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This paper studies the impact of certain characteristics of companies to training programs in the Industry 4.0 (I4.0) context. Partial objective is to rank the main human barriers companies have to overcome so that they can digitalize.

To accomplish the objectives, a closed-ended questionnaire was sent to Slovak and Italian companies and analyzed using statistical nonparametric tests. The partial objective was achieved using the so-called Henry-Garrett’s ranking method.

Results show the significance impact of companies’ characteristics such as foreign participation and company dimension on training practices whereas economic situation (financial health) seems not to influence it.

The study may lack generalizability as only 102 answers were collected. Perhaps, the outcome would be different with another sample from other countries. Moreover, using closed-ended questions, certain features may not have been covered.

Companies should always guarantee training for the resulted benefits. It is fundamental for organizations to find a time gap, resources and professionals who can teach these programs. Even when companies are incurring financial problems they should do so since human capital development can increase their competitiveness. The most critical barriers should be carefully addressed by companies. Training can help to overcome I4.0 barriers related to Human Resources (HR) and contribute to its growth.

This paper gives insights of the impact of certain characteristics of companies to the training programs. Because past research has limited their analysis on the identification of barrier, its novelty lies in the attempt to rank the most significant barriers among those detected by other authors in previous research.

This paper aims to investigate the locational determinants of the craft beer industry in Budapest, Hungary, between 2009 and 2022.

The authors use various count data models to determine the relationship between the number of microbreweries and locational factors.

The authors find that demand and supply-side factors, including income, unemployment, level of education, population density and the number of local businesses, affect the number of craft breweries. Whilst agglomeration effects proxied by breweries per capita in a district have a positive coefficient, the number of breweries in neighbouring districts is not significant. In addition, the authors do not observe any negative impact of COVID-19-related restrictions. The picture of a still-evolving, resilient craft beer sector emerges from our analysis.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is one of the first specific studies on the craft beer sector in the Central and Eastern European region and the first to evaluate the location choices of craft breweries in Hungary within a municipality using an up-to-date data set. The authors’ analysis covers 14 years, from the early stages of craft brewery proliferation in Budapest until 2022, testing several hypotheses with respect to the location choices of these businesses.