The article focuses on the current, urgent, and much discussed global issue of climate change, the impacts of which are expansive and involve a wide range of expertise. The base forms the evaluation of a sample of European Union member states using the quantification of threats and intensity of two key factors. The main objective of this article is to evaluate EU countries the INFORM assessment tool and to highlight the link between the effects of climate change (environmental, social, and economical) as quantified by respective threats posed by emission volume and poverty. In the present research, we relied on the new INFORM Risk Index assessment indicator because it represents a completely new but also globally applicable, reliable, and transparent tool to understand the risk of humanitarian crises and disasters. The significant results of the performed quantitative analysis suggest that security risk, poverty, and pollution levels operate as closely linked areas. It can be expected that recent changes (the COVID-19 pandemic, state of war) will mean that these influences will increase in severity. Read more

Public administration in the European Union is undergoing several reforms, as well as in Slovak Republic (SR), to make the public services more efficient. New Slovak building legislation introduced a new policy of state building authorities with retroactive transfer of building competences from self-government to the state. The aim of this paper is to evaluate two policies in the construction sector – the original and the new one and their efficiency. In the quantitative analysis current building authorities, exercising competences at municipalities, are compared with the simulated district building authorities, employing metafrontier approach based on Data Envelopment Analysis. Results of the analysis of the net effect of the two organizational forms on efficiency show that the potential district building authorities would be 56.5 percentage points less efficient than the current building authorities, in terms of Meta-Technology Ratio indicator. In the qualitative analysis, using guided interviews with mayors in two regions of the SR, we found out ambiguous opinion on the building competences transfer from municipalities to state authorities within the new state policy.
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