Nowadays, interest in corporate environmental strategies shifts from cleaner processes to the holistic nature of green products. The relevant literature argues that firms have the opportunity to pioneer through green product innovation, allowing them to differentiate and thus gain competitive advantage. Environmental burden of products during their entire life cycle is undeniable. Due to the weakness of the existing literature that inadequately addresses a commonly accepted green product definition, as well as the thereby caused inconclusive academic empirical results on firms' competitiveness, there are many cases of businesses greenwashing behavior. The overall contribution of this exploratory paper, on determining and evaluating the degree of greenness of a product, is twofold; first, starting with a systematic literature review, authors further contribute by proposing an integrative definition that addresses the so far existing terminological gap. Next, after reviewing the existing environmental assessment tools, authors based on the developed definition and in accordance to its dynamic dimension contribute to the existing methodology, as the paper reveals issues that need to be considered in the evaluation of green products.
In spite of economic growth, which led to the creation of millions of new jobs, income inequality has been growing sharply in most parts of the world. There is no doubt that inequality of income is the single greatest threat to social stability throughout the world. Development of technologies contributes to the increase of labour productivity, replacement of job positions by robots and automatic machines, which can further exacerbate social inequality. The aim of this paper is to determine how changes in technology affect the inequality of income in European countries. Based on the econometric apparatus, two periods are investigated: the first one, from 2006 to 2017 and the second one, from 2010 to 2017, that characterizes a new economic era after the global financial crisis. All countries were clustered, which made it possible to generalize their social and technological development. The novelty is that we considered the dichotomy and cointegration of two economic categories -income inequality and technological changes. Using a model that features biased heterogeneity, factor proportions, and labour market frictions, we obtained four quite sufficient results. (1) Central European countries and the UK have reached such a level of development and redistribution in the economy that a change in labour productivity is not significantly associated with any deepening of inequality in incomes. (2) Periphery countries, due to their significant dependence on larger economies and lack of
Standard growth theory emphasizes the closure of gaps: as internationalization proceeds, socioeconomic, structural characteristics of different countries become similar. Despite the fact that the European Union (EU) represents a historical experiment of a region of gradually strengthening internationalization, a wide range of EU studies reject the convergence hypothesis, showing an unclear development of standard deviation in time. Many of the studies find that something went wrong in the 1980s, yet they describe it as the result of a temporary effect. In the present paper, we show that the puzzle of the 1980s is not a short-term break in a continuous trend, but a complete alteration of the process, a structural shift toward a persisting period of continuous divergence! The previous trend of closing the gap among the member countries was reversed completely: in 2010, the coefficient of variation returned to higher levels than those of 1960. Second, all previous gains of labor vanished: in the period 1980-2005, real wages lost about 35 percent against per capita gross domestic product (GDP). The empirical findings we provide support our main suspicion: apart from confirming the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) observation of growing and persisting inequality in all Western economies, the gradual transition of the European free trade area into an economic and monetary union, accompanied by the prevalence of a specific policy, explains the prevalence of a period of deepening divergence since the beginning of the 1980s.
The present paper is an empirical exercise that contributes to the debate on whether long-lasting cyclical economic development can be viewed as a deterministic phenomenon or a stochastic process. First, we search for longer lasting, periodically reappearing cycles of GDP per capita in four countries: USA, UK, Germany and France. Second, based on theoretical arguments that stress applied knowledge as a significant driving force, we test its dynamic interrelationship with these countries' economic performance by applying spectral and cross-spectral methodologies. We confirm the existence of periodical long waves both in terms of GDP per capita as well as of applied knowledge. Moreover, we find strong interrelations between them and modest evidence for which is the leading force in the long term.
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