Institutional counteraction to digital divide of selected social groups

Widely understood informatization process of every sphere of life facilitates human living to a great extent. On the other hand, this process brings a number of different dangers. One of them is a kind of social stratification, clearly dividing people into the ones who use computer facilities and Internet resources and to those who do not. Such a phenomenon is most often called digital divide. It concerns especially people belonging to the fifty-plus age group, which constitutes one third of Polish inhabitants

Social campaigns embrace communication activities targeted at certain communities, and their aim is to increase public knowledge or change its behavior. A major differences between commercial and social campaigns are both the subject and the arguments (symbols) used in a message. The purpose of this paper is to show the specificity of social campaigns, as well as to present subjective opinions about discussed campaign attractiveness and their impact on behavior.

Providing information as an element of cooperation between school and parents in supporting students development

The article tackles the problem of cooperation between school and parents in providing information connected to development and raising children. Carried out analysis demonstrated that straight majority of parents declares to be informed about successes and diffuculties of students at school. Parents consider these information as helpful in supprting students development.

The role of Local Action Groups in local development managment on example of Malopolska LAG's in financial perspective 2007-2013

The paper is focused on the specificity of local action groups and their role in shaping the development on areas of local development strategies. The article shows that LAGs have significant power of decision making at the local level, but it is not fully utilised.

This paper examines empirically a policy question whether or not there is a significant effect of the character of the relationships between the third sector organizations and public administration units for distribution of public resources at the local community level (gmina orcommunes). The key issue concerns the role of NGOs in making the level of community deprivation – measured by multidimensional index of local deprivation (MILD) – a factor in allocating resources to gmina (in the form of various subsidies accrued to it). An evaluation of the relative importance of the two competing criteria, equity andefficiency – which are typically, at least implicitly, involved in distribution of public resources – is conducted using public statistics data from the Bank of Local Data for years 2008 and 2010. Since it is usually assumed that the former remains of focus of the third sector units while the latter seems to remain under responsibility of the administration, one may expect that the type of relations between them will affect the prevalence of one of the two criteria over the others, without. however, knowledge of the circumstances conducive to it. Indeed, the results of empirical analysis reveal a clear pattern of the dependency –public resources obtained by gminas are shown to be on average both ‘need-adjusted’ and efficient when the relations are positive in character (however, not unconditionally – for instance, it is not true in the case of European Union’s funds).  And that there is a form of complementarity between the above mentioned principles (equity and efficiency) under a certain pattern of interaction between non-profit organizations and administrative units at the local community – some of the circumstances suitable for such a desired type of effects are discussed in the paper. 

The paper touches upon the question of using the European Union funds as perceived by the inhabitants of the Silesian Voivodship municipalities. Research on the recognizability of particular programmes, from which projects, enterprises and training courses have been financed, are presented in the course of the paper. The inhabitants of the municipalities were to indicate the areas of urgent needs which, according to them, could be financed or co-financed using the  funds allocated for the realization of the Cohesion Policy

The current law, which regulates the functioning of local government designate their powers and tasks that aim to achieve the objectives. Such activities tend to be heavily supported institution of management control. In addition, the modern tool for the management of the local government in the effective management of all processes in the body - is the internal audit unit. Definition, based on article 272 (act on public finance) internal audit is an independent and objective activity, the aim of which is to support the Minister in charge of the department or manager in the implementation of goals and objectives through a systematic evaluation of management control and advisory activities. The article brought closer the possibility of creating the regional government's development policy, which is and can be to support the internal audit activity.

Forms of co-operation between local government and Non-governmental organizations in the case of Elbląg

Self-government offices play a very important part in the life of local community. They integrate the inhabitants and fulfil their need of belonging to a certain group as well as the need to integrate (integration function), counteract isolation, are conductive to building social bonds (affiliation function), and make interest development and self-fulfilment possible. They also have considerable contribution in improving the quality of life of local community and even the nation (expressive function).

The Act on work for public benefit and voluntary service imposed the duty to create the yearly programme of co-operation with non-governmental organisations on local governments, which  should ultimately be the basis to start the processes stimulating the development of not only these organisations but should also translate to fuller supplying various needs of  the inhabitants.

