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Sustainability is understood as a balanced integration of economic, ecological, and social aspects. Sustainable manufacturing can be considered one of the most important issues to address in the pursuit of sustainable development. The main purpose of the paper is to identify the most important directions of research to date and to indicate new and emerging areas of research concerned with the usage of decision-making methods in sustainability assessment in steel manufacturing companies. A systematic review was based on the publications indexed in the Web of Science and Scopus databases. In the analysis, the correspondence analysis and log-linear model were applied. To sum up, this study examines decision-making modalities and sustainable performance in terms of approaches that influence sustainability in steel manufacturing. Firstly, the study determined key decision-making aspects, such as the appropriate material identification for the manufacturing process and material labeling for the manufacturing process, which is essential for sustainable metal products. Secondly, the identification of sustainability indicators is considered vital in the hierarchical process as their integration is essential for the decision-making process and its outcome. Furthermore, system efficiency and productivity, alongside increasing attention to environmental protection, have led to significant changes in all production systems. In addition, many factors play an important role in the selection of suppliers, such as increasing the importance of the environment, increasing the recycling rate of the products, and ensuring sustainability performance. However, companies in the steel manufacturing industry rely little on the application of decision-making to assess sustainability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research background: A rapidly developing e-commerce market and growing customer expectations regarding the speed and frequency of deliveries have made the last mile of the supply chain more challenging. The expectations of e-customers increase every year. They choose those companies that deliver goods faster and cheaper than others. A significant group of customers in Poland still selects home delivery. Many of them frequently return products to the retailer. These expectations and behaviour pose a challenge for the transport companies to deliver parcels to individual customers soon after the purchase, sometimes even on the same day. In addition, in creasingly frequent deliveries contribute to environmental pollution, congestion, and accidents, as well as more expensive deliveries. Purpose of the article: The paper aims to identify e-customers' preferences and assess their impact on sustainable last-mile delivery (LMD) in the e-commerce market. The authors have also identified factors influencing e-customers' behaviour to make last-mile delivery more sustainable. Methods: The conjoint analysis was applied to evaluate a set of profiles defined by selected attributes in order to investigate the overall preferences for the profiles created by the respondents to the survey. Findings & value added: The segmentation of e-customers according to their preferences connected with last-mile delivery was presented. The added value of the paper is the presentation of the methodology to assess the impact of customer preferences on sustainable last-mile delivery. The obtained results may contribute to the formulation of recommendations for e-commerce and logistics companies regarding the preferences of e-customers to improve the sustainability of lastmile delivery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the need to understand the structure of sustainability change in the face of the unpredictability of modern civilization. The aim of the paper is to examine the structure of sustainability change in relation to smaller spatial units such as the regions of the European Union and to compare these results with those achieved at the country level. For this purpose, the sustainable development indicators available in the Eurostat database were analyzed. Studies published to date have tended to focus on the performance of national economies or selected regions. In this article, the available data on regions are also analyzed. The study aims to compare the level of sustainable development achieved at the level of EU countries and regions located within them. Methodologically, the study uses advanced methods of comparative analysis, and the synthesis of the data enables the construction of a synthetic measure using taxonomic methods, facilitating the classification of EU countries and regions into clusters. The results highlight significant divergences in sustainability achievements between EU countries and regions. The study reveals the importance of studying sustainable development in smaller geographical cross-sections. The results highlight the need to expand access to data at the regional level (sustainability indicators) to facilitate more comprehensive analyses and inform targeted policy interventions. Looking to the future, the study recommends further research into the inter-linkages between sustainability and other critical areas in EU regions, such as innovation and competitiveness. • A new approach to studying sustainable development from a regional perspective has been proposed. • An in-depth analysis of the current level of sustainability in EU regions was carried out. • The diversity of sustainable development in the countries of the EU has been described. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nowadays, sustainability issues are at most importance for the global world. The Agenda 2030 for sustainable development is the key strategy in this field. When sustainability issues are discussed, the most often topics relate to sustainable cities, sustainable supply chain, sustainable transportation etc. However, it must be noted that sustainability concerns to almost all the issues related to the functioning of enterprises, society, cities, etc. It also has an impact on the innovation activity of enterprises. Responsible innovations, eco-innovation, green innovations are the topics lately studied by scholars around the world. Thus, the study aims to identify the relationships between terms of innovations related to the environment and other research areas presented in the literature. For this purpose, the extensive literature revives of publications indexed in the WoS database has been provided. The main research questions are: How the relationships between the notions described a new direction of the research in the innovations area for the environment, are created? Is it possible to identify the only one kind of relationship between the keywords described the eco-innovations and other similar notions with other research areas? The conducted analyzes show that in the literature many different terms describing innovations created for the environment, can be identified. Although innovations that are safe for the environment are a relatively new topic, the number of publications identified in the WoS database and their dynamic growth confirms the importance of research conducted in this area. Therefore, it is necessary to organize the terminology used and indicate whether these terms and in what cases can be applied interchangeably. Research in this area will also be conducted by the authors of this article in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sustainable financial systems are gaining importance in light of the increasing impacts of ESG risk in the real and financial spheres. It is believed that sustainable financial systems effectively support the management of this risk on national, international and global scales, hence the, inter alia, UNEPFI recommendations. Work on building sustainable financial systems differs in the degree of advancement at the level of individual countries and institutions. The aim of the article is to show that the level of advancement of activities in building sustainable financial systems depends on the attitude and awareness of financial managers and financial institutions and, consequently, on the banking system model. As a result of the research, it was shown that bank finance managers (German-Japanese model) were more aware of the role and importance of sustainable financial systems in the management of financial institutions than financial managers who represent capital market institutions (Anglo-Saxon model). