The tendency of depletion of non-renewable resources and the environment's continuous degradation have been considered in the last centuries acceptable as side effects for achieving the economic growth and satisfying the human needs in the conditions of demographic growth following an upward trend. An adequate response to all these challenges is related to increasing the share of green GDP in total GDP, to green procurement and to the large-scale promotion of circular economy. At EU level, there are appropriate legislation and programs and packages aimed at implementing green procurement and the circular economy. There are also "prize-winner" countries that have adopted National Green Procurement Plans before they became mandatory, countries that have found it harder to adopt this type of plans, but also countries that have not adopted National Green Procurement Plans such as Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Luxembourg and Romania. The article focuses on an analysis of the impact of national green procurement plans adoption on circular economy in the European Union member states for the period 2007-2018, with the help of an unrestricted VAR panel (PVAR), based on three hypotheses according to which the impact of these plans' adoption is positive on economic growth, CO2 emissions and circular economy. Data taken from Eurostat and processed using E-Views 9 econometric software allowed the validation of research hypotheses, confirming the positive impact of the adoption and implementation of green procurement national plans on some significant indicators characterizing the circular economy, which is likely to encourage the generalization of concerns regarding the adoption of coherent public policies in all Member States.

Background: Our study aims to verify the impact of corporate governance index on financial performance, namely return on assets (ROA), general liquidity, capital adequacy and size of company expressed as total assets in the banking sector for both a developing and a developed country. In addition, we investigate the interactive effect of corporate governance on a homogenous and a heterogeneous banking system. These two banking systems were chosen in order to assess the impact of corporate governance on two distinct types of banking system: a homogenous one such as the Romanian one and a heterogeneous one such as the Italian one. The two systems are very distinct; the Romanian one is represented by only 34 banks, while the Italian one comprises more than 350 banks. Thus, our research question is how a modification in corporate governance legislation is influencing the two different banking systems. The research implication of our study is whether a modification in legislation, thus in the index of corporate governance, is feasible for two different banking sectors and what the best ways to increase the financial performance of banks are without compromising their resilience. Methods: Using survey data from the Italian and Romanian banking systems over the period 2007–2018, we find that the corporate governance has a significant, positive and long-lasting effect on profitability and capital adequacy in both countries. Results: Taking the size of the company into consideration, the impact of the Index of Corporate Governance (ICG) on a homogenous banking system is positive while the impact on a heterogeneous banking system is negative. Conclusions: Our study provides evidence of the impact of IGC on financial performance and sheds light on the importance of the size of the company. Therefore, one can state that the corporate governance principles applied do not encourage the growth of large banks in heterogeneous banking sectors, thereby suggesting new avenues of research associated with new perspectives.

In the present paper, we focus on the macroeconomic implications of the populist public policies and in particular on the effects of wage led growth strategy, which started to be applied in Romania from January 2017. Such a study is important as a practical example of applying this particular wage related public policy and sets the premises for analyzing its sustainability and its macroeconomic implications and costs. For analyzing the implications of the wage-led growth strategy upon the sustainability of macroeconomic variables, we have used an unrestricted VAR (vector auto regressive) and compared the effect of the impulse response functions with the recent evolutions of the Romanian economy. Thus, we have observed the effect of the wage led growth strategy, by using the average wage, trade deficit, number of employees, inflation rate, labor productivity, and minimum wage as variables. Our study shows that the wage-led growth policy had a strong positive impact on the number of employees and on inflation, increasing it, but a negative impact on productivity. In addition, we have seen a strong positive impact on increasing the trade deficit. These particular evolutions have left the Romanian economy with almost no fiscal and monetary space of maneuver in the face of the exogenous shock produced by the pandemic.

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