Achieving sustainable economic development is one of humanity’s greatest challenges, and, in this regard, the United Nations has promoted a line of research based on sustainable economic development. In view of this, our study focused on the sustainable economic development of nations, specifically, development through the deployment of information and communication technologies (ICTs). Academic researchers recognize the importance of ICT for economic and sustainable development, but there is controversy in the literature regarding two opposing points of view. First, there is a view that advances in ICT support Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth, while, on the other hand, the view is that there is no relationship between these two factors. In view of this, we conducted a study where the objective was to determine whether investing in ICT contributes to sustainable economic development (measured by the GDP per capita) of European Union countries. We used Eurostat data and applied the partial least-squares (PLS) method to address the study. This approach