The economy of Latvia lags behind economically developed nations approximately fourfold in terms of labour productivity in the tradable sector, which is the key constituent of a modern economy, thereby affecting future sustainable development in the entire country, including the rural areas. The economic backwardness is characteristic of the entire Central and Eastern Europe. This is the heritage of a communist regime that lasted for about half a century and the economic system termed a (centrally) planned economy or a command economy. However, such a term for the communist-period economy is not correct, as it does not represent the purpose it was created for. Accordingly, the paper aims to assess the effect of the communism period on the economic backwardness of the Central and Eastern European region of the EU. A planned economy that existed in all communist countries, with the exception of Yugoslavia, was not introduced to contribute to prosperity. It was intended for confrontation or even warfare by the communist countries under the guidance of the USSR against other countries where no communism regime existed, mostly Western world nations with their market economies. For this reason, it is not correct to term it a (centrally) planned economy or a command economy; the right term is a mobilised (war) economy. An extrapolation of a geometric progression for GDP revealed that during the half a century, Latvia as part of the USSR was forced to spend on confrontation with the West not less than EUR 17 bln. (2011 prices) or approximately one gross domestic product of 2011. The research aim of the paper is to assess the effect of the communism period on the economic backwardness of the Central and Eastern European region of the EU.

This study aimed to investigate the factors associated with adopting technologies promoting soil conservation in Brazilian family farming in 2017. Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) was employed to identify these factors to achieve this aim, with the territorial unit of analysis being the 558 Brazilian microregions delineated by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) in 2017. The adoption of soil conservation technologies by Brazilian family farming represents a multidimensional phenomenon, which is positively influenced by factors within the socioeconomic context (including access to technical assistance services and credit facilities, as well as participation in collective farmer organizations), as well as characteristics of rural properties (such as water availability and the presence of productive machinery and equipment) and the education level of the farmer. It was observed that adopting such technologies has the potential to contribute to an increase in the country’s Gross Production Value (GPV) of family farmers. The primary theoretical contribution of this study lies in validating factors associated with adopting soil conservation technologies within Brazilian family farming and the importance of family farmers’ participation in collective organizations (cooperatives, technical meetings, and seminars) to access technical assistance and credit services. Furthermore, the practical implications suggest the need for specific public policies, including the establishment of cooperatives and the organization of technical meetings and seminars nationwide, the conservation and preservation of springs and water bodies in rural areas, and the provision of dedicated credit lines for the acquisition of machinery and equipment by family farmers.

The contemporary scientific and technical community claims that the new development paradigm will be based on the priority of the universal laws of nature, the principles of ecological economics and the widespread use of digital transformation. The analysis of the sustainable development strategy Latvia 2030 and the presented changes in the value of indicators showed that, it is quite difficult to put together a common unified picture of Latvia’s movement towards sustainable development. The main goal of the article is to present a new approach to the assessment of sustainable development and to monitoring system, using a system’s power changes analysis method. In the context of a Latvian sustainable development strategy, the authors presented the results of the formalisation of new approach to the sustainable development monitoring, using an invariant coordinate system in units of power (energy flow) in compare with calculated data in monetary terms. Calculations and the initial interpretation of the results of Latvia as well as of the five EU countries from the Baltic Sea region – Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Estonia and Lithuania – were carried out for the period 1990–2019. The presented indicators of sustainable development show that achieving the strategic goals of Latvia 2030 would be very difficult without any serious internal and external incentives. The results can provide a basis for creation of the development strategy both the country as a whole and each region separately.