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This paper deals with the importance of print products in SME corporate communications. To this end, the interest of customers of a German tour operator belonging to the SME in printed travel literature is analyzed. For this purpose, two independent samples with n=1,500 each are examined. An influence of the characteristics age, gender, place of residence can be proven. In each case, the influence is of medium strength. Logistic regression is then used to try to explain better the consumption of printed travel literature. In addition, the economic importance of a customer, which was determined during a customer segmentation, is included. It becomes clear that the place of residence with age and customer segment are of particular importance. This shows that print cannot be dispensed with in corporate communications in certain target groups. It also becomes clear that optimal coordination of corporate communications can be developed into a competitive advantage for SMEs. Namely, when a target group that differs from the overall population is reached more efficiently than by national or international competitors.

The current research investigates the Hungarian-Slovakian cross-border area of Szigetköz-Csallóköz in the context of new economic opportunities facilitated by water level regulation. The objective of the research is to unearth the potential economic opportunities triggered by the planned interventions and reveal the latent resources in the regional socio-economic fabric. The research employs two analytical methods: a situation analysis phase comprising an in-depth analysis of strategic documents that discuss various economic features of the Szigetköz – Csallóköz area, and a needs assessment phase based on in-depth interviews with decision-makers and institutional leaders of the selected municipalities (N=22). The research results are presented in the form of proposals related to infrastructural developments, such as the construction of a cycle path along the Old Danube embankment (from Danakiliti to Gönyű) or economic development such as the creation of a unique tourism brand.

The importance of cities throughout history is indisputable. Their allocation of economic, cultural and political power, their spatial organization functions are impressive, and their role in social reproduction reached a milestone in 2008, when more than half of the world's population was considered urban. Today, the urban population is still growing. Small towns are extremely diverse in terms of economic power and society, but their numbers and population base do not justify their dominance in the urban network. There have been intense waves of urbanization across Europe, with the scope of formal cities widening and the scope of functional cities closing. Grouped by population category, there are more than 7,000 small towns in Europe, almost two-thirds of the countries' urban settlements are small towns. This is particularly true in Central- and Eastern-Europe, where, due to delayed urban development, there is a combination of welfare suburbanization and urban depopulation, as well as forced-generated movements from the big cities to smaller towns. In our study, we present the main characteristics of population change in small towns in Hungary. We examine spatial and functional differences in the population dynamics of small towns. The aim of the study is to show the spatial distribution of the settlements identified by prosperous suburbs and shrinking cities by illustrating the changes in the population dynamics of the Hungarian small towns population over the last almost twenty years.

The aim of the paper is to discuss the situation of the municipal enterpreneurship in some EU member countries (namely Great Britain, France, Germany, Austria and Scandinavian countries) with regards to the process of privatization running out since later 1970s and the subsequent outsourcing of contracting the municipal service provision by private companies. This situation was related to the shortage within public budgets as well to the influence of the so called New Public Management ideas. The findings are compared with the situation in the Czech Republic. The fully privatized sector of municipal services did not show to be the best way of how to provide citizens with such services. The procurement of public services for individual settlements proved to be quite successful by means of collective communal enterprises or through the joint contracting of these services by a group of municipalities with the private entities in Western countries. Unfortunately such a co-operation does not find place in the Czech Republic.

The objective of the study is to examine the correspondence between city status and city identity and the factors explaining the spectacularly large number of small cities in Hungary. A further aim is to explore the positive or negative impacts of the acquisition of city status on the development of the urban network. The study, using a historical approach, aimed to identify the key enabling factors of the transformation of small towns into cities. This was achieved through the qualitative assessment of specific properties of the urban micro space, the presentation of various life stories and a review of the main milestones of the development path. The elements of local government capacities of peripheral small towns in the region are assessed on the basis of operational and efficiency aspects. The lack or reduced mobility of these elements has negative implications on local government functions, the delivery of public services, the availibility of local resources and the vitality of the local economy.
The recently launched Hungarian Village Program categorizing small towns with less than 5,000 inhabitants as villages may fuel further reflections on the development policy and governance relevance of the research. The analysis of developments planned and undertaken in the framework of the project and the monitoring of the implementation of the Modern Villages and Small Towns Programme will constitute the tasks of the next phase of the research.

