Rasto Ovin

By Anita Maček, Rasto Ovin and Jelena Zvezdanović Lobanova

Foreign direct investments play a vital role in generating economic growth. National governments as well as local communities therefore need an appropriate strategy for attracting foreign direct investments on the one hand and maximizing their benefits on the other.

Part of the book: Perspectives on Business and Management

By Rasto Ovin and Pedja Ašanin Gole

The chapter presents the discussion on fair trade initiatives and their possible role in achieving more equilibrated trade relations inside globalization and governance. The authors want to challenge the overrated goodwill of peoples’ initiative mostly positioning itself as a counterpart of existing trade policy developments. Fair trade is scanned through principles of economics, which enable a conclusion that the present concept is too narrow to produce enough inside energy for its establishment in real policy of developed economies. Special attention the authors are paying to governance as a field that may profoundly explain the gaps subject to action in the fair trade initiatives. Due to the global meaning of the principle for sustainable global trade and security, it must continuously be more and more incorporated in the mainstream politics of world leading economies.

Part of the book: International Trade

By Urška Starc-Peceny, Anita Maček and Rasto Ovin

Our time sees more and more cities striving to grow into smart cities, which makes this market to grow with a considerable pace. However, there are many challenges of these processes such as municipal budgets, disposability of skilled staff, privacy and cyber security concerns, etc. Besides, by the technology-driven smart city development, an essential thing has been lost on the way—the human dimension. While the world has started to recognize this deficiency, the hunt for the right methodology to do better has begun, and so an open run to understand the relations among humans, technology, and society in order to manage their effect on business and economy. This development will eventually enter the perspective of the electoral body of democratic societies, thus influencing public policy. It will provide the room to a new equilibrium within the triad: people, businesses, and public policy. Being close to the population and their everyday needs (smart), cities will no doubt act as a push factor to these developments. Propelled with technology change and new values, the private-public-people partnerships (PPPP) will earn the pace. The communicators, bringing new relationship to life, are in this way challenged by metadesign: designing for the “new” designer(s)—the empowered end user. Therefore, for the communicators, the next challenge for marketing in smart cities is the creation of tools and methodologies for the new forms of the collaboration design. After presenting the unique factors that are driving the growth of smart cities in different parts of the world, authors identify important challenges that still need to be overcome in different markets. Special focus will be given on the discussion of contemporary challenges of public policy seen through smart cities development, which by requiring new marketing design is exercising pressure on public policy. Smart cities marketing design will be discussed from the perspective of the need to hear human needs, and at the same time to support the functionality of the 4Ps. Its concrete role will be in bringing understanding of the need for collaboration, which can reduce costs of public policy, thus enlarging benefits of collective action in smart cities.

Part of the book: Management of Cities and Regions

By Rasto Ovin and Anita Macek

Especially since 1990s when capital flows liberalization took their intensive course, also the literature on foreign direct investment and respectfully cross-border mergers and acquisitions grew. On the other hand, although it was accompanying these processes, foreign divestment attracted much less attention. Speculating about the reasons for such situation, one could stress that following the nature of the balance of payments logic foreign direct divestment was not expected. Nevertheless, these processes were present. This chapter addresses some of the most important impacts of foreign direct investment that had been a subject to inverse processes later. The authors try to confront the drivers of these processes and search for different patterns obviously often deriving outside economic rationale from the position of a developed market economy. Using their expertize the authors connected concrete findings of their study with possible drivers of divestment. According to the finding the common nominator was mixed success with the transition in transition countries.

Part of the book: Foreign Direct Investment Perspective through Foreign Direct Divestment