The airing of the documentary An Inconvenient Truth meant the Nobel Prize for Al Gore and has created an unprecedented state of awareness for millions of people all around the world. Nowadays, an ever increasing number of people is growing concerned with the environment and actually engage in positive action. This work is a step in that direction--development and economic progress through environment protection. We all have some readily available

ROMANIAN ACADEMY – BRANCH OF IASI INSTITUTE OF ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL RESEARCH "GH. ZANE" 2, T. Codrescu 700481, Iasi, Romania Phone: +40 0332 106507 XIII INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE "Romanian rural tourism in the context of sustainable development.Present and prospects" •ROMANIAN ACADEMY – BRANCH OF IASI "Gh. Zane" Institute of Economic and Social Research – Iasi •"LUCIAN BLAGA" UNIVERSITY OF SIBIU School of Agricultural Sciences, Food

Academic education services entered Romanians habits more than a century and a half ago, at the beginning as a need for professional development mostly. Paradigm shift from the traditional perspective on education to the knowledge society perspective requires the increasing competitiveness of higher education systems. From this perspective, universities should collaborate frequently with other research institutions, private companies and public institutions,

The current social and economic stage of development observed in Romania and, implicitly, that of the national tourism, requires a new type of approach vis-a-vis the "tourism development" concept. Until the 90s, tourism development was carried out in a centralized fashion and, in most cases, with little regard to the impact that strategy had on the environment and the local population. This strategy- which, in some cases, is still applied today-has

The 17th IGWT Symposium and 2010 International Conference on Commerce As a host of the 17th IGWT Symposium, it is my pleasure to invite you on this special occasion to Romania, during 21st - 25th September 2010. We wish that our symposium "Facing the Challenges of the Future: Excellence in Business and Commodity Science" would become an efficient opportunity for scientific confrontation within the competition for the future. As this keen competition

Open to trends in tourism development on European and world level, Romanian tourism improves under its impact, developing specific recognition criteria at global level, regarding the quality of services and cultural and natural attractions it owns. Developing a set of indicators based on performance which can be integrated into the ecotourism certification, provides an objective and scientific assessment of implementation and development of programs

Integrated development seen at the level of local community assumes a global approach of all influence factors over these on the one hand, but also the evolution of these in time on another hand. In these conditions there must be taken in consideration a series of aspects as: economic activities, local community and environment protection. The purpose of this paper is to analyze traditional trades/professions from rural areas in order to surprise