• Energy Research

The world population maintains a growing trend and in turn, the amount of municipal waste is also increasing. Rising municipal waste quantity poses a challenge for human beings and the environment, therefore recycling becomes important for environmental sustainability and circular economy. This study explores the effects of municipal waste recycling and renewable energy on the environment sustainability proxied by CO2 emissions in EU member states over the period from 2004 to 2017 through panel cointegration and causality analyses. Recycling is considered an efficient way to reduce CO2 emission, but surprisingly our results indicate mixed findings. The causality analysis revealed no significant interaction among recycling rate, renewable energy and CO2 emissions. However, in the long run, the negative impact of recycling and renewable energy use on CO2 emissions were revealed but varied among the countries. Results indicate that increasing renewable energy consumption will play a significant role in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. These findings must raise awareness among policymakers that should focus on the adoption and implementation of different types of sustainable energy policies that can affect directly or indirectly renewable energy sector development.

The present study reveals the importance of understanding how business decisions focused on sustainability can impact companies, due to the risks associated with brand loyalty. The relationship between brand loyalty and consumers’ environmental viewpoint is investigated, including how consumers’ brand loyalty would be impacted after environmental-based expansion decisions are announced. College students from the USA and Romania (N = 92) were asked to voluntarily participate in a survey. The Brand Loyalty Scale (BLS) is used to assess brand loyalty before and after a fictitious expansion announcement was made and the New Ecological Paradigm (NEP) scale is utilized to assess attitudes toward sustainability. A paired samples t-test analysis reveals a significant positive correlation between NEP scores (attitudes toward sustainability) and brand loyalty. No significant differences are found in attitudes toward sustainability regarding region (Romania and USA) or gender. These results indicate that individuals who generally show concern towards the environment will stay loyal to their favorite companies after sustainability is introduced. Results also indicate that the gap regarding region and gender is slowly closing in attitudes toward sustainability; individuals in developing countries are also showing a major concern toward environmental issues. Males indicate just as much concern toward the environment as females, which is confirmed by other findings in previous literature.

Sand is an indispensable natural resource for any society. Despite society’s increasing dependence on sand, there are major challenges that this industry needs to deal with: limited sand resources, illegal mining, and environmental impact of sand mining. The purpose of this paper is twofold: to present an overview of the sand market, highlighting the main trends and actors for production, export and import, and to review the main environmental impacts associated with sand exploitation process. Based on these findings, we recommend different measures to be followed to reduce negative impacts. Sand mining should be done in a way that limits environmental damage during exploitation and restores the land after mining operations are completed.

Sand is considered one of the most consumed natural resource, being essential to many industries, including building construction, electronics, plastics, and water filtration. This paper assesses the environmental impact of sand extraction and the problems associated with its illegal exploitation. The analysis indicates that extracting sand at a greater rate than that at which it is naturally replenished has adverse consequences for fauna and flora. Further, illicit mining activities compound environmental damages and result in conflict, the loss of taxes/royalties, illegal work, and losses in the tourism industry. As sea-level rise associated with climate change threatens coastal areas, sand in coastal areas will play an increasingly greater role in determining the amount of damage from floods and erosion. The present analysis points to the need for swift action to regulate sand mining, monitoring, law enforcement, and international cooperation.

This study investigates the effect of energy efficiency and renewable energy on economic growth in emerging economies over the 1992–2014 period using Westerlund’s (2008) cointegration test and Dumitrescu and Hurlin (2012) causality test. The panel cointegration coefficients reveal that energy efficiency positively influences the economic growth in the long term, but renewable energy has no significant effects on economic growth in the long term. Furthermore, the causality analysis revealed a one-way causality from both energy efficiency and renewable energy use to the economic growth in the short term.

Entrepreneurship plays a major role in all countries’ economies through generating new jobs and innovation, and in turn making a contribution to the economic growth. Therefore, the determinants underlying entrepreneurship have become important for designing an environment that increases entrepreneurial activity. In this study, we considered it important to investigate the influence of factors such as financial sector development, foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows, and trade and financial openness on entrepreneurship, using information from 15 upper middle income and high-income countries over the 2001–2015 period. The findings reveal that the banking sector and capital market development, FDI inflows, and trade openness affect the total early-stage entrepreneurial activity positively. Furthermore, the crises had a negative impact on the entrepreneurship.

In the context of contemporary society, characterized by the information users’ growing and differentiated needs, the way country-level governance and social responsibility contribute to the ensuring of sustainable economic development is a concern for all the actors of the economic sphere. The aim of this paper is to test the causal linkages between the quality of country-level governance, economic growth and a well-known indicator of economic sustainable development, for a large panel of world-wide countries for a period of 10 years (2006–2015). While there are some prior studies that have argued the bidirectional causality between good public governance and economic development, this study intends to provide a new focus on the relationship between country-level governance and economic growth, on one hand, and between country-level governance and adjusted net savings, as a selected indicator of economic sustainable development, on the other hand. Four hypotheses on the causal relationship between good governance, economic growth and sustainable development were tested by using Granger non-causality tests. Our findings resulting from Granger non-causality tests provide reasonable evidence of Granger causality from country-level governance to economic growth, but from economic growth to country-level governance, the causality is not confirmed. In what regards the relationship between country-level governance and adjusted net savings, the bidirectional Granger causality is not confirmed. The main implication of our study is that improving economic growth and sustainable development is a very challenging issue, and the impact of macro-level factors such as country-level governance should not be neglected.