2  The theme of this year's conference is "Emerging Economic and Financial Issues in 21st Century Economies”. Judging from the conference programme, the next three days is expected to be stimulating, involving research papers covering a variety of topics, including financial market performance, financial regulation, economic growth, tourism performance and banking industry issues.
I would like to emphasis some factors requiring changes to our societies today which find their origin in: •  political and institutional changes  •  economical and financial evolution  •  exogenous factors  Political and institutional changes During the last 50 years, the institutional set up has been subject to various changes such as the creation of the IMF, the EEC, the OECD etc.