Financial Technology (Fin Tech) means "Technology enabled financial innovations". There is a strong need to improve the competitiveness of the European Fin Tech sector, creating a common regulatory field across all countries which, while encouraging innovations in Big Data analytics, Artificial Intelligence, and Blockchain technologies, can correctly measure their risks. Europe is a broad mosaic of regulatory landscapes. Policy makers and regulators must move quickly to establish a new regulatory framework for emerging fintechs, without stifling their economic potential. The FIN-TECH project, under the EU's Horizon2020 funding scheme, aims to create a European training programme, aimed at providing shared risk management solutions that automatize compliance of Fintech companies (RegTech) and, at the same time, increases the efficiency of supervisory activities (SupTech). In other words, we aim at connecting FINancial supervision with TECHnological compliance, from which the acronym of the project: FIN-TECH. The project programme will be built jointly by 24 university and fntech partners that are established experts in fintech risk management, that will share knowledge with with regulators, supervisors and fintech associations and hubs from all 28 European Union countries, plus Switzerland. The goals of the project will be achieved through research activity in risk management models for Big data analytics, AI and Blockchain applications to finance, discussed in three different research workshops; two levels of knowledge exchange sessions: a training level, run at the location of the involved supervisor in each of the 29 countries, to achieve uniformity across Europe; a coding level, centralised at the location of six different fintech hubs. The project will be simultaneously disseminated and validated through a dedicated web site, social network activity, users feedback and validation by established bank, insurance and investment funds.

Sustainable economic growth needs a sustainable energy supply. In order to accomplish this goal, good economic governance incorporating energy policy should implement reforms that will increase economic efficiency and social prosperity. The sector’s reform experience goes back to the beginning of 1990s, indicating that existing literature has been limited by a relatively short period of time, inadequate hypothesis cross-testing and without appropriate panel-data analysis. Therefore there is a strong need for the systematic analysis that would include EU countries and Croatia as the new EU Member State, a broader range of issues related to energy sector reforms within a longer time frame to examine whether the empirical evidence supports the logic of reforms and to compare the existing evidence on the reform determinants and performance. So far the findings on some issues have been limited and inconclusive. The goal of the research is to better understand the reform process by providing solid economic evidence on energy reform results and its economic and social impacts on sustainable growth. The aim of the research within this project is to address several related issues: 1) internal and external factors that will further influence the progress of reforms, especially in the EU; 2) macroeconomic performance, institutional settings, regulatory prudence and sector governance as the important wider framework; 3) measuring the economic impact of energy reforms in terms of economic efficiency, rate of investments, competitiveness and economic growth; 4) testing the existing risk management models and developing a novel approach to assessing and hedging the risks in the energy market; 5) measuring the social impact of energy reforms in terms of coverage of energy services and welfare; 6) evaluation of the energy reforms impact on long-term and sustainable economic growth. The research will be performed by combining economic and technical approach and research methods.

The subject of this research is to measure the efficiency of public health services in Croatia, which is carried out through various programs and projects of Public Health Institutes (prevention of diseases, ecology, social medicine, microbiology, etc.). The main goal of the research is to propose a model of measuring the efficiency of public health services that can also be applied to other activities in healthcare and other public services such as local government, universities etc. The model will be based on the combination of two methods (DEA and BSC) that are suitable for measuring the efficiency and effectiveness of various public services. DEA method is traditionally used for non profit organizations where similar units operate with different input/output basically without any income. BSC is a method that encourages strategic thinking and evaluates the effectiveness of set goals. The combination of DEA and BSC is relatively a new approach and is used to identify the cause and effect relationships especially within inefficient units. The model will be developed for the Teaching Institute of the Public Health of Primorje-Gorski Kotar County which has 48 organization units (DMUs). The objective of the project proposals are as follows: to determine relative efficiency of each organization unit and suggest improvements for the inefficient ones (projection on the efficient frontier-DEA method), to define an integrative model (integration of DEA and BSC) for measuring the efficiency of individual perspectives within BSC framework with the aim to assess the effectiveness of achieving goals.

The project is dealing with a tax policy problem Croatia has been tackling with in times of its fiscal consolidation as to ensure enough fiscal revenues, support long-term growth and maintain and even increase the equity of the tax system. The research starts with an extensive expert opinion survey about the state and perspectives of Croatian tax systems, which will be extended to Slovenia and Bosnia and Herzegovina in order to do relevant cross analysis of the obtained results. This survey will be followed by some public attitude surveys concerning relevant tax issues. The macroeconomic effects of fiscal consolidation measures in Croatia, with the emphasis on tax measures, will be analyzed at different government levels as well as the effects of tax structure on the economic growth. The research will be broadened to encompass other (mostly region) countries. It is expected that the research team with their in-depth tax policy analyses will pinpoint different aspects of crucial tax policy issues in Croatia with problem-solving recommendations regarding financial transaction tax, real estate tax, environmental taxation, flat tax and some other base broadening and tax expenditure issues.