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The World Bank and International Monetary Fund reported that the achievement of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) requires an escalation of development finance. The report Scaling Finance for the Sustainable Development Goals highlighted the urgency of the efforts to realize SDGs in encouraging financial innovation to move quickly. Even if the role of finance in achieving SDGs is unquestionable, few scientific studies have addressed these issues. We tried to fill the existing research gap. In this study, we examined the link between sustainable finance and SDGs based on European Union countries belonging to the OECD. We present a new and the original research approach. We assumed that the sustainable finance model plays a fundamental role in implementing SDGs (all SDGs were analysed except for SDG 6 and SDG14, due to lack of statistics were not analysed) and ensuring that social and environmental sustainability are reflected in SDGs. The results of this study show that the more sustainable the finance model, the better the achievement of SDGs in the group of analysed countries. We found a strong link between sustainable finance model and social sustainability (SDG1, 3, 4, 5, 10, 16); environmental sustainability (SDG11, 12, 13, 15) and economic sustainability (SDG8, 9, 17). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Finance and financial markets are the engine of sustainability. Financial institutions are one of the main channels influencing entrepreneurs. By determining the conditions of access to financial services, the financial market affects the decisions and attitudes of entrepreneurs, including their business models. The purpose of this article is to diagnose whether (and to what extent) banks affect the decisions and business models of enterprises. The research material is based on data obtained by survey, supplemented by in-depth interviews with 60 Polish enterprises operating in ESG-sensitive sectors. The study uses correspondence analysis, a method of multivariate analysis. The results of the study indicate that financial institutions have an impact on enterprises that have a business model and such enterprises declare their will to co-operate with the bank and to implement the ESG risk reduction measures recommended by the banks. On the other hand, enterprises that do not have developed business models do not succumb to the bank's influence and co-operation with the bank is limited to a minimum; usually considering only account keeping and monetary settlements related to it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Entrepreneurs perceive and build sustainable business models in different ways. The actual and declared entrepreneurs' attitudes and actions towards sustainable business models differ. The aim of the study was to determine whether the declarations of enterprises referring sustainable business models are coherent with actions they have taken to build sustainable business models. The basis of the study was data collected during focus interviews conducted in 2019 among business owners or their financial directors. The survey involved 60 respondents representing enterprises, including 34 referred to as micro and small enterprises, 17 medium enterprises, and 9 large enterprises. The study used the development pattern method described by Z. Hellwig. As a result of the study, four typological groups of enterprises were obtained, the first being the best and closest benchmark, and the fourth being the worst and the most distant from the benchmark. As a result of the study, it was confirmed that enterprises that declare a sustainable business model are more likely to undertake social and environmental activities than enterprises that delineate that they do not implement such a model. However, this is not a general conclusion, because in the fourth typological group, in which sustainability activities were sporadically identified, no enterprises declared a sustainable business model, and vice versa, in the first typological group, one company declared that they did not have a sustainable business model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Environmental degradation is currently one of the biggest challenges for policy makers designing public policies. In particular, the emission of greenhouse gases as side effect of human activity is a significant problem. One of the methods and instruments used in the public sector to limit the progressing environmental degradation are environmental taxes. It is an element of fiscal policy used by countries around the world, including in the European Union, although it has no compulsory nature. So far, studies on the effectiveness of environmental taxes are not explicit. The effects of environmental taxes differ in EU countries, also environmental taxes systems are of different construction, and tax policies in this scope vary as well. This paper uses the taxonomic measure based on the Weber median to analyse the link between environmental taxes and environmental degradation. 23 EU countries belonging to OECD were analysed for 2016, on the basis of the Eurostat dataset. The study attempts to answer the question whether environmental taxes are an effective instrument for shaping environmental policy and whether they can become an important tool in the decision-making process at the government level. The paper assumes that the role of environmental taxes and their impact is different in developed and converging economies. The results prove a positive relationship between environmental taxes and environmental performance in the case of one indicator (Share of renewable energy in gross final energy consumption) for others a negative link is reported. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of the paper is to examine the relation between finance and sustainability, with a special emphasis on the impact of negative externalities. Sustainable development as a concept aims to mitigate negative externalities. Conventional finance offers no room for the environment and society. Therefore, three-dimensional sustainable finance has appeared. This paper is the first original attempt to examine the relationship between: financial, economic, environmental and social development indicators from the sustainability perspective, with a special focus on externalities. To study the disparities between the European Union (EU) countries belonging to the OECD in the field of sustainable development and sustainable finance, the multi-criteria taxonomy was used. The basis of the analyses was the indicators transformed according to the relative taxonomy method. The database, based on Eurostat, contains indicators describing pillars of sustainable development such as: economic (12 indicators), social (28), environmental (7) and sustainable finance (16). The study analyses the sample of 23 countries in 2007, 2013 and 2016. The results confirm a positive relationship among the analysed indicators. On the basis of 62 statistical features selected according to the statistical methods, 7 groups of countries were obtained in 2007 and 2013 and 8 groups in 2016. In the case of Scandinavian countries, one can observe a permanent separation of economic growth from its negative impact on the natural environment. Such dependencies are no longer so obvious in the case of other EU countries belonging to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Therefore, attention should be paid to the most economically developed countries in Western Europe, i.e., Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, whose high rankings in the case of economic, social and very often also financial results correspond to much worse results in the case of environmental development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]