Zoltan Dorogi (p), Flora Szkordilisz

László Csák

The coming decade will bring new challenges to be faced in urban and regional planning: climate crisis, Industry 4.0, and circular economy. These challenges will prompt planners to create networks among various actors: investors, manufacturers, information technology, which also has spatial manifestation in the form of new sort of urban patterns.
In Central Europe we are witnessing a dual development: central regions face a strong urbanization and parallelly other regions are shrinking: losing their economic attractivity and population, resulting in numerous social and environmental issues. The named tendencies change the importance and role of functional urban areas but also create new opportunities. As countries in the V4 region are in a similar position, they can effectively work together to trigger novel methodologies in urban planning and development. Besides mapping the state-of-the-art of urban planning, the project will deliver an interactive knowledge base regarding the following cross-cutting trends of nowadays urban planning. V4 countries are similar in differing from Western European planning system and economic culture, that is why cross-cutting issues such as climate change, digitalization and Industry 4.0 need a slightly different implementation model.
The main result of our research project is to collect the newest challenges of the municipalities, which they will have to face from the coming years and we will trigger solutions to them, using the knowledge from common planning traditions. The conference is ideal to open discussion on how to support researchers and urban experts, the daily management of cities in practice, how we can learn from each other in the V4 countries to adapt to new challenges besides their limited financial latitude.

Eva Výrostová (p)

Zoltan Dorogi

Most approaches evaluating the effectiveness of EU Cohesion policy in the literature focuses on various macroeconomic models. Newer studies point out that the analysis should also be carried out at the micro-level. This paper investigates the impact of Cohesion policy expenditure at the beneficiary level, focusing on companies instead of public entities. Our paper aims to estimate the effect of EU Cohesion policy grants on firms' performance in Slovakia. Our firm-level database is based on Slovak firms' financial statements and business activities combined with a dataset of enterprises receiving EU funding from Cohesion policy grants (excluding financial instruments support). We evaluate the effects of financial assistance from EU structural funds and national co-financing on firm performance measured by profit, labor productivity, fixed assets, and other performance indicators.

László Csák (p)

Eva Výrostová

The aim of the study is to show basic characteristics of regional planning in Romania. In order to have a perspective accessible in general, I am going to identify national policies and actions related to regional development, no matter if the national regional policy does not label these actions as regional development.
I am going to offer a short description of the governance and planning of these regional development related actions, and how they evolved in time - mainly from the current century.
The main aim of the study is not only the descriptive analysis of the governance of regional development in Romania, but also the tell if its changes led to a more suitable solution, are they in line with current planning theory, or they are merely reflecting the political changes of the member state while fulfilling the conditions set by the European Commission for the given programming periods.