With the political agreement by the European Parliament and the Council on the Commission's proposal for 2021-2027 on the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), the Cohesion Fund (CF) and the European Territorial Cooperation Programmes ("Interreg"), and all the other instruments related to cohesion policy, we have entered the final stage of the provisions for the new EU programming period: the final approval of the legal texts (EC, 2020a).
Thus, the main objective of our study is to present the most important challenges at the Member State level (Hungary) with a bottom-up and practice-oriented perspective. Methodologically, three specific factors were identified and studied in the paper that constitute significant challenge for national level policymaking, as follows: (1) as regards the soci(et)al aspect, the questions of the new "regions" (Central Hungary vs Budapest and Pest region); (2) regarding the economic aspect, the newly created territorial "units" (Economic Development Zones); and lastly (3) as a nature-focused aspect, the management of surface water.
These factors are directly connected to the five investment priorities of the EU for 2021 -2027 i.e. Smarter, Greener and carbon free, Connected, and Social Europe that is Closer to its citizens (EC, 2018) and represent criteria that reflect the reality on the ground. These factors were examined in specific case studies exploring their relations to national and interregional policymaking and EU level policies also, together with their presence in the planned programming documents, e.g. the Operational Programmes and Partnership Agreement. As a result, we aim to identify some direct causal relations between policy and practice, highlight some synergies (or their absence) between national and interregional level sectoral (horizontal) and EU-Member State level (vertical) processes, and additionally, shed some light on the possible future scenarios in these specific and important areas. Through these outcomes, our research could contribute to a more tailored approach to regional development, that is a major objective of the New Cohesion Policy.

Rural tourism seems to be an appropriate means of revitalizing abandoned rural areas and ensuring their sustainability in the future through job preservation or job creation. The Vojvodina Province (Northern Serbia) has very good resource potentials in rural tourism, but in order for rural tourist products to become competitive, it is necessary to work on the segmentation of the tourism market or consumer profiling. The primary purpose of this study is to investigate the profiles of tourists, motivational factors that most influence the choice of rural tourism. The research was conducted in the traditional rural surroundings, on a sample of 491 respondents. A modified questionnaire was used, in which the basic motives were grouped into six market segments, and based on CFA analysis, in the software, SPSS Amos, version 21.00, the authors confirmed the hypothetical structure of factors, and the causal relationship of manifest variables and latent dimension rural tourism. More precisely, it has been established what the key motives that identify rural tourism in Vojvodina are. The research results showed that rest, or relaxation in nature with learning, are the main motives for visiting rural areas of Vojvodina. By segmenting the tourist users of rural tourism, it was determined that most of those tourists come for relaxation.

Understanding territorial processes has come to the focus of relevant enquiries in the past few decades but it is especially important in the case of less favoured areas. In this particular research project presented here, the major factors of endogenous development and their presence in the regions of Visegrad countries – Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary – have been investigated.
The theory of endogenous development, namely the utilisation of the given resources, has become the focus of many empirical analyses and it means the framework of quantitative analysis. The main aim of the paper is the examination and explanation of the effects of each capital on development.
A model is proposed that explains development and includes latent variables symbolising the forms of capital.  The model then is further examined using a Partial Least Squares (PLS) path analysis. This shows and helps to understand the connections between the various forms of capital, although the model is only valid in a Visegrad context.
The first part of the paper reviews the academic literature of development theories, and it outlines how the concept has been understood and developed in the last few decades. In the next chapter of the paper, the concept is examined from a narrower perspective and the focus is on the theory of endogenous development, which is assumed to be a qualitative change. Despite the fact that in this case it is very difficult to carry out quantitative analyses, they have an obvious relevance in regional research. Besides defining endogenous development, several models and capitals are compared in the paper. The compa rison shows the most important elements by the usage of which the development of the Visegrad regions becomes measurable.
The methodology of the empirical test can be found in the next chapter, and it means that research questions were tried to be answered based on the latest statistical indicators, i.e., the Eurostat database and the national databases of the Visegrad countries. In the abovementioned countries 115 NUTS3 regions can be found, hence this array of territories serves as the framework for the quantitative analysis. The territorial units are compared to multivariate analysis, so the accumulation of various forms of capitals has been analysed by PLS path analysis. With the help of the method, a simultaneous factor and regression analysis is run, enabling the analysis of the direct and indirect effects among the latent variables. It helps to highlight the effects of capitals on each of these.

The migration of health care workers is a longstanding process which causes shortages in the sending countries. The Eastern enlargements of the European Union strengthened the East-West migration flows causing serious political controversies and jeopardising medical services. Hungary is also heavily affected by these processes and in the last 10 years; thousands of doctors and nurses left the country. Managing migration processes requires complex policy answers with the involvement of actors from various spatial scales – but most of the studies on medical migration from Hungary focuses on the national scale. To fill this research gap, this study aims to analyse local political responses to the outmigration through the content analysis health care development documents to reveal the role of local scale. On local scale individual needs and preferences, emotional factors can influence the decision on staying or moving. Therefore, local policies, which take local features into account and apply place-based approach, can be useful elements of (re)migration policies in the case of health care workers, too.

Despite its normative goals of deepening interstate integration, ‘de-bordering’ European societies and promoting a greater degree of territorial cohesion, the European Union remains a highly and intricately bordered space. Economic bordering within the EU involves the investigation of the geoeconomic relationships that have emerged as a result of global market re-integration and EU membership of post-socialist states during the economic transition of Central and South-Eastern Europe. The objective of this paper is to provide a comprehensive review of the transformation processes of the Central and South-Eastern European region.

