Vira Butenko

The year 2020 showed certain unpreparedness of the world’s countries for the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic due to the unpopular measures of closed borders and total quarantine. The leading social component that opposes a pandemic is the healthcare system. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to assess the ability of European countries to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. The cluster modeling was performed using the STATISTICA 7.0 package. As a result of modeling, the studied countries were divided into 4 clusters. The first cluster included nine countries. According to the smallest distance, the core countries in this cluster are Ireland and Bulgaria. The second cluster included seven European countries. The core country in this cluster is Sweden. Five of the studied countries were part of the third cluster. The core country in this cluster is Estonia. The fourth cluster included economically developed European countries with a Scandinavian social economy model and countries with a transitive social economy model. The core country in the fourth cluster is Germany. The recommendations for European countries can be introducing educational activities at the state level among the population on the importance of vaccination against COVID-19, increasing the staffing of the healthcare system, conducting the audit on the effectiveness of using public funds, and developing the medical infrastructure.

The cryptocurrency market is not regulated, people and companies wishing to invest in cryptocurrency do not have the same protection as when investing in other assets. In the absence of information and regulatory laws, investors should decide if cryptocurrencies make sense for their financial goals and what kind of investment strategy to choose not to go bankrupt. The aim of the study is to determine the probability of “tail events” and to assess in this way the probability of bankruptcy when investing in cryptocurrency using the Monte Carlo method. The analysis is carried out on the period from September 1, 2014 up to July 1, 2022. Despite the fact that today there are more than 10,000 types of cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin was chosen to assess the probability of bankruptcy. The reason is that Bitcoin is the world’s first decentralized cryptocurrency and its data is stored in a long-term history, which allows testing a long-term investment strategy. Besides, Bitcoin has not gone through a period of persistent inflation that makes the result of testing a short-term investment strategy more reliable. To date, there are around 25 million Bitcoin holders, representing 42.2% of the crypto market. Almost all cryptocurrencies have been proven to follow Bitcoin. The probability of bankruptcy for a short-term cryptocurrency investment strategy is about 17%-23%. For a long-term cryptocurrency investment strategy, the probability of bankruptcy fluctuates from 13% to 16%. Contrary to popular belief, investors looking to avoid bankruptcy should prefer a long-term strategy. The best way for cryptocurrency investors to protect themselves from bankruptcy is to alternate long and short investment periods.

Organic farming is an essential approach to agriculture that seeks to reduce the negative impact of human activities on the environment and ensure the sustainability of food production. The study aims to determine the integral index of the development of organic farming and to create a clustering model of organic farming in European countries. As a research methodology, additive-multiplicative convolution was used to determine the integral index of organic farming development. Cluster analysis (the Ward method and the k-means clustering method) identified respective clusters. The integrated index is based on eight indicators of organic farming from the Eurostat database, 2012–2020, and ranges from zero to one. The following countries have the highest value of the integral index: Italy (0.57), France (0.54), Spain (0.54), Germany (0.45), and Turkey (0.47). Three clusters were identified according to eight indicators of organic agriculture. The first cluster includes countries-leaders in agricultural territories (about 2.1 million hectare) with the highest state financial support for agricultural research and development (1.1 billion euros). The second cluster includes countries with the most minor organic farming operators (50-100 operators). The third cluster includes countries with the highest index of annual income from the sale of farm products (200-220 points) but with the highest level of usage of dangerous pesticides (250 points). The heterogeneity of clusters allows one to determine the strengths and weaknesses of organic farming in European countries.