Luminita Nicolescu

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at Bucharest University of Economic Studies

Interest in the concept of '15-minute' / 'x-minute city' exploded during and especially after the COVID-19 pandemic. The benefits of this concept identified by the scholarly literature were many, but even more were the identified challenges of translating into policy and implementing this concept in practice, due to the different socioeconomic , cu...

This bibliometric research reflects the literature available to date on the themes of mega-events – such as sporting events, cultural festivals, and world expos – in creating a country image. For that, a base dataset was set up with 137 papers from Web of Science written from 2000 to 2024 as input for the bibliometric analysis. Analysis demonstrate...

This article examines the strategic use of mega sports events as a means to enhance national soft power, exploring the complex interplay between international sports diplomacy and geopolitical influence. The study will examine how these events serve as means of economic and cultural diplomacy and also as platforms for global interaction through a c...

This study investigates the influence of international mega events on tourism accommodation, with a specific focus on the Untold Festival, an annual electronic music festival held in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. Since the first time it was held in 2015, it has become a key event within the landscape of global cultural and music festivals. Attracting hundr...

Customer relationship management (CRM) became one of the marketing practices that is assumed to bring success to companies in recent years. Therefore, the present research aims to identify the level of development of CRM in the top ten consumer goods companies as ranked at world level in 2021. Different models describe components of the CRM and the...

Entrepreneurship refers to the undertaking of obligations and responsibilities that not only require the necessary knowledge to apply interpersonal competences, but also respect justice and the freedoms of other stakeholders. The objective of the study is to analyse individual, spiritual, and rational knowledge as antecedents to fostering interpers...

The COVID-19 crisis disrupted the economic life of the entire world and caused various disturbances at different levels in economies and societies. Consequently, the study of the economic impact of the health crisis became necessary to identify the influences that the health crisis had on numerous activities, including economic ones. There are call...

For the last two years the COVID-19 pandemic has changed the main activities in higher education institutions (HEIs), including teaching activities and internationalization activities, activities that are directly involved in the development of student graduates’ competences. The present study analyzes the perceptions of students on the results of...

The area of social marketing to promote health awareness and prevention is attracting considerable interest due to the health crisis caused by the emergence of COVID-19. Over the past two years, the epidemic has proved to be a problem of economy, education, and inequality, as well. Due to the requirement to raise public awareness and persuade th...

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a trend that manifests on a global level. The positive effects of CSR initiatives depend on the reaction of stakeholders, among which customers represent an important category. The purpose of this paper was to analyse the impact that CSR initiatives of cosmetics companies have on customer behaviour in both t...

The COVID-19 crisis affected the global economy at unprecedented and unexpected levels. Practitioners and researchers are concerned about the economic consequences of the crisis and analyses of the economic impacts of the health crisis are required. The present paper had as main objective to analyze the economic evolution of European countries duri...

Artificial intelligence (AI) conversational agents (CA) or chatbots represent one of the technologies that can provide automated customer service for companies, a trend encountered in recent years. Chatbot use is beneficial for companies when associated with positive customer experience. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the overall customer...

This paper is motivated by the influences that the COVID-19 health crisis had on the economies of the world. The economic crisis that has evolved from the health crisis affected economic life at all levels (global, national, industry, and company levels), including the trading relationships between countries. The purpose of the paper is to analyze...

The COVID crisis affected the whole world at an unprecedented and unexpected level. There are concerns about the economic impact of the crisis and about how the world will be after the COVID-crisis ends. The present paper had as main objective to analyze the opinions of specialists about two aspects: a) economic impact of the COVID crisis at differ...

The present paper envisages an analysis of the main goals and future directions of action in the higher education sector at world level. In recent years higher education institutions apply professional management principles and guide their activities using business specific strategic tools. Starting from the fact that higher education institutions...

Internationalization of Higher Education (HE) has direct implications on adapting the curricula and providing the skills and abilities needed by graduates on the labour market. In this regard, in recent years, universities and researchers have undertaken studies in order to identify the skills that their graduates need in order to be competitive on...

The relationship between capital markets and macroeconomic variables is well documented in developed financial markets, but still developing in emerging financial markets. This paper looks at young financial markets from Central and Eastern Europe, focusing on two markets in the region: Romania and Hungary. Capital markets in these countries are an...

One of the most important challenges for our society is to keep a properly balanced insight of the relevant triangle of: Quality, functionality, and productivity. Regarding this, the most important challenge for universities now is to understand which are the main global competencies needed in the market, and to put them into practice in the educat...

Purpose This paper aims to make an analysis of investment behaviour in mutual funds, by looking at different investment decision influencers and trying to identify the extent to which the investment decision is knowledge-based. The paper has three main purposes, namely, to assess the degree to which the considered factors influence investment decis...

Purpose This paper aims to present a model of the employability confidence of graduates using employability skills. The purpose of the study is twofold: to identify to what extent self-perceived employability skills (input employability) influence the employability confidence of students/graduates (output employability) and to identify if there ar...

