• Energy Research

The paper performed comparative assessment of greenhouse gas (GHG) emission trends and climate change mitigation policies in the fuel combustion sector of selected EU member states with similar economic development levels and historical pasts, and implementing main EU energy and climate change mitigation policies, having achieved different success in GHG emission reduction. The impact of climate change mitigation policies on GHG emission reduction was assessed based on analysis of countries’ reports to UNFCCC by identifying the key areas of GHG emission reduction, their GHG emission reduction potential, and the driving forces behind them. The study revealed that climate change mitigation policies that have been implemented so far in Bulgaria are less efficient than in Lithuania, as Bulgaria places priorities not on energy efficiency improvement and penetration of renewable energy sources, but on switching from coal to natural gas. The policy implications for strengthening GHG emissions reduction efforts are provided based on analysis conducted.

Culture plays an important role in implementing sustainability principles and approaching sustainable development goals across different countries. This paper aims to analyse the relationship between the value created by culture and the implementation of sustainable development goals of countries. The majority of attention in this research is devoted to composing and calculating the integrated cultural value index, which provides clear linkages between value created by culture and sustainable development goals. An expert survey was conducted, during which experts had to assess indicators by ranking them according to importance. There have been 14 indicators included in total to calculate the integrated cultural value index. The values created by culture in the selected Baltic States have been determined by calculating the weight coefficient of each indicator and providing a composite cultural value index. Statistical data analysis unquestionably confirms that cultural input when implementing sustainable development goals is significant, because there exists a very strong positive relationship between the cultural value index and achieved sustainable development goals in all three case studies.

The problem of inflation is crucial for ensuring sustainable economic growth of the country. In the broadest sense, the economic dimension of sustainable development represents the general economic health of the country. Such macroeconomic indicators as unemployment and inflation rates are the main economic indicators of sustainable development. This article discusses the historical aspects of inflation development and the attitudes of economists towards it. The article presents a new approach to inflation and analyses the main reasons for its formation by developing a new analytical model of aggregate inflation. Based on new analytical model, the theoretical analysis of the formation of an economic bubble is provided based on saturation phenomena and its micro and macroeconomic implications are discussed. The main input of this paper is the creation of an extended (detailed) inflation model representing the main drivers of inflation and therefore contributes to the concept of controlled economic growth, which is necessary to ensure sustainable economic growth of the country.

The motivation behind the current research is to check the effect of the recent introduction of value added tax (VAT) and Vision 2030 on the economy of Saudi Arabia. To check this, those variables are added to the analysis which contribute to economic development including labor, capital, oil price, financial development, and trade openness to examine that how economic transformation affects the role of these variables in economic growth. According to the vector error correction (VEC) model, the impact of labor becomes negative after VAT, however, the impact of capital and financial development becomes significant by this transformation. The coefficients of oil prices, for positive and negative shocks, are significant and negative. Financial development and trade openness are reporting surprising results; positive shocks have shown negative coefficients. However, after Vision 2030, trade openness has a significant and positive coefficient. Policy implications include diversification of exports, reviving the private financing mechanism and restructuring the export/import policies.

The sustainable organization culture is one of the most important intangible assets and driver of competitiveness of organizations. The aim of this article is to reveal the role of various form of leadership in shaping organisational culture by conducting empirical study in the network of pharmaceutical companies distinguished with high share of young females working in such companies in Lithuania. This is very competitive sector and has important implications on public health and other sustainability issues therefore this area was selected for the empirical study on testing leadership impacts. The main focus of the study is leader’s personal features and their impact on team work and relationships with clients, what effect male and female managers have on innovation culture in the network of pharmaceutical companies and what impact leader’s characteristics have on sustainable of organizational culture and long-term development goals of the company. The study results showed that transformational leadership can provide for more effective organisational culture than transactional leader, because such a leader is oriented towards the transformation of employee expectations and can create more opportunities for sustainable organizational culture.