This issue of Ekonomika preduzeća begins with three exploratory papers in the Finance section. In the first paper, a duo of authors, S. Janković and M. Todorović, analyses the effects of the inflation targeting strategy in Serbia from the perspective of behavioral economics. Their empirical study underscores the complex relationship between inflation expectations, actual inflation, and the central bank’s monetary policy. The authors point out that success in achieving inflation targeting objectives largely depends on clear communication, credible strategy, and the right understanding of the behavior of market participants. In the next paper in this section, S. Balaban, B. Stoiljković and L. Madžar deal with the influence of working capital management on the profitability of 141 Serbian companies with the highest level of business income in the period from 2016 to 2020.
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The results of their research show that the longer inventory conversion cycle had a negative and statistically significant impact on the profitability of these companies, while the other control variables, such as liquidity, financial leverage, activity and sales growth did not affect profitability. The third paper, written by J. Radojičić, M. Jemović and T. Stojanović, evaluates the impact of digital distribution channels on the profitability of the banking sector in EU countries in the period 2015-2020. Their findings confirm that innovations brought by the digital transformation of banking services positively affected ROA and ROE of the observed banks, which justifies further investment in digitalization.

In the Organizational Design and Change section, the team of authors, including M. Mosurović Ružičić, M. Ignjatović, V. Obradović and M. Lazarević Moravčević, gauges the impact of certain factors of strategic project management on organizational design of scientific research organizations in Serbia. Their study has demonstrated that the most critical factors in shaping organizational design and innovation climate in SROs are external and internal environment, project portfolio, resources, monitoring, methods, and techniques.

The paper presented in the Strategic Management section, written by M. Aleksić, N. Berber, A. Slavić and D. Gašić, examines the relationship between employee commitment, corporate social responsibility and organizational citizenship behavior, with a particular focus on the processing sector in Serbia. The positive correlation between these variables calls for greater mobilization of companies when it comes to socially responsible behavior and activities as well as the empowerment of their workforce to embrace the same values.

In the Tourism and Hospitality Management section, N. Stanišić and N. Radović in their paper explore the influence of social environment factors and basic psychological needs on job satisfaction in the hospitality industry in Serbia. According to the results of their survey, the satisfaction of basic psychological needs and a conducive work environment have positive effects on work performance. Also, the authors provide some valuable recommendations to hotel managers aimed at creating an environment that boosts employee satisfaction, motivation and productivity.

The paper in the Information Technologies section, by a trio of authors A. Zečević, Đ. Stakić and D. Đurđić, gives an overview of available ERP solutions, with special emphasis on the role and importance of programming languages in unleashing the full potential of ERP systems.

In the last paper of this issue, in the Sustainability and Climate Risks section, the group of authors, F. Kiss, M. Tomić, R. Romanić, I. Pavkov and N. Đurišić Mladenović, assesses the economic feasibility of producing biodiesel in small-scale production plants in Serbia. Bearing in mind that the competitiveness of biodiesel is primarily determined by the retail price of fossil diesel, the amount of state levies (excise and VAT), and the unit cost of biodiesel, heavily affected by the price of the input raw material, it is evident that small-scale domestic biodiesel producers cannot produce biodiesel at competitive prices without substantial state incentives.

Prof. Dragan Đuričin, Editor in Chief

This issue of Ekonomika preduzeća starts with two remarkable papers in the Economic Growth and Development section. In the first paper, a trio of authors, I. Nikolić, M. Kovačević and K. Stančić, attempted to explain why early warning systems (EWSs) failed during the COVID-19 pandemic by analyzing a specific example, the determinants of currency crises episodes in the Republic of Serbia from January 2001 to December 2021.

According to the authors, the complexity of the current rolling crisis calls for a shift in approach. Namely, EWSs can serve as one of the many tools in the assessment and identification of financial crises, but to be more effective they need to be put under the auspices of a more complex Decision- Making Support System (DMSS). The authors invite the academic community and policymakers to start discussing and developing this line of reasoning and to work together with the Statistical Office of the Republic of Serbia that has already laid the groundwork for such a system. In the second paper, M. Stamenković, M. Milanović and P. Veselinović undertook a challenging endeavor of quantifying the economic development level of local administrative territorial units (LAUs) in Serbia. To do so, they adopted an innovative and complex multivariate statistical approach, based on a statistically valid and combined application of FA and MANOVA. The resulting classification of LAUs confirms the presence of pronounced regional and intraregional polarization in Serbia or a well-known gap between “developed north” and  “underdeveloped south”. Their findings can be a valuable input for the creation and successful implementation of national strategy of balanced regional development.

The first paper in the Finance section, written by S. Stamenković, N. Stanišić and T. Radojević, is dedicated to the telecommunications services sector as one of the most dynamic sectors and the greatest contributors to the global economy. Specifically, the authors investigated the impact of internal and external determinants of the capital structure of 46 European telecom operators in the period 2009-2020. The results of their research, which are mostly in line with both pecking-order theory and trade-off theory, show that the most relevant variables included annual sales growth, profitability, liquidity, assets turnover, non-debt tax shield, and cost of debt, while tangibility, firm size and annual GDP growth did not significantly affect the capital structure of these companies. In the next paper within this section, D. Simović and T. Šutaković observed the effects of the Euribor and risk premium on interest rates on foreign currency loans and FXindexed loans approved in both corporate and retail lines in Serbia in the period from September 2010 to August 2020. They concluded that there is a statistically significant impact of Euribor and country risk premium on lending rates on new retail as well as on corporate investment FX and FX-indexed loans, with high pass-through coefficients.

In the Labor Economics section, a duo of authors, L. Lebedinski and D. Pavlović, examined the outcomes of the largest program of the National Employment Service of the Republic of Serbia targeting youth ‒ Professional Traineeship Program (PTP), which was conducted from 2017 to 2018 assigning 9,561 participants to workplace training based on their educational background with the aim of easing the transition from education to work. The authors provide some very interesting facts and statistics on Serbia’s labor market. Overall, they found this program very useful as it gives young people an opportunity to get the first professional training, acting as a stepping stone toward regular employment. Also, by taking part in this program, companies get an opportunity to train labor market entrants at a relatively low cost and improve their talent management practices.

In the Marketing section, a multidisciplinary team of authors, including Lj. Bojić, M. Mitrović Dankulov and N. Pantelić, addressed quite an interesting and lively topic in the era of social media. More precisely, they applied combined methods from statistics, psychology, machine learning, and complex networks theory to explore the influence of weather parameters on different psychological categories of Twitter users in ten different countries. The results show that the level of activity of Twitter users, described as Post Count, is strongly connected to changes in temperature and humidity in all observed countries, but the strongest correlation was found for the USA, Italy, and Portugal. So, weather parameters can be used to predict Twitter users’ activity, and marketing and advertising experts should bear this fact in mind when crafting their strategies.

This issue of Ekonomika preduzeća closes with the paper in the Logistics section, written by B. Stojanović-Višić, S. Jelisavac Trošić and M. Simić, in which they presented an overview of the projects implemented in Serbia through China’s Belt and Road Initiative. It is obvious that the location of Serbia plays an important role in China’s strategic plans and choices. Chinese companies mainly invest in large-scale transport infrastructure projects, energy sector, heavy industry and manufacturing. Despite the tangible results and benefits of this fruitful cooperation with China, Serbia should also be aware of the pitfalls and potential geopolitical risks arising from such close ties with China that might jeopardize its EU accession prospects.