Academic literature recognizes that knowledge is universal and higher education, as the main provider of knowledge and competences, is all the more not constrained by borders. In this regard, meeting the demand for competences is also challenging especially for the graduates of the 21st century who are confronted with the rapid changes of fourth in...

The internationalization of companies has led to the diversification of demand for competences and to an increased competition on the labour market. For the labour market it has become more common to adopt the concept of global citizenship in terms of competences and economic competitiveness when recruiting human resources. The global citizenship i...

Mutual funds and their evolution represent an expression of the performances of capital markets in the majority of states. The inflows and the outflows in mutual funds are used to evaluate the achievements obtained in capital markets all over the world. At the same time, both individual and organizational investors guide their acquisition decisions...

The present chapter aims to examine the role that outsourcing and business networks play for top banks in Southeastern Europe (SEE). From a theoretical perspective, the first part of the chapter briefly examines the concepts of outsourcing and business networks, as well as their application in the banking industry, in an era of continuously changin...

Tourism is one of the sectors that have been favoured by the creation of the EU and each new country that acceded helped the Union increase its competitiveness in tourism. According to official statistics, the number of international inbound tourists in the New Member States of the EU increased, on average, three times and in many cases this is par...

The evolution of mutual funds in terms of their inflows and outflows is seen as a good indicator of the capital markets’ performance in different countries. At individual level, investors substantiate their buying decisions on the past performance information and invest asymmetrically in funds with very good performance in the previous periods. Num...

The paper aims to analyze the importance of reinforcing the relational capital of the small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the context of a globalized market. It elaborates on the influences of competitiveness on online versus offline business networking with a view to achieve effectiveness in the European steel pipe SMEs internationalizati...

The advent of the digital economy and, implicitly, of competition in the online marketplace has triggered new challenges in terms of consumer protection approaches. Online, consumer skills are expected to be improved and the level of consumer awareness and engagement increased. These are the baseline prerequisites of the sustainable purchasing deci...

This chapter aims to highlight key issues regarding the evolution of entrepreneurs' perceptions within small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) sector from Romania in the period 2003/2004–2012/2013. Given the fact that the SMEs' sector has a major role in any economy, bringing a considerable contribution to the achievement of GDP, job creation, co...

The evolution of mutual funds and their inflows and outflows is seen as a good indicator for the financial markets of different countries. There were numerous studies, mainly conducted in the US, which illustrated that flows were highly dependent on the previous performance. This paper envisaged to study the flows of funds into and out of Romanian...

The present study approaches consultancy services in relationship to family businesses, focusing on the extent to which those services are used by this category of companies and the way in which they are used. The element of novelty of the research relates to the identification of a number of factors that influence the acquisition of consultancy se...

This chapter approaches the internationalization of higher education in Europe in terms of its relationship with convergence trends in European higher education. It starts with illustrating a relationship of mutual influence between convergence and internationalization at a conceptual level. The chapter looks at developments of European higher educ...

The importance of achieving optimality or near optimality in supply routing is on the rise as globalization leads to scenarios in which multiple, heterogeneous and highly spatially distributed demands have to be satisfied under stringent constraints. However, there is no consensus concerning what constitutes an all-encompassing objective function f...

The paper looks at how smes from Romania evolved in the period 2004–2011. The main objective of the paper is to compare smes' situation before the start of the economic crisis and during the period of the crisis. The examination is done from a dynamic per-spective and the analysis comprises two aspects: a) the evolution of a number of economic indi...

Simon Anholt, who fathered the concept of nation branding, values the nation brand as the most important resource of a state as it contributes to obtaining a competitive advantage and a consolidated position in the international marketplace. This paper pinpoints how Anholt’s paradigm for nation branding applies in the case study of two Middle Easte...

The present paper has as a starting point the close relationship existing between entrepreneurial activity, innovations and the development of Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs). Most SMEs result from implementing the entrepreneurial spirit, through which the entrepreneurs' activity is conducted in different domains. One aspect of utmost imp...

The present paper envisages applying an international marketing specific concept, namely the country of origin effect (COE) to a knowledge-based type of service, respectively higher education services, for the purpose to illustrate the existence of a relationship between the two and to propose a conceptual framework to study this relationship. The...

Starting from the lack of empirical evidence about students' experience at university level generally in Romania, this paper envisages bringing more insight into students' experience through empirical evidence from two Romanian higher education institutions. Based on two individual studies conducted at faculty level in the two higher education inst...

The present paper approaches the topic of the quality of educational services, emphasizing on higher education, as a field of services of large public interest that has high influences at individual, group and society level. The paper starts by looking at the influencing factors for the quality of higher education from the perspective of the regula...

The present paper is motivated by the importance of financing for the higher education sector. The formulae based financing Romanian higher education system has been inspired from the British financing system. In this context the paper makes a comparison between the higher education financing system in Romania with the one from United Kingdom. Simi...

This paper deals with the issue of governance in higher education, as a specific service sector. It approaches the field from both theoretical and practical perspectives. It first looks at governance theories at a general level and it continues by looking at governance theories specific to higher education. The paper approaches the practical perspe...

