets. This paper presents some of the UN and EU’s policies with regard to climate change and resource efficiency and offers an independent evaluation of the achievements of Member States. We assumed that the implementation of the objectives of the EU climate and energy package improves the resource productivity and reduces its negative impact on the environment, relation analysed with the help of a linear regression model. Further, we have performed a critical study on the performance of EU-member states in meeting their GHG-emission targets correlated with the resource intensity of their economies, modelled using Microsoft Excel. Resource efficiency and the low-carbon economy have emerged as central themes in global discussions on the transition to a sustainable economy, and this paper sheds new light onto the connection between the two subjects.