Search Results (182)

Urban areas are responsible for most of Europe’s energy demand and emissions and urgently require building retrofits to meet climate neutrality goals. This study evaluates the energy efficiency potential of three public school buildings in western Macedonia, Greece—a cold-climate region with high heating needs. The buildings, constructed between 1986 and 2003, exhibited poor insulation, outdated electromechanical systems, and inefficient lighting, resulting in high oil consumption and low energy ratings. A robust methodology is applied, combining detailed on-site energy audits, thermophysical diagnostics based on U-value calculations, and a techno-economic assessment utilizing Net Present Value (NPV), Internal Rate of Return (IRR), and SWOT analysis. The study evaluates a series of retrofit measures, including ceiling insulation, high-efficiency lighting replacements, and boiler modernization, against both technical performance criteria and financial viability. Results indicate that ceiling insulation and lighting system upgrades yield positive economic returns, while wall and floor insulation measures remain financially unattractive without external subsidies. The findings are further validated through sensitivity analysis and policy scenario modeling, revealing how targeted investments, especially when supported by public funding schemes, can maximize energy savings and emissions reductions. The study concludes that selective implementation of cost-effective measures, supported by public grants, can achieve energy targets, improve indoor environments, and serve as a replicable model of targeted retrofits across the region, though reliance on external funding and high upfront costs pose challenges. Full article

This study presents a comprehensive bibliometric and topic modeling analysis of the academic literature on green and sustainable finance. Using 1372 peer-reviewed articles indexed in the Web of Science up to 2024, we identify key publication trends, influential authors, prominent journals, and thematic clusters shaping the field. The analysis reveals an exponential growth in publications since 2017 and highlights the dominance of journals such as Journal of Sustainable Finance & Investment and Sustainability. Text mining techniques, including TF-IDF and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), are applied to abstracts to extract the most relevant terms and classify articles into four latent topics. The findings suggest a growing focus on the impact of green finance on carbon emissions, energy efficiency, and firm performance, particularly in the context of China. This study offers valuable insights for researchers and policymakers by mapping the intellectual structure and identifying emerging research frontiers in the rapidly evolving field of green finance. Full article

China’s national strategies emphasize both achieving carbon peaking and neutrality (“dual carbon” objectives) and fostering high-quality economic development. This dual focus highlights the critical importance of the Green and Low-Carbon Transition (GLCT) of the economy and the development of New Quality Productive Forces (NQPF). Firms are central actors in this transformation, prompting the core research question: How does corporate engagement in GLCT contribute to the formation of NQPF? We investigate this relationship using panel data comprising 33,768 firm-year observations for A-share listed companies across diverse industries in China from 2012 to 2022. Corporate GLCT is measured via textual analysis of annual reports, while an NQPF index, incorporating both tangible and intangible dimensions, is constructed using the entropy method. Our empirical analysis relies primarily on fixed-effects regressions, supplemented by various robustness checks and alternative econometric specifications. The results demonstrate a significantly positive relationship: corporate GLCT robustly promotes the development of NQPF, with dynamic lag structures suggesting delayed productivity realization. Mechanism analysis reveals that this effect operates through three primary channels: improved access to financing, stimulated collaborative innovation and enhanced resource-allocation efficiency. Heterogeneity analysis indicates that the positive impact of GLCT on NQPF is more pronounced for state-owned enterprises (SOEs), firms operating in high-emission sectors, those in energy-efficient or environmentally friendly industries, technology-intensive sectors, non-heavily polluting industries and companies situated in China’s eastern regions. Overall, our findings suggest that corporate GLCT enhances NQPF by improving resource-utilization efficiency and fostering innovation, with these effects amplified by specific regional advantages and firm characteristics. This study offers implications for corporate strategy, highlighting how aligning GLCT initiatives with core business objectives can drive NQPF, and provides evidence relevant for policymakers aiming to optimize environmental governance and foster sustainable economic pathways. Full article

To respond to China’s sustainable development goals, this study uses a dynamic panel data set (2009–2023) and the PSM-DID model to examine how blockchain adoption impacts corporate sustainable development performance (CSDP). The results show that blockchain significantly enhances CSDP by 9.8–12.3%, primarily through two channels (reducing financing constraints by improving transparency and decreasing chairman-CEO duality) to optimize governance. Regional environmental regulation strengthens this relationship. Heterogeneity analysis reveals stronger impacts in unregulated industries, private firms, and central–western regions, while state-owned firms show policy-driven governance improvements. The study enriches the understanding of blockchain’s dual role in balancing efficiency and sustainability, offering insights for integrating digital technology into green policy frameworks. Full article

