In the context of financial markets, this article examines the relationship between sector-specific regulation and competition law, with an emphasis on clearing and settlement infrastructure access. It looks at how competition authorities, particularly the European Commission, make decisions and how those decisions align with or deviate from statutory frameworks. The Clearstream ruling is a crucial case study that illustrates how competition law handles access to vital financial market infrastructures. The article describes the Clearstream case's facts, assesses it under antitrust law, and compares how it was handled under regulatory law, emphasizing the influence on the development of competition law in the banking industry. Bottleneck scenarios that require access to vital infrastructure in order to enter the market are given more consideration. The research highlights distinctions in the scope of regulated organizations and the rationale behind access limits by contrasting how competition law and regulatory law handle such access concerns. The article shows that competition law may serve as a catalyst for legislative advancements in financial market regulation in addition to serving as a supplement to regulation. Additionally, it demonstrates that the European Commission frequently takes on a quasi-regulatory role when implementing competition legislation, especially when it comes to instances requiring access to clearing and settlement systems.
Municipal budgets are often read as accounting statements, though they also shape the social and spatial futures of cities. This article examines how a metropolitan district translates fiscal rules into public value under decentralization, post-pandemic pressure, and dependence on intergovernmental finance. It develops a budget-to-place translation framework through a secondary documentary analysis of a 2024 research on the Bratislava-Petr & zcaron;alka area. The corpus comprises the research institution's discussion, budget figures for 2021-2024, and documented transport, housing, school, cycling, and public space projects. Results identify three tensions. First, a welfare-maintenance logic dominates: education absorbs 51% of the EUR 70.74 million 2024 budget, while nearly 70% of planned capital investment is directed to school reconstruction. Second, fiscal autonomy is selective: own and shared revenues expand, yet transformative projects rely on European grants, state funds, and borrowing. Third, procedural openness does not automatically produce delivery capacity: participatory budgeting and disclosure coexist with delayed infrastructure and maintenance backlogs. The case also shows that municipal housing can operate as social infrastructure and workforce policy rather than as a narrow revenue instrument. Balanced budgets should therefore be evaluated not only for compliance but also for their capacity to convert resources into equitable, durable, and intelligible urban outcomes.
The European Union operates in a highly fragmented international environment shaped by geopolitical rivalry, geoeconomic competition, technological disruption, and growing uncertainty regarding critical external dependencies. These developments have elevated economic security and resilience to the centre of European policymaking, challenging assumptions that traditionally linked economic openness with stability, prosperity, and sustainable development. The purpose of this article is to examine how geopolitical and geoeconomic fragmentation is reshaping the European Union’s approach to economic and technological resilience and to analyse the implications of this transformation for long-term competitiveness and sustainable development. Employing a qualitative research design based on policy analysis and systematic document analysis, supported by secondary statistical evidence from European and international institutional sources, the study investigates three interconnected dimensions of resilience: technological resilience, resource resilience, and competitiveness resilience. The findings indicate that the European Union is moving from an efficiency-oriented model of globalisation towards a resilience-oriented governance framework focused on managing sensitive dependencies in critical technologies, strategic resources, and supply chains. The analysis further demonstrates that resilience cannot be sustained through risk reduction measures alone. Its long-term effectiveness depends on productivity growth, innovation performance, technological capabilities, industrial strength, and investment capacity. The article concludes that competitiveness constitutes a foundational condition for durable resilience and that economic security increasingly functions as an enabling factor for sustainable development in a more contested global economic environment.
This study investigates the relationship between public healthcare funding and healthcare infrastructure development in a universalistic (Beveridge-type) healthcare system. Focusing on Italy over the period 2000–2023, the analysis compares the public and accredited private healthcare sectors by examining annual changes in the number of hospitals and available beds, used as indicators of healthcare infrastructure capacity. A robust Seemingly Unrelated Regression (SUR) model is employed, together with a dummy variable capturing the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Given the observational nature of the data, the empirical analysis is intended to identify statistical associations rather than establish causal effects. The findings indicate that increases in public funding are positively associated with changes in the number of public hospitals, whereas no statistically significant relationship emerges between public funding and changes in the number of accredited private hospitals. These results suggest that public funding is more closely associated with healthcare infrastructure development in the public sector than in the accredited private sector. Furthermore, the COVID-19 pandemic is significantly associated with changes in public healthcare infrastructure, reflecting the exceptional pressures placed on healthcare systems during the emergency period. Although the estimated relationships should be interpreted as descriptive associations rather than causal effects, the findings provide evidence that public healthcare funding is systematically related to key indicators of healthcare infrastructure development within the Italian National Health Service. Overall, the results highlight the importance of examining not only the amount of public resources allocated to healthcare but also the mechanisms through which those resources are distributed and utilized. Strengthening monitoring and evaluation mechanisms may therefore contribute to improving the effectiveness, transparency, and accountability of public resource allocation across healthcare providers.
Digital literacy and the ability to withstand disinformation are among the key competencies of the twenty-first century. This article analyses the relationship between digital literacy and resilience to disinformation among students and the adult population in the Slovak Republic, in comparison with the Czech Republic, Poland, and the OECD/EU average, based on aggregated data from PISA, the Digital Economy and Society Index (DESI). The theoretical framework draws on concepts of digital literacy and models of critical thinking. The empirical part focuses on indicators of reading and digital literacy, inter-net use, and exposure to disinformation. In this section, we use aggregated data from international studies and the Digital Economy and Society Index (DESI), supplemented with indicators of digital technology use and exposure to disinformation. The results suggest that Slovakia records below-average scores in digital competences and that its inhabitants report a lower self-assessed ability to recognise disinformation than the EU average, with especially pronounced differences among socio-economically disadvantaged groups. The discussion identifies systemic gaps in education and society and recommends curriculum reform, teacher support, and the development of media literacy. We discuss the implications for educational policy and propose measures to strengthen critical and digital education. The study uses proxy indicators of resilience to disinformation, which constitutes a methodological limitation and requires caution in interpreting the findings. The use of proxy indicators constrains causal inference and calls for further empirical research.