This paper looks at the internationalization of higher education in a number of countries with the final purpose to make proposals for the acceleration of the higher education internationalization process of the countries that lag behind. It does that by first placing conceptually higher education in the context of globalization at world level and...

Incl. bibl., abstract The paper takes into discussion the issue of quality of higher education services, from the perspective of graduates and employers as main beneficiaries of higher education services, by putting face to face expectations of students at graduation with employers' requirements. In the two surveys conducted in 2006 in Romania, bot...

The student experience and the way universities deal with it became an actual issue for higher education nowadays. The present paper has the purpose to look at the student experience in a faculty of a Romanian higher education institution. It does that by reviewing at first recent evolutions about the student experience concepts and the types of re...

This paper focuses on applying marketing concepts to the higher education sector. It starts by shortly reviewing some of the main marketing concepts and continues with an overview of how such marketing concepts can be relevantly used for the higher education sector. The extent and limits in their application are identified and dicussed and the pape...

Building a coherent country branding program at international level requires a strong coordination between the government, the business sector, the decision makers from educational and cultural sector, the civil society and, the mass media representatives in any country. The paper presents the main efforts Romania has done to build a country image...

We examine the issue of regional competitiveness by taking as a discussion example the region of Southeastern Europe. The paper begins with the concepts of national and regional competitiveness and finishes with the results of a survey on the region’s competitiveness.

The need for a good image is important for a country in the same way as it is for a company: governments have problems of reputation, image and credibility, as they compete for investments and sales with different tools, such as tourism or trade. Countries are following the example of corporations, by putting brand management in the centre of their...

In order to build a country branding it is needed a complex analysis of the country image internally and eternally, namely the image that the country has abroad and the self image about national identity. In the context of the national and international changes Romania is in the situation to reposition its country image. Having this purpose the ima...

Recent changes in higher education systems worldwide have stimulated the emergence of new forms of higher education. (Kovac et al. 2003; Maasen and Stensaker 2003; Mora and Vila 2003). As Romania’s new institutions multiply at a high speed, private institutions in particular have confronted the issue of legitimacy (Nicolescu 2003b; Brătianu 2002).

The Romanian Journal of European Studies No.4/2005 ISSN 1583 - 199X EUV - Editura Universitatii de Vest, Timisoara, 2005 The British Coucil in Bucharest and The School of High Comparative European Studies (SISEC), within the West University of Timisoara, edited The Romanian Journal of European Studies - special issue on migration and mobility (Gues...

Overview This symposium aims to assess recent cooperative initiatives in management education between Western/US and Eastern European business schools. The following important issues will be examined: (1) forms of cooperation so far; (2) stage of globalisation of management education in Eastern Europe and its critique; (3) value of management educa...

This paper represents a part of the authors’ contribution to a study developed under the auspices of the European Institute in Romania included in the “Pre-Accession Impact Studies - PAIS II” series, funded by a Phare project. The study combines the aspects related to mechanisms, legislation, institutional and behavioural challenges with the quanti...

This work represents a brief version of the research devoted to the migration phenomenon in the context of Romania’s accession to the European Union, as Study no. 5, included in the PAIS II project. The complexity of such issue has necessarily induced an inter-disciplinary approach that mainly includes an institutional-legislative dimension, a soci...

This paper envisages to analyze theories related to the study of the Country of Origin Effect (COE), specifically in relationship with two types of products: tangible goods and services. It starts from the growing international character of different types of products and from the necessity that companies with international activity to consider the...

The paper has two purposes: to present the evolution of highereducation in Romania after 1990, as an illustration of the transitionperiod in Central and Eastern Europe and as a background for thesubsequent section, and to present the results of a study concerningthe relationship between higher education and the business communityin Romania. The emp...

La plupart des pays de l'Europe de l'Est ont subi depuis le debut des annees 90 des changements profonds tant au niveau social qu'economique. Le role des systemes educatifs est d'autant plus grand dans ce contexte, qu'ils doivent faciliter la difficile transition vers l'economie de marche. Ainsi, une mutation organisationnelle doit s'implanter dans...

This paper explores the development of the family-business sector during the post-socialist era in the Balkans. It establishes the profile of family-business entrepreneurship in the emerging markets of southeastern Europe. By focusing on the Bulgarian and Romanian experience, we present and briefly contrast the transitional variant of family-busine...

This paper envisages looking at the theories related to the study of the Country of Origin Effect (COE), specifically in relationship with two types of products: goods with physical appearance and services. It starts from the growing international character of different types of products and from the necessity that companies with international acti...

The present paper identifies and discusses factors, considerations and aspects from the jobs of university academic staff that contribute to their satisfaction and dissatisfaction at the working place. An institutional case study lies at the basis of the discussion, emphasizing the measurement of the job satisfaction of academic staff within a Roma...

The Romanian Journal of European Studies No.4/2005 ISSN 1583 - 199X. EUV - Editura Universitatii de Vest, Timisoara, 2005 The British Coucil in Bucharest and The School of High Comparative European Studies (SISEC), within the West University of Timisoara, edited The Romanian Journal of European Studies No.4/2005 - special issue on migration and m...