The coupled development of economic and ecological systems is crucial for achieving sustainable growth, with the financial system playing a pivotal adaptive role. Green financial innovation (GFI) is central to enhancing this adaptation. Urban land use eco-efficiency (ULUEE) serves as an effective measure of economic–ecological coupling. Using China’s Green Finance Reform and Innovation Pilot Zones (GFRPZs) as a quasi-natural experiment, this study assesses the impact of GFI on ULUEE, employing panel data from 283 prefecture-level cities (2013–2021). The results show that GFI significantly enhances ULUEE through technological spillovers, strengthened environmental regulation, industrial upgrading, and resource agglomeration. Heterogeneity analyses further reveal that GFI’s positive effects are more pronounced in economically developed regions, cities without legacy heavy-industry reliance, and those with deeper financial development. Additionally, GFI demonstrates cross-regional spillover effects, effectively interacting with other environmental policies. While GFI’s impact is more pronounced in economic growth, its ecological governance improvements are modest. This study provides critical insights for tailored green financial policies aimed at harmonizing economic and ecological objectives. Full article

Corporate resilience, a critical metric assessing firms’ capacity to withstand risks, recover rapidly, and maintain growth in dynamic environments, has garnered increasing attention from academia and industry. This study employs China’s Green Factory certification policy within its green manufacturing system as a quasi-natural experiment, utilizing a multi-period difference-in-differences (DID) model to evaluate the impact of green manufacturing implementation on corporate resilience. Results confirm that Green Factory certification significantly enhances firms’ resilience. Mechanism analyses identify three reinforcing pathways: alleviating financing constraints, optimizing resource allocation efficiency, and fostering green technological innovation. Heterogeneity analyses reveal more pronounced effects among heavily polluting industries, firms with low reputations, and those with higher levels of managerial myopia. Furthermore, the certification exhibits significant spillover effects, transmitting resilience improvements to industry peers and geographic clusters. This research expands the theoretical boundaries of corporate resilience literature while offering practical implications and empirical evidence for enterprises undergoing green manufacturing transitions. Full article

As the mainstream financial modality in the digital economy era, digital finance drives industrial digitization and green transformation through capital and technological support, enabling governments to advance environmental governance with greater precision, efficiency, and sustainability. Utilizing 2012–2023 panel data from 31 Chinese provinces, this study innovatively constructs a multidimensional panel data model for the quantitative analysis of the overall impact, heterogeneous effects, and spatial spillover effects of digital finance on government environmental governance. It further examines the mediating effect and the threshold effects of new quality productive forces, and the moderated mediation effects of green technological innovation and industrial collaborative agglomeration. In this study, (1) digital finance significantly drives government environmental governance, and this finding exhibits robustness; (2) digital finance exerts heterogeneous impact on government environmental governance, with more pronounced effects in eastern and sub-developed regions; (3) digital finance generates positive spatial spillover effects on government environmental governance; (4) new quality productive forces positively mediate the relationship between digital finance and government environmental governance; (5) green technological innovation exhibits dual moderation characteristics, moderating both “digital finance → new quality productive forces” and “new quality productive forces → government environmental governance,” while industrial collaborative agglomeration shows single moderation, specifically moderating “new quality productive forces → government environmental governance”; (6) the impact of digital finance on government environmental governance presents a nonlinear feature of “increasing marginal returns.” On these accounts, this study proposes targeted recommendations from six dimensions. Full article

Green finance is widely promoted as a tool for supporting low-carbon development, but its effects on innovation efficiency remain unclear. This study examines the impact of China’s Green Finance Reform and Innovation Pilot Zones (GFRIPZ) on green innovation efficiency at the city level. Using the GFRIPZ policy as a quasi-natural experiment, we employ a difference-in-differences approach to identify the causal effects of the policy and explore the underlying mechanisms and contextual moderators. The results indicate that the policy significantly reduces green innovation efficiency in pilot cities, with the negative impact being more pronounced in non-central cities, provincial capitals, and cities in western China. Mechanism analysis reveals two key pathways: increased environmental costs contribute to resource lock-in, and strategic shifts toward quantity-focused innovation reduce overall efficiency. Furthermore, we find that the institutional environment plays a critical role—market integration mitigates the policy’s adverse effects by improving resource allocation, while administrative environmental pressure intensifies distortions. These findings suggest that rigid green finance regulations may unintentionally suppress innovation performance. We propose that more flexible policy design, better cross-regional coordination, and refined local governance incentives are essential for aligning green finance tools with innovation-driven sustainability goals in emerging economies. Full article

