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Abstract:Corporate social responsibility (CSR) in tourism, with its central evironmental dimension, represents an important component for the sustainable growth of the tourism industry. The related CSR education could prove a major factor for future professional performance in this field of activity. Thus, this article is aimed at identifying the perceptions of current business students about CSR (students from study programs dedicated to business administration in tourism) and the importance they attribute to CSR environmental practices, mainly from their perspective as future employees in the tourism industry. We elaborated a research methodology based on the Ecolabelling principles, designed by the European Union in 2009. Our findings revealed that business tourism students assign more importance to several specific CSR environmental practices and that the importance of these CSR practices is statistically significant (we determined this significance by using the Friedman, Paired-Samples t-, ANOVA, Kruskal-Wallis and Bartlett sphericity statistical tests). The elaborated research methodology proved to be statistically highly reliable. Results also show the differences regarding the CSR practices preferred by various categories of students according to their study levels and gender. Our results pointed out that our third-year bachelor students showed a higher interest in CSR practices related to their professional training, while students from the master level degree attached more importance to CSR practices related to the environment. We also confirmed conclusions of previous studies that female respondents attach more importance to environmental issues than male respondents. Thus, we can state that a higher level of education is a key factor that supports CSR development in practice. Also, a significant conclusion of our research is related to the academic curricula for business faculties which must incorporate solid CSR and business ethics-dedicated courses and offer the needed support for the development of thematic projects about CSR Environmental practices in hotels.

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At the panel level, formed of 33 European economies based on resource efficiency enhancers or innovation-driven factors, the present study followed causal relationships between the conditions of economic efficiency ensuring framework and different macroeconomic effects of entrepreneurship, mediated by the entrepreneurial behavior, with delays up to five years. Research findings highlighted that a national efficiency enhancing framework acts as stimulant for the entrepreneurial behavior of nascent entrepreneurs and new small and medium-sized business owners, while a superior level of entrepreneurial behavior generates simultaneous and/or medium-term favorable effects on the growth of gross domestic product, exports, imports and employment, therefore assuring, besides immediate growth, sustainable economic and social progress in the analyzed countries. The causal relationships identified are consistent with the results of other empirical studies in the field.

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