CHARACTERISTIC OF CROWDFUNDING CAMPAIGNS RELATED TO THE CIRCULAR ECONOMY PROJECTS: EVIDENCE FROM EU COUNTRIES.

Ever since 2010s, EU is the leader in the concept of circularity as a new socio-economic paradigm. Due to the nature of circular projects, they are faced with financing difficulties. Crowdfunding emerged as an alternative source of finance that has the potential to enhance projects with environmental and social aspects. The focus of this paper is to explore the characteristics of the crowdfunding campaigns of the circular economy project in the EU countries and to determine do start-up projects located in a country with better circular rank have a higher probability of launching a crowdfunding campaign. Using the data from "Kaggle.com" open-source repository and Politico as a circular economy index, we found that circularly oriented crowdfunding could be a suitable source of finance for circular projects in terms of positive statistically relevant relationship between the probability of launching circular campaign and the success. At the same time, results suggest that the probability of launching the circular campaign is higher in countries with the lower rank of chosen index of circularity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]