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The present work tackles the crucial issue of global sustainability and the challenge of policy coherence around sustainability, focusing on sustainability reporting in the fashion industry in the EU. As the legislative framework has grown increasingly rigorous, so has the importance of well-formed and carefully focused legislation. By examining non-financial (sustainability) reporting in the fashion industry and its challenges, this paper exposes the most plausible next steps to be taken in terms of requirements for non-financial reporting as well as changes to corporate purpose and behaviour. This paper engages with policy and legal considerations, practical behaviour and their analysis in relation to sustainability science, providing an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary understanding of the sustainability reporting and adjacent framework in the EU.

We examine the effect radical institutional change on long-run growth through the case of the partition of Friuli Venezia Giulia in 1947 between Italy and Yugoslavia and the subsequent integration in two distinct institutional regimes. Friuli Venezia Giulia's long-run development trajectory is matched through a novel dataset with other countries on pre-1947 growth and development characteristics, producing a plausibly exogenous source of variation in the absence of the unification. By using the long- run growth and development paths of other countries for the period 1871-2016, we construct a plausible counterfactual scenario, showing pervasive and substantial long-run growth benefits of Italian unification. In the absence of unification, Friuli Venezia Giulia's per capita income would be 41 percent lower and Yugoslav-controlled Littoral would have 32 percent higher per capita income if it had joined Italy. A battery of large- sample placebo distributions and permutation tests confirm the significance of the 1947 border partition for long-run economic growth.

The research was funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 789461 (SCOM Project – Sustainable Company).

As sustainability concerns advocate for a rapid deployment of circular economy, preserving and recovering the so-called ‘critical raw materials’ and minimising plastics waste, the European Commission issued an EU action plan for the Circular Economy in 2015 with two subsequent reports on its implementation. The focus of the action plan has been threefold: product design, facilitating durability of the products and waste management, while determining five priority areas of action and highlighting the need for financing the transition to a more circular economy. The latter has been seen as an accelerator for the deployment of circular economy, mentioned in the framework of creation of new circular business models and in the waste management framework. While it has been repeatedly highlighted that there is a need for extensive financing (an estimated EUR 320 billion by 2025) for a systemic transition to circular economy to come about (with estimated combined benefits of such shift of EUR 500 billion), the focus of the report has been on providing such finance in the current ‘business as usual’ framework, advocating for higher investment in such transition by the EU, without a comparative assessment of the current private financial market frameworks and their role in such transition. The present article critically assesses the action plan’s lack of focus on the access-to-finance as critical for the transition to a more circular economy outside of the public finance.

We live in a time of pressing planetary challenges, many of which threaten catastrophic change to the natural environment and require massive and novel coordinated scientific and societal efforts on an unprecedented scale. Universities and other academic institutions have the opportunity and responsibility to assume a leading role in an era when the destiny of the planet is precisely in the hands of human beings. Drawing on the Planetary Health project promoted by the Rockefeller Foundation and The Lancet, Pompeu Fabra University launched in 2018 the Planetary Wellbeing Initiative, a long-term institutional strategy also animated by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Planetary Wellbeing might be defined as the highest attainable standard of wellbeing for human and non-human beings and their social and natural systems. Developing the potential of these new concepts involves a substantial theoretical and empirical effort in many different fields, all of them interrelated by the crosscutting challenges of global complexity, interdisciplinarity, and urgency. Close collaboration of science, humanities, and culture is more desperately needed now than ever before in the history of humankind.

The present research paper analyses the EU general and mandatory sectoral legal framework on public procurement, arguing for its inhibiting effect on the EU-wide uptake of green public procurement. It explores de jure and de facto barriers to green public procurement, motivated by the need for a change in the business world towards more sustainable practices through preferably mandatory legal changes of EU corporate law. As the public procurement represents a strong nudge for a qualitative change in private market demand, accounting for a minimum of 12% of the national gross domestic product, it should become environmentally sustainable itself and guide markets through the qualitative and quantitative changes on the demand side. Given the complexity of the current legal framework and the novelty of the approach to public procurement as a strategic tool for the achievement of sustainable production and consumption, a better defined and clear legislative approach is called for, possibly in a mandatory form, clarifying the obligation of public procurers to account for sustainability in their practices, especially as regards incorporating environmental concerns in their purchasing activities. In its current form, the EU legislative public procurement framework entails a seemingly permissive attitude towards green public procurement, hampered in practice by the existing legal institutes in the field, which hamper the strategic use of public procurement and thereby its influence on sustainability on the private markets. This research was funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 789461 (SCOM Project—Sustainable Company).

