Factors of national environmental performance in sustainability management aspect

Abstract

The ambitious goals of environmental sustainability stated in international agreements and national programs require developing strategies to achieve them. At the same time, there is a lack of empirical evidence on the environmental performance factors, which can be purposefully changed to achieve an effective result in the short and medium-term. The paper aims to find the institutional factors of national environmental performance, including financial ones, which might be effectively used as environmental sustainability management tools. For this, the relationships between the Environmental Performance Index (EPI), as the dependent variable, and the indicators of control of corruption, the effectiveness of an anti-monopoly policy, financial opportunities, undue influence, corporate culture, innovation output, GDP, and income growth among the poorest population, using a sample of 81 countries, and the technique for constructing nonlinear regression models based on the normalizing transformations for non-Gaussian data were studied.The study findings show that environmental performance can be predicted with sufficient accuracy by a linear model of its dependence on corruption control, minority shareholders protection, judicial independence, favoritism in decisions of government officials, tax incentives, ease of access to loans, and innovation output. Adding GDP per capita to the explanatory variables of the EPI model does not significantly affect the result accuracy but changes the model shape from linear to nonlinear. The paper substantiates ways to apply results for institutional reforms and sustainability management, such as inflation targeting, public credit guarantee schemes, performance-based loans, etc.

Institutional determinants of environmental performance

“…The results mostly show the expected correlation; more corruption results in less environmental quality. Corresponding results are found by Gallego-Álvarez, Vicente-Galindo, Galindo-Villardón, and Rodríguez-Rosa (2014); Ganda (2020); Rohov, Prykhodko, Kolodiziew, Sybirtsev, and Krupka (2021) and Sofrankova et al (2021). However, Morse (2006) points out that the influence of corruption becomes weaker when per capita income is included as a control variable.…”

Untitled

“…This is especially important, because the crisis phenomena in the Ukrainian economy caused a decline in the manufacturing industry. Due to the growth of competition on the Ukrainian and world markets, some enterprises do not have the proper pace of development (Kolodiziev, 2019;Kolodiziev et al, 2021).…”

Determining Patterns of Interest in the Theme of State Regulation of Economic Risk in Small Enterprises Activity

“…The sharp drop in living standards in most countries in 2020 has significantly increased the influence of populist forces on governments, which are forced to respond by increasing social benefits through an increase in external borrowing, which can objectively lead to rising inflation and depreciation of small enterprises' revenue [2]. Such actions of many politicians in power will not solve another urgent probleminequality in wealth and quality of life, which is becoming exacerbated every year not only in relations between individual countries, but also within each of them [17]. We can therefore expect to see the imposition of the so-called wealth tax both in individual states and at the international level.…”