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Why do firms' sustainability disclosure performance differ so much between firms and across countries? Which factors drive firm's awareness of sustainable development and do these factors have different driving mechanisms between developed and emerging countries? We answer these questions using a panel data regression model on around 1500 companies from 20 developed countries and 20 emerging countries during the period from 2009 to 2019. Our empirical results reveal that both firm-level and country-level variables are important predictors for sustainable disclosure performance. In developed countries, most firm-level indicators show a significant and positive effect on Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) disclosure scores. In emerging countries, only operating performance, measured by total revenues, and firm size have a positive impact on ESG disclosure, while high level of profitability is associated with low ESG score. On the country level, we find a significant relationship between all drivers and ESG scores in developed countries. However, in emerging markets, only economic, cultural (excepting uncertainty avoidance index) and technological factors are shown to impact significantly sustainable development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study used an asymmetric ARDL model to analyse the asymmetric (positive and negative shocks) impact of foreign direct investment, personal remittances, total reserves, gross savings, and information and communication technology on economic growth in Pakistan from 1976 to 2019. The short-run and long-run results of the asymmetric autoregressive distributed lag approach show that total reserves have a negative and non-significant influence on Pakistan's economic growth. Similarly, the results of asymmetric ARDL show that positive shocks in personal remittances have a positive and significant influence on Pakistan's economic growth, but negative shocks have a negative and non-significant impact in both the long-run and short-run. The findings of the gross savings show that a positive shock has a favourable and non-significant impact on economic growth in both the long-run and short-run. The investigated outcomes of foreign direct investment show that positive shocks have a detrimental and considerable impact on the economy of Pakistan in both the long-run and short-run. Furthermore, information and communication technology has a negative impact on economic growth in both the long-run and short-run. The government of Pakistan may adopt better policies to build the country's infrastructure by employing foreign investment more effectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current study aims to explore the role of environmental taxes and regulations for the renewable energy consumption, focusing on reporting policy suggestions to overcome climate change issues and achieve environmental sustainability. The main objective of this paper is to examine the relation between renewable energy, environmental taxes, environmental technologies, and environmental regulations in 29 OECD countries during 1996–2018. More precisely, we inspect the impact of the environmental regulations and environmental technologies on the renewable energy consumption. The authors employ CIPS and CADF unit root tests, panel Westerlund co-integration test, FMOLS, and Quantile regression methods for the econometric analysis. The econometric analysis suggests that the environmental regulations impede the renewable energy consumption in OECD economies. The study suggests that environmental policy initiatives should focus on implementing environmental strategies to inspire cohesiveness between environmental regulations and the development of environmental technologies in order to promote the renewables industry in the developed countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, governments across the EU countries had to introduce measures to close the borders, restrict the movement of people, and suspend business activities in nonessential sectors. These restrictions threatened to result in the worst economic shock since the Great Depression of the 1930s. This situation forced the EU leaders to quickly implement urgent measures in the form of stimulating packages in order to avoid a catastrophic economic collapse. The measures, however, have been implemented without coordination and insufficiently considering the solidarity principle among the Member States, which is one of the EU basic principles. In that way, the already existing gap in development among the EU economies has become even more pronounced, which will certainly have an impact on the convergence process in the EU. In that sense, this paper is aimed at analyzing the convergence process among the EU economies during the period from 2004 to 2020 and comparing differences among the EU member states during the pandemic crisis (in 2020) and the global economic crisis (in 2008). To define the policy recommendations for overcoming the crisis and for obtaining a satisfactory level of real convergence and nominal convergence, Hierarchical Agglomerative Clustering (HAC) was performed on the data for 2020 and five clusters were derived. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the role of the import diversification in the renewable energy consumption for a global panel of both developing and developed economies. The study applies panel co-integration and panel quantile regression analysis on the panel data of 138 countries during 1995–2018. For empirical analysis, the authors used Pedroni) cointegration test and panel-quantile regressions. The investigation proves that the import diversification significantly reduces the renewable energy consumption and there is a major need for designing and implementing some revised and synchronized policies of trade with the energy mix and sustainable development goals. The empirical findings claim that the foreign direct investments, natural resources and GDP increase significantly boost the renewable energy demand for both groups of developing and developed countries. Therefore, this study shows that generally the current trade policies might be ineffective and import diversification policies should be reformed to match with the energy regulations, manufacturing, and sustainable development goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to find out if the high economic growth rates achieved by the CEE countries are based either on consumption or on investments, considering many exogenous factors that impact on the economic growth and how these factors can contribute to the employment process in the CEE economies to stress if these trends of economic growth and employment are sustainable in the long run. We performed two Panel Least Squares and Pool Least Squares estimations to determine the impact of the exogenous variables on the economic growth (as GDP per capita growth) and on the unemployment rate in the short and long run, depending on the lags of the exogenous variables used in the analysis. We used yearly data series during 2004–2017 for eight selected CEE countries. Our results show that private consumption is positively related with economic growth in the short run, but it doesn't support the job creation process, in the same way as the savings rate can't determine positive effects on the employment. Public spending is strongly and negatively correlated with economic growth and positively correlated with the unemployment rate in the CEE region, while the net export is weakly impacting on the economic growth in the CEE region and doesn't support the employment process in this area. The impact of the domestic investments on the economic growth is weaker in the CEE area than the impact of both private and public spending, but they are positively correlated with the economic growth and negatively correlated with the unemployment rate, while the correlation of the foreign direct investments (FDIs) with both economic growth and unemployment is very weak, as it is the case of net exports. We conclude that the economic growth in the CEE area is mainly based on the private consumption in the short run but the private consumption doesn't support the job creation process either in the long run or in the short run. The qualitative factors included in the analysis by using global competitiveness index (corruption control, bureaucracy, infrastructure quality, governance effectiveness, political stability, rule of law factors, property rights, markets efficiency, etc.) and corruption perception index are strongly and positively correlated with the economic growth and negatively correlated with the unemployment rate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]