Q56 - Environment and Development; Environment and Trade; Sustainability; Environmental Accounts and Accounting; Environmental Equity; Population GrowthReturn

Numerous studies have explored the possible causes of global carbon emissions and climate change; however, the impact of export diversification and concentration on these emissions is a less examined topic in literature. This study investigates the effects of export diversification and concentration on carbon emissions in Türkiye from 1995 to 2018, utilizing the nonlinear ARDL method. The findings indicate that export diversification reduces carbon emissions after accounting for the effects of other control variables, such as renewable energy, levels of inequality, and government size. In this model, an increase in renewable energy, inequality, and government size leads to higher carbon emissions and worsens environmental quality, although the environmental Kuznets curve hypothesis is supported. Additionally, this study reveals that positive shocks in export concentration reduce carbon emissions, while negative shocks increase emissions. This hypothesis remains valid for the specified period in Türkiye, but the control variables display behavior similar to export diversification. The results suggest that mitigating climate change and improving environmental quality in Türkiye relies on policies that support export diversification and concentration.

Green finance aims to achieve a balance between economic performance and sustainable economic development. This study examines the effect of green finance on sustainable eco- nomic development at the national level by spotlighting countries that are at the forefront of green bond issuance. Employing balanced panel data and utilizing a mediation model with fixed effects, the results demonstrate a significant ability of green finance to mitigate carbon emissions and promote high-quality economic development. The robustness of the findings is confirmed by a series of statistical tests. Furthermore, the renewable energy consumption structure enhances the suppressive effect of green finance on carbon emissions, highlighting its crucial role as a channel for mitigating carbon emissions. Overall, increasing green bond investment and structuring renewable energy consumption are crucial for carbon emission reduction, and this paper contributes new evidence regarding the emission reduction effects of green finance. It also offers several policy implications: by prioritizing green finance, R&D, and renewable energy consumption, the policymakers can achieve high quality economic development and lower carbon emissions.

Expanding imports and promoting balanced trade have been the direction China has been adhering to in recent years, and are also important measures for China to build an open domestic and international dual cycle development pattern. This paper incorporates the emissions of “three industrial wastes” into the production function, uses the Slack Based Measure model and the globally referenced Malmquist-Leuenberger index to measure the green total factor productivity of Chinese enterprises from 2002 to 2013 in order to measure enterprises’ green transformation development. Subsequently, it tests the green development effect of import trade from the perspective of import technology sophistication and import diversification. Afterwards, we discover that the improvement of import sophistication and import diversification can significantly promote enterprises’ green transformation, largely through spillover effects and intermediate import competition effects. Furthermore, the green development promotion effect of import trade is greatly heterogeneous. The research in this article provides beneficial insights for China’s economic opening-up and high-quality economic development.

The study explores a relationship between divergence in ESG scores (measurements of a company's performance in environmental, social and governance issues) and excess stock returns on the European equity market. The sample consists of 851 European stocks in the period from January 2015 to May 2022. It is concluded that, despite previous findings on the US stock market, a similar effect is not observed for equities in Europe. Even though the stock portfolios with the most and the least divergent ESG scores bear excess returns, the effect disappears when it is adjusted for Fama-French factors. The effect is not relevant for any specific industry, nor does it depend on the level of ESG awareness of the issuer's country. Deeper exploration of the nature of ESG score divergence, specifically by decomposition of the individual elements of ESG scores, could further contribute to the understanding of the relationship between the quality of non-financial disclosures and stock performance.

This study provides evidence on the probability of adopting an accounting approach for emission allowances and greenhouse gas emissions as a function of each company's GHG emissions performance. The different accounting treatments adopted by national standard-setters and the lack of specific guidance from the International Accounting Standard Board (IASB) allow identification of the use of multiple accounting approaches. Based on a sample of 85 companies registered with the Portuguese, Spanish, and French National Plans of Allocation, data collected from the annual reports were analysed for the period 2008-2014. The results suggest that the probability of adopting omission strategies is positively associated with better GHG emissions performances. It addresses the importance of introducing the transactions of the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS) in financial reporting as the visibility of the costs of polluting is one of the purposes of the market mechanism.

The purpose of the survey and to some extent polemical article is to present the issue of green growth, a new operating strategy, which the OECD is currently working on. Green growth is seen as a practical tool for achieving the timeless objective, which is sustainable development. In the paper, a particular attention is put on the following question: what kind of relationship occurs between green growth, green economy and sustainable development. The author analyses the purpose of simultaneous functioning of the three "green" ideas. The added value of this paper is a presentation of the author's model of GG-GE-SD relations and a new approach to defining the phenomenon of green growth. It is concluded that co-existence of the trio green economy - green growth - sustainable development is reasonable due to the complementary and synergistic nature of correlations between these concepts.

In this paper, we contribute to the literature focusing on ethics in banking from both theoretical and empirical point of view. We argue that the recent business of the global banking industry is not sustainable and we believe that ethical banking may represent one of the alternative models. In the empirical section, we investigate how ethics in the banking business models affects their financial performance. We identified 69 ethical banks and compared them with conventional banks using Bankscope data of more than 80,000 bank-year observations for the 2003-2013 period. We apply the Within-Between estimation method to bank financial indicators of Return on Assets, Return on Equity and their respective volatilities. We conclude that ethical banks report significantly lower volatility in Return on Equity than their conventional counterparts. In addition, the hypothesis that ethical banks would have higher profitability than their peers is not rejected.