The aim of the article is to analyse and assess the forms of co-operation between the local government in Elbląg and self-government offices heading to improve the quality of life of local community, particularly taking into consideration the assessment of non-governmental organisations participation in executing own tasks and initiatives undertaken to strengthen the actions of existing organisations, creating new ones and improving voluntary service. The aim is also to diagnose the partners’ of this co-operation expectations as well as showing the directions of its development. 

Hungary has a unitary government system with 19 counties, 23 “cities with county rank” and about 3200 local (municipal) governments. The financial architectureof local governments is quite complicated and budget constraints are “halfway” between soft and hard. After an early and temporary “municipal bond boom” in the middle of 1990’s, the size of indebtedness started to increase considerably, first in 2002. By the end of 2011 the size of financial obligations deriving from local borrowing amounted more than 4.7% of GDP.

The paper is aimed at examining factors that might have been behind indebtedness and tries to separate the effect of internal and external variables for the period between 1990 and 2011. According to the results of the empirical analysis local authorities’ borrowing activity cannot be explained only with help of quantitative macro-economical indicators such as total sub-national revenues, expenditures, CPI and GDP.Namely, the formation of debt was mainly determined by behaviour patterns of local governments and byrandom (unforeseeable) shocks caused by changes in central regulation. The short term patterns in borrowing attitude are due to the four-year long election cycle of local representatives while adapting to random shock happens quickly within one year. Four different time-phases (periods) can be determined, which can be described by different characteristics and makes explanation for the formation of local debt: Early development of subnational debt markets (1990-1995); restriction (1996-1997); moderate growth (1998-2006); municipal bond-boom (2007-2010).

The main goal of the European Union's regional policy is to reduce structural disparities between EU member states and regions. The balanced development throughout the EU can promote real equal opportunities for all. So the policy is based on the concept of solidarity and cohesion of economic and social conditions. It achieves this by means of a variety of financing operations, principally through the Structural Funds and the Cohesion Fund.

The policy focuses on three main objectives, convergence – solidarity, regional competitiveness and employment and European territorial cooperation. By these objectives the EU supported projects in a wide range of areas – at regional and national level – from business support to urban development. It is very important that, these themes reflect the objectives of the Europe 2020 strategy to promote smart, sustainable and inclusive growth.

Between 2007 and 2013 for the European Union's regional policy is allocated 347 billion euro, 35.7% of the total EU budget for that period, just over 49 billion euro a year. All programmes are co-financed by the member countries the total available funding is almost 700billion euro, so the programmes and the results are and will be significant.

The main programmes, eligible areas, and the beneficiaries of the national programs can be summarized, but to measure the various programs effectiveness, in the different countries, are much more complicated. The results depend on a lot of variables, for example the managerial institutional system, the structure of the national programs, the habitat of the participant and many obvious and potential, external and internal economical and social conditions.

But despite of the dissimilarities, we try to collect, through some macroeconomical structural indicators, the main characteristic trends of the utilization EU sources. With various methods, we will characterize the coherence between gross domestic product, labour force statistics etc. Because the analysis of the 27 EU countries could be voluminous, it will be focused on some countries of Central and Eastern Europe.
 

Over a span of the last two decades governments of many countries have made an attempt to implement e-Government. The goal of e-Government is to transform thoroughly business processes of administration on the basis of ICT and to make management of the state – by using money of taxpayers in the most efficient way as possible – intelligible and predictable, based on the open cooperation with citizens, enabling to control activities of the state and serving of well-being of all citizens. The topic of the article are barriers in e-Government implementation, divided into three categories – strategic, tactical and operational – are discussed. Since the obstacles overlap with each other it is sometimes difficult to define them unambiguously. In the article they are analyzed from the most general to the most particular ones.

Cooperation of schools and social services in process of coping with difficult situations

Paper show the importance of cooperation in dealing with difficult situations schools face. Presented research carried out with participation of 20 secondary schools shows types of difficult situations schools face, kind of social services schools cooperate with in dealing with those situations and also tries to describe different types of cooperation