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The paper focuses on the trade performance of Romania, a representative country for the Central and Eastern European region, strongly connected with its European partners in global value chains and thus affected by any change in these countries' relationships with the rest of the world in general and China in particular. Using panel data gravity models for the 2008-2019 period, we find that Romania's exports are significantly influenced by the demand of its major trade partners in the EU, and imports from China and the rest of the world. In addition, exports are vulnerable to the effectiveness of the government in relation to the other countries, corruption control and cultural values such as collectivism. We also assess the capacity of Romanian exports to regain their ascending trend displayed before the COVID-19 pandemic by using simulation forecasting scenarios based on the shape of the economic recovery and the type of shock transmission across economies. We observe a sharp decrease in 2020 followed by an important recovery in 2021 in a V-shape scenario and uniform transmission of the pandemic shock in the internal demand and in the foreign trade, or followed by a very slow recovery in 2021 (in a U-shape scenario and non-uniform transmission type in the two previously mentioned elements), especially when the global relation with rest of the world is included.

In the context of the recent labor shortages in Eastern European countries, Romania included, companies, organizations and decision makers need to strongly address the issue of labor motivation for increasing worker performance and also for attracting the scarce labor resources. The main goal of the research is to explore new determinants of work motivation, such as regional sustainability and also individual factors related to individual expectations. Therefore, the responsive methodology used for this purpose implies a multilevel econometric modelling, in which the first level regards individuals, and the second one consists in development regions. Moreover, the role of individual factors is tested using Vroom’s theory of expectations and filling a gap in the existing literature on work motivation in developing, post-communist economies. The main findings prove that one dimension of sustainability, namely social sustainability has a significant impact on work motivation, alongside with four dimensions of individual factors. Economic and environmental sustainability have no significant impact on work motivation in the case of Romanian workers.

The fast development of technologies shapes the way companies address and understand their customers’ needs, including the more and more pressing call for sustainability. If, by now, many organizations use the advantages of social media in their marketing strategies, newer technologies, such as Internet of things (IoT) wearables, are not fully used to their whole potential. Thus, we conducted two research studies—a qualitative one in the form of a focus group where eight different companies’ representatives took part, followed by a quantitative one in the form of an online questionnaire, where 84 (Small and Medium Sized Enterprises) SMEs and Large Enterprises answered. The main purpose of our research was to investigate companies’ attitudes and practices about using social media and IoT wearable technologies in developing organizational marketing strategies. The results indicate that, though there are some differences in the perception and use of social media and IoT wearables for developing marketing strategies, these differences are not marked between SMEs and Large Enterprises, but rather between micro enterprises and other companies with higher numbers of employees. Additionally, there are some differences noticed between companies operating in regional, national, or international markets.

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