In recent years, inter-municipal cooperation in solving various common problems has become more popular in Europe, and has become an important part of European regional policy. These trends can also be observed in Lithuania. However, after a few generally agreed on success projects, there have not been many more successful municipal cooperation projects. Lithuania has been regulating cooperation between state institutions through legislation since 2000, which was supposed to stimulate regional growth and reduce interregional disparities. Providing municipalities with the necessary legal powers to provide public management and public services, and providing financial incentives, including European Union (EU) funds, to promote cooperation can achieve good results. In waste management in the regions and in organising public transport in the Tauragė and Klaipėda regions, EU support helped municipalities to agree on cooperation, and the same cooperation remained after the end of the EU support, and also a higher standard of public management and public services for all the municipalities that participated in these projects. This article aims to analyze recent changes in public administration regulation in Lithuania, which are likely to complicate cooperation between municipalities and, accordingly, high-quality public governance and the provision of public services in regions, and increase the gap between regional municipalities.
Innovation and an innovative approach in management, education and leadership have been changing over decades, according to the dynamic world we are living in. Changes start at an individual level, with the personality, and only those who have changed themselves can start to lead others towards global change. The Latvian National Development Plan defined aspects of polycentric development for all the regions of Latvia. Each region has resources, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, but human resources are the most important resource for change, creative ideas and sustainable development. The education system changes very slowly, from lecture learning to a more inclusive ‘learning by doing’ approach. This approach has been used in northern countries for a while, but Latvia has just now started to implement the approach. The term ‘innovation’ today is wider than product, process, service or organisational innovation. At a national and regional level of development, it is crucial to encourage inhabitants of the region to stay in or return to rural areas, and create knowledge and enterprises in the region and their home town.The aim of the paper is to evaluate the involvement of residents in management activities and regional development processes, and their willingness to participate in the creation of knowledge and innovative entrepreneurship and co-creation. The paper is a review of literature on theoretical aspects of the creation of innovation in the region in a combination of survey analyses of residents. The methodological approach is based on two steps: a review of research literature, and an analysis of the results of a survey of residents of the region of their willingness to be involved in processes and tasks for regional development, and some aspects of analysis of entrepreneur opinion about innovative solutions in their companies. The article consists of four main parts: 1) the theoretical findings of a systemic approach to innovation and development; 2) the role of the innovation process in development from different perspectives; 3) an analysis of a survey of the region’s residents about their willingness to be involved in processes of regional development; 4) aspects of innovation used in regional entrepreneurship. The significance of the paper is to define aspects of regional development relating to innovation and co-creation.
This study consists of three main themes: (1) An overview is given about the main findings of the economic theories associated withemployment and labour / paid work; reinterpretation of the concept of labour is also provided, divided into pre-industrial, industrialand post-industrial periods, which the author aligns with the periods of the economic thought. The author interprets globalizationas a factor influencing the transition between industrial and post-industrial periods; and she elaborately introduces its economicsocialand labour market impacts. Among the potential alternatives of employment of the future, this thesis investigates the atypicalforms of employment, public employment and social (solidarity) economy. (2) Central-Eastern European countries and regions areanalyzed, as the territorial unit of the research, from labour market and employment aspects. Afterwards, the author evaluates theemployment situation of her closer environment, Northern Hungary. (3) Afterwards, she contributes suggestions to the criteria ofcreating a more efficient regional employment policy. The aim of this research was analysed the regional labour market situation bythe Central-Eastern European countries and regions, in particular by the North Hungarian region and was gave some proposals for apossible, efficient regional employment policy. Therefore through the multiple transformation of work concept, the demand for alternativeemployment forms has increased along with the significant change of the content. The author believes that these alternativefields and the regional employment policy can provide the answer for global labour market problems in the future. At the beginningof her research, she hypothesised that the position of the North Hungarian region is significantly determined by its special economicand social context which can be derived from the end of communism. The author used Hoover-index, tested the Okun’s law inCentral-Eastern European countries and regions, calculated the Markov-chain model and used factor analysis methods.