PurposeBecause of the renewed interest in public purchasing and the strategic use of public funds under the requirements of sustainable development, the question arose once again as to how to curb the fall of institutional quality once criteria other than price are inserted into the decision-making in public purchasing. E-procurement has been repeatedly named as one of the most efficient tools to that effect and the present paper sets out to discover whether the implementation of e-procurement in a particular country per se entails also higher institutional quality, allowing for a wider implementation of green and sustainable procurement at the national, regional and municipal level without the fear of worsening the country’s institutional quality. By analyzing the implementation of e-procurement in Denmark, the Netherlands and in Portugal, this paper aims to verify the hypothesis that the implementation of e-procurement implies better institutions in terms of public purchasing. As such, the conclusions will be used in further research on the prerequisites for a successful implementation of green public procurement across the European Union.Design/methodology/approachGathering data on institutional quality of three early e-procurement adopters (Denmark, the Netherlands and Portugal) allows for comparison of institutional quality pre- and post-e-procurement implementation. By using difference-in-differences comparison the paper seeks to answer the question how doesmandatory e-procurement influence institutional quality on the national level.FindingsThe paper finds that the reform is generally associated with a relatively stronger control of corruption in the Netherlands and Denmark, while a similar reform in Portugal failed to translate into a stronger control of corruption. Furthermore, while using the quality of regulation as a dependent variable, a positive and robust effect on the quality of regulation in Denmark was shown, while the quality of reputation in the Netherlands and Portugal declined in the post-reform period, with the drop in the quality of regulation in Portugal being considerably greater, a two-fold higher amount than the estimated drop in the Netherlands. The paper suggests that in spite of the same aims, the reform yielded substantially different or even opposing effects compared to Denmark.Research limitations/implicationsBy examining three examples of early adopters, further research with broader impact is needed to deduce general implications for e-procurement implementation. Furthermore, implementation of e-procurement at the regional or local level can also yield distinct results.Social implicationsUnderstanding the actual impact of e-procurement on institutional quality is indispensable for further study on the matter. The present study argues that e-procurement needs to be accompanied by additional measures or variables to yield a positive impact on institutional quality in public procurement.Originality/valueAs to originality, the present paper uses a law and economics approach, originating or better said drawing motivation from green public procurement concerns, trying to provide an insight in terms of tools that can be used to eliminate concerns regarding institutional quality when implementing green public procurement practices.

We examine the impact of e-procurement on economic growth. To this end, we exploit an ambitious implementation of large-scale mandatory e-procurement platform in New South Wales and Western Australia. By matching pre-reform growth dynamics and its covariates with the rest of Australia and the world, we provide a plausible source of variation in growth that allows us to build a counterfactual growth scenario in the hypothetical absence of the reform. Using a donor pool of other Australian states and a pool of more than 100 countries in country-state matched balanced sample, our evidence highlights a mixed impact of mandatory e-procurement on growth. We find that the institutional quality of governance and policy implementation underlines the magnitude of the growth effect. In particular, our findings contrast a significant positive impact of the mandatory e-procurement on the economic growth of Western Australia with a zero impact of the similar reform in New South Wales. We argue that this contrast arises from the differences in transaction costs, quality of governance, and strength of regulatory oversight that either foster or hamper the opportunities for corruption. The estimated impact of reform is robust across a multitude of spatial and temporal placebo checks, choice of samples and does not seem to be driven by pre-existing shocks or prevalent economic conditions.

Public procurement amounts to about 16 per cent of the EU Member States’ GDP. A major contribution to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals is possible by enhancing sustainable procurement practices. The 2014 EU Public Procurement Directives (Directives 2014/23/EU, 2014/24/EU and 2014/25/EU) have largely clarified the scope for permissible sustainable procurement decisions, but the adoption of Sustainable Public Procurement (SPP) is still limited. The rules could be more permissive and thoroughly take into account all the different aspects of sustainability. Even more urgent and essential is to push for behavioural and organisational changes in the ways contracting authorities perform their buying functions to maximise positive, sustainable impacts. It is critical to change procurement management practices so that the sustainability demanded in contracts is properly verified along the entire supply chain and remedial actions are taken where non-compliance is detected. Solution: We make three main proposals: 1. That the EU invest significantly in the professionalisation of contracting officials, procurement strategists and financial auditors by (a) encouraging the institution of SPP knowledge centres at the EU, national and regional levels following the model already provided by various Central Purchasing Bodies; (b) creating a network of knowledge centres working closely together in developing and disseminating best practices on SPP, including through training materials, and in collecting information and data on the adoption of SPP and the difficulties encountered in applying the relevant EU rules, and (c) providing financial and technical assistance targeted to specific SPP formation for ground-level contracting officials. 2. That the EU make it mandatory for contracting authorities to map and monitor their supply chains for risks of breaches of environmental and social rules, including those protecting human rights. That the EU take those breaches seriously, mandating the exclusion from award procedures of those found in violation and appropriate remedial actions in case of violations during contract performance. That the EU make it easier for contracting authorities to know about economic operators that have breached environmental and social rules, including those protecting human rights. 3. That the EU make the legislative environment more ‘SPP friendly’. Contracting authorities must be allowed to require suppliers to have effective sustainability policies in place. A shift is needed from enabling the Member States to pursue SPP to requiring them to buy sustainably by increasing the amount of mandatory sectoral legislation and by requiring contracting authority to take into account the life-cycle costs associated with their purchases. Non-solution: Simply relying on the goodwill of individual procurement officers or policy makers without providing training and networking opportunities on SPP and information and communication tools; leaving the regulatory burden of pushing SPP forward on the shoulders of Member States. Instruments: The Commission, including DG Devco in its procurement activities in Official Development Assistance (ODA), and other EU institutions should lead by example concerning the professionalisation of procurement officials and the creation of competence centres. The Commission should act as a catalyst for the network of competence centres, and adequate funds should be released to fund the actions recommended under solution point 1 above. The Commission, possibly together with OECD, should collect data on breaches of environmental and social rules, including those protecting human rights, and make that data available to contracting authorities. The other solutions under points 2 and 3 mainly require amendments to Directives 2014/23/EU, 2014/24/EU and 2014/25/EU. Ad hoc rules need to be adopted to enact further sectoral mandatory legislation.