In the context of global climate change and the deepening of ecological civilization construction, forestry, as an ecological security barrier and green economic engine, faces many challenges to the enhancement of its ecological total factor productivity in the traditional development model. As a new type of production factor, the data factor provides a new path to crack the bottleneck of forestry eco-efficiency improvement. Based on China’s provincial annual panel data from 2014 to 2022, this study systematically examines the impact and mechanism of data factors on forestry ecological total factor productivity by using the SBM-GML model and dual machine learning model. It was found that data factors have a significant contribution to forestry ecological total factor productivity, a conclusion that passes a series of robustness tests and endogeneity tests. The analysis of the mechanism shows that the data factor enhances the total factor productivity of forestry ecology mainly through three paths: promoting the progress of forestry technology and promoting the rationalization and advanced structure of the forestry industry. Further analysis showed that the promotional effect of data elements is more obvious in regions with a high level of green finance development, high intensity of environmental regulation, and strong financial autonomy. It is recommended to systematically promote the in-depth application of data elements in forestry, build a data element-driven innovation system for the whole chain of forestry, and implement regionally differentiated data element-enabling strategies. Full article

The escalation of international geopolitical conflicts has triggered shocks in the global energy supply and demand pattern. The importance of increasing the resilience of energy systems to risk has become increasingly prominent. At the same time, energy demand has shown substantial growth, driven by the continuous expansion of economic scales. Improving utilization efficiency to enhance energy resilience while achieving coordinated development between economic growth and environmental protection has become a critical priority. This study takes pilot zones for green finance reform and innovations as a quasi-natural experiment and selects panel data from 30 provinces in China from 2013 to 2022 as the research sample. The empirical analysis constructs a staggered difference-in-differences (DID) model to investigate the impact of pilot zones for green finance reform and innovations on energy resilience, while exploring their heterogeneity and mechanism of action. The research shows that: ① The policy of pilot zones for green finance reform and innovations has significantly enhanced China’s energy resilience capacity. This conclusion still holds after a series of robustness tests. ② Mechanism analysis shows that the pilot zones for green finance reform and innovation policy enhance energy resilience by elevating green innovation capacity and optimizing industrial structure. ③ Heterogeneity analysis reveals that policy effects exhibit significant regional disparities. The enhancement effect of pilot zones for green finance reform and innovation policy on energy resilience is more pronounced in the eastern region compared to the central and western regions. This research provides empirical evidence and theoretical support for local governments to refine green finance policy systems and explore novel pathways for optimizing energy resilience. Full article

This study investigates the relationship between disclosures related to Sustainable Development Goal 7 (SDG 7) and the financial profitability of Romanian commercial banks during the 2017–2023 period. Using an unbalanced panel dataset of 17 banks and applying fixed-effects regression models, the paper examines how transparency around energy-related sustainability practices influences various dimensions of bank profitability: recurring earning power (REP), loan yield (LY), return on assets (ROA), and return on equity (ROE). Macroeconomic energy indicators, such as the energy intensity level of primary energy (EnInt) and renewable energy consumption (REnC), are also controlled for. The findings indicate that SDG 7.1 disclosures are negatively associated with all profitability measures, except for LY, suggesting potential short-term trade-offs between sustainability transparency and financial outcomes. In contrast, SDG 7.2 disclosures positively impact REP, ROA, and ROE, underscoring the financial relevance of renewable energy financing. SDG 7.a disclosures show no significant relationship with profitability, indicating limited operational involvement in global energy cooperation. Additionally, higher energy intensity negatively affects REP and LY, supporting existing evidence that energy efficiency improves banking performance. These findings have implications for banking strategy, emphasizing the need to align sustainability disclosures with business priorities while recognizing the long-term benefits of green finance and energy efficiency. Full article

Sustainable mineral resource management is critical amid escalating environmental concerns and growing demand for minerals in digital and clean energy technologies. While financial technology (FinTech) has been widely recognized for enhancing financial inclusion and economic efficiency, its role in environmental governance—particularly in the mining sector—remains underexplored, especially within developed economies like the United States. This study addresses this gap by examining how FinTech adoption influences mineral sustainability, using time series data from 1998 to 2023. Four FinTech proxies—mobile cellular subscriptions, Internet usage, fixed broadband access, and financial inclusion—were analyzed alongside environmental compliance and investment in sustainable mining technologies. Using the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model and Frequency Domain Causality (FDC) analysis, the results show that greater FinTech adoption significantly reduces mineral depletion rates, indicating improved sustainability. Internet and broadband access exhibit strong long-term impacts, while mobile connectivity and credit access show notable short- and medium-term effects. Investment in sustainable mining technologies further enhances these outcomes. Our findings suggest that FinTech serves as a multidimensional enabler of sustainability through digital inclusion, transparency, and access to green financing. This study provides empirical evidence to guide policymakers in integrating digital financial infrastructure into strategies for sustainable mineral resource governance. Full article

