Business reports

After the first steps in the economic orientation towards the West, in the 1990s under the European political and financial influence, east European countries developed their transport systems with a systematic policy of integration with the western part of the continent. In this context, an essential factor that has decisively contributed to the development of airline routes between Emilia Romagna (an Italian region) and eastern Europe is trade (coupled with migrations).

The livestock industry in the Forlì-Cesena Province produces over 300 million euros of output in value terms. Production areas (poultry, eggs, cattle and pigs) are organizing themselves into strongly integrated systems in order to reduce market risks and capture greater product ranges of value added. To complete the process of integration and specialization with targeted market positioning, it is also necessary to specialize the feed component. This component has an estimated value of approximately 150 million euros per year, using mainly imported raw materials.

Currently over 60% of central and eastern Europe’s trade is with the western part of the continent and this has benefited from exponential growth in the last twenty years. The growth of trade and infrastructure modernization in the region has been creating a context in which air transport has been fully engaged and was a major target of respective national economic strategies as well as private and public investment from abroad. In the case of airports, civil aircraft and crucial services for air transport, it was a matter of updating and relaunching individual airport systems as well as the larger regional system.

The air transport sector in the Balkans has grown significantly in recent years in terms of business turnover, taking a major step forward. The region has experienced a quantitative increase in the number of civilian flights (i.e. flights transporting passengers and freight). The recent growth in numbers of passengers and airline connections in the region is the result of an economic trend common to all Balkan countries, that is, the orientation of domestic markets towards the EU’s founding members. Thus the dynamics described above have led to an increase in airport connections. Currently there are more than 100 flights per week between Albania and northeastern Italy, specifically between Tirana and Venice, Bologna, Rimini, Trieste, Treviso, Verona and Forlì.

In the decade 2000-2010 political forces in the Balkans (Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Kosovo, Montenegro, Macedonia, Albania, Romania and Bulgaria), inspite of many obstacles, proceeded to take on the challenge of leaving behind the events of the recent past. The positive influence of the European Union on the entire Balkan area has enabled economic growth to be anchored to European growth. One important example of this is the airport system in the Balkans, which has undergone marked progress in terms of development and modernization.

Rising oil prices, haigh pollution levels nd the global warming, have pushed East European intitutions to focus on replacing, as much as possible, coal and oil with natural gas. Moreover the dependence on foreign supplies and the monetary burden that it generates are persuading the authorities of the area to pursue alternative ways to gather the gas they need. One of the pioneering techniques to extract gas from the underground that is gaining ground in Eastern Europe is called “fracking”. It has has some strong consequences to the environment; will the benefits that it brings be higher than the costs?

Food security and food safety are two concepts, both taken into growing consideration by all governments of the world, especially in sight of rising food prices and increasingly unpredictable weather events. Eastern Europe is facing some essential challenges....

From the Soviet period the Russian Federation inherited a rigid industrial structure on which it has built its present-day productive system with substantial continuity. The difficulties faced by Moscow in diversifying the national economy are damaging....

The expectation of the increase of European energy demand, combined with the decrease of the energy sources within the European Union (EU), stresses a growing dependence on energy importation from outside the continent. In order to reduce this dependence on Russian pipelines, a series of projects have been planned. Among these projects is the Trans Adriatic Pipeline (TAP); a planned pipeline that directly concern Italy.

The European Commission programme, called TEN-T (Trans European Transport Network), is working as a groundwork for the enlarging and rationalizing of a trans-border transportation network. The lesser known, the less commonly utilized and the less developed of different transportation sectors is the river navigation. European inland waterways are seen as underdeveloped and their unexploited potential as means of transporting of goods is believed to be huge. Have the medium-long term effects of the planned infrastructural works, needed to carry on this project, been evaluated properly?