This paper uses a quantile fixed-effect panel data approach to investigate how environmental policy stringency affects CO2 emissions in a set of 32 OECD countries from 1990 to 2015. This approach allows us to identify the asymmetric impact of policy stringency on emissions, considering the emission level recorded in each analysed country. More precisely, we posit that the effectiveness of environmental regulations and policies is influenced by the air pollution level. Our results show that an increase in policy stringency has a negative impact on emissions. As a new contribution, we show that environmental stringency has a more powerful impact in the countries with lower level of carbon emissions. This result is also recorded for the subset of EU member countries of the OECD. Moreover, we show that policy stringency measures only become effective after the implementation of the Kyoto agreement.Finally, the policy stringency effect is stronger for EU countries at high risk of missing the 20-20-20 target in terms of greenhouse gas emissions.

This article concretizes the continuous development of social sustainability in organizations based on ergonomics methods and tools, among others. Numerous scientific studies have already revealed many reasons for justifying balanced efforts towards organizational sustainability, including its economic, social, and environmental dimensions. Because the social dimension is recognized as the weakest and is often neglected, it is placed at the forefront of the present research. The link between social sustainability in the workplace and the ergonomics concept is provided through 17 underlying indicators of the workplace sustainability framework proposed in a previous study. The OWAS and REBA ergonomic risk assessment methods were used in a toolmaking company to study how results can be used directly or indirectly to determine the size or value of indicators used in the sustainability framework. The research finds that direct use of the OWAS and REBA results is not possible, but it is certain that the implementation of proposals in response to identified levels of risk affects up to four out of five factors that constitute the sustainability framework. The use of OWAS and REBA is not suitable to address environmental concerns. This study encourages companies to use ergonomic methods and tools to develop social sustainability in the workplace. It is often necessary to decide between the pen-and-paper approach and an advanced one using artificial intelligence (e.g., supported by the ErgoIA software tool). Not only the method but also the technique chosen affects the degree of sustainability achieved. Finally, relevant aspects of knowledge exploitation in the field of ergonomic education for social sustainability were summarized.

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