The educational indicators are an important basis for spatial researches focusing on regional development. Border areas provide special conditions for educational attainment, but the levels of aggregated results are worse in general. Different distance categories and given sections of Hungarian border areas are separated in order to detect the altering development paths of the complex educational attainment index (CEAI). This complex indicator combines the number of people with high school graduation and with diploma in the ratio of the 20 years or older population (with a weighting procedure included). Border areas are generally characterized by worse educational attainment values than the national average, but during the last more than six decades, significant convergence of data could be observed, in which the dominance of large towns is decisive. For this reason, suburbanization significantly impacts the spatial pattern of educational attainment in the border zones. Most parts of the settlements are below the national average, however general conditions are better in the case of the Austrian border section. However, the previously assumed continuous development of this border section has not been confirmed by our analysis.

The emergence of cross-border suburbanisation is based on the geographical proximity of a large city and the unrestricted permeability of state borders. A social group, the ‘transnational borderlanders’, is emerging (Martinez, 1994), who use the territory of both states on both sides of the border daily, e.g. they live on one side and work on the other. In our case, a cross-border suburbanisation has developed, with Bratislava residents moving to nearby villages in Hungary. The open border is a prerequisite for their daily life, and they took a risk when they bought a property in another country. The study examines how the closing of borders during the COVID-19 epidemic affected the lifestyle of Slovak citizens who settled in Hungary and commuted to Bratislava and the new situation of the cross-border area. To this end, a questionnaire survey and interviews were conducted in four settlements in Hungary inhabited by Slovaks. The study summarises the results of these surveys and concludes that the temporary closure of borders did not have a significant impact on the satisfaction with cross-border lifestyle, and the willingness to move. In fact, there are signs that the lockdown has dissolved the previously entirely Bratislava-centric way of life (shopping, using services, registering an address, etc.).

This study provides a critical review of the instruments developed for measuring service quality in restaurants. However, this study reviews the researches to examine the relationships between service quality, customer satisfaction (CS), and customer loyalty (CL) in restaurants. It is revealed that there are many attempts to develop instruments that aim to measure service quality in restaurants. SERVQUAL instrument, which measures service quality (SQ), has been used in many studies related to the tourism industry. However, the SERVQUAL is directly used as the basis of the SERVPERF and DINESERV instruments. Besides, since the GRSERV and CFFRSERV scales are based on DINESERV, the SERVQUAL plays an important role in the development of such scales. In addition to the instruments developed by modifying SERVQUAL, there are attempts to create different ones. In researches that develop a new SQ scale, the reasons underlying this need are stated as follows: 1) Some service quality components specific to restaurants and tourism sector not included in the current scales 2) Measuring the expectations and performance at the same time is not necessary 3) Current scales are insufficient for the unique types of restaurants, such as Fast Food, Upscale and Green Restaurants. CS and CL are the most common variables in the studies examining the SQ in restaurants. There is a divergence in the literature about whether service quality leads to satisfaction or satisfaction brings service quality. However, it can be said that there is a consensus that these two structures are in a very close relationship with each other. Another consensus in the literature is that CS and SQ are regarded as the determinants of CL. On the other hand, a considerable amount of research has been devoted to service quality, customer satisfaction, and customer loyalty, and it will be the case for future studies. However, the changes in business environments reveal the necessity of modification in the instruments that will pave the way to measure these concepts. A pandemic has recently affected the lives of businesses, and people and this new situation may require the addition of a new dimension to service quality instruments, like outbreak measures.

Background: A wide range of food allergies is now more or less commonplace in many people. The number of people with these food restrictions has increased several over recent decades. When making purchases, these consumers ask and require non-standard and specific types of food. There are some limitations and risks associated with eating food while travelling. The specific food allergy, in this case, is gluten intolerance, which is used to show the behaviour of consumers in restaurants. Aim: The study aimed to identify the factors influencing the purchases of gluten-free foods, and to propose ways to tailor services in restaurants to the target group of consumers. There is a gap in the research in this area, and consumer behaviour and their preferences in public food establishments have not been determined. Method: Consumer behaviour by people with gluten intolerance and the availability of food following the principles of a gluten-free diet in the foodservice sector was studied using comprehensive comparative research combined with quantitative and qualitative research using individual interviews. The data was collected from October 2016 until June 2017. A total of 1,611 patients with coeliac disease were addressed. The availability of gluten-free meals (the availability of dining) in the public food service network was examined through a field survey from February to April 2017 in three types of foodservice units. A total of 370 food operations were visited. Results: The survey revealed very urgent demand from consumers (those suffering coeliac disease) to expand the range of meals in the foodservice units. In spite of the growing number of consumers who need a gluten-free diet, this situation is not sufficiently addressed by most restaurants.