The present study examines the impact of customer firms’ environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance on suppliers’ green innovation efficiency, grounded in stakeholder theory and innovation diffusion theory. The DEA-SBM model is employed to measure green innovation efficiency and analyze transmission mechanisms through knowledge spillovers, financing constraints, and the moderating roles of executives’ green cognition and digitization. This analysis is based on panel data from 3134 customer–supplier pairs of China’s A-share listed firms from 2014 to 2023. The findings indicate that high ESG performance by customer firms has a substantial impact on suppliers’ green innovation efficiency, with a 1% increase in customer ESG score resulting in a 1.38% improvement in supplier efficiency. The phenomenon under scrutiny is hypothesized to be precipitated by knowledge spillovers and mitigated by reduced financing constraints. The hypothesis further posits that supplier firm executives’ green cognition and customer digitization will amplify the effect. A heterogeneity analysis reveals stronger effects in technology-intensive firms and regions with higher governmental environmental oversight. These findings underscore the pivotal function of ESG-driven supply chain collaboration in propelling sustainable industrialization. It is imperative that policymakers prioritize cross-regional ESG benchmarking and digital infrastructure to amplify green spillovers. Conversely, firms must integrate ESG metrics into supplier evaluation systems and foster executive training on sustainability. This research provides empirical evidence for the optimization of green innovation policies and the achievement of China’s dual carbon goals through the coordination of supply chain governance. Full article

Intensifying challenges posed by global warming have elevated the urgency of improving corporate carbon performance and curbing carbon emissions. Green financial instruments serve a vital function in advancing corporate transitions toward environmentally responsible and low-carbon operational models. This research explores the influence of green funds on carbon performance at the firm level, aiming to clarify the micro-level mechanisms through which green financial instruments promote low-carbon development. The study utilizes data from Chinese listed companies spanning 2012 to 2021 and employs a TWFE regression model to empirically assess the effects. The findings indicate that green funds contribute to improved carbon performance. Furthermore, this effect is positively moderated by executive green awareness and financial background, indicating that managerial cognition and experience play a vital role in amplifying the benefits of green finance. Notably, green funds exert a stronger positive effect in highly polluting industries, suggesting that green financial resources should be directed not only to low-emission sectors but also to high-emission ones to improve their carbon efficiency. These findings extend existing literature by offering firm-level evidence on the effectiveness of green financial instruments and underscore the importance of targeted policy support to encourage green upgrading across all industry types. Full article

The private healthcare sector in Romania, led by prominent players such as Medlife, Regina Maria, Medicover and Sanador, has become a cornerstone of the country’s healthcare system. However, achieving sustainability in this sector remains a challenge. This study evaluates sustainability practices in Romania’s private medical sector using the Triple Bottom Line (TBL) framework, comparing them to those of the EU, USA and Japan. Using statistical methods and benchmarking, we identify correlations between healthcare expenditures, financing schemes and sustainability metrics. A bibliographic review highlights global trends in sustainable healthcare management, including environmental, social and economic strategies and provides insights into the cost-effectiveness of green initiatives. Special focus is given to the role of technology in driving sustainability through innovations in telemedicine, digital health records and operational optimization. Using statistical methods (Pearson and Spearman correlation coefficients), we have performed an analysis of health expenditure data for EU countries, the USA and Japan. The dataset was extracted from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) data portal and included various health expenditure indicators, financing schemes and administrative data for all EU countries, the USA and Japan for the period 2018–2023. We have performed a structured analysis that explores correlations between these indicators, with a focus on financial schemes, expenditures and management sustainability. The analysis shows strong correlations between healthcare expenditures, financing schemes and administrative costs. Countries with efficient governance, balanced financing and proactive population health strategies (e.g., Japan and Nordic countries) demonstrate better management sustainability. However, countries like the USA and Eastern EU nations face challenges due to high administrative costs and inefficient financing models, respectively. Addressing these issues is critical to sustaining healthcare systems in the long term. The findings reveal that while Romanian providers excel in patient satisfaction and technological innovation, they lag behind their European counterparts in environmental sustainability and equitable access. Recommendations are proposed to address these gaps, drawing on successful strategies implemented in other European healthcare systems. This study fills a gap in the literature by providing a structured analysis of sustainability practices in Romania’s private healthcare sector, contextualized within a global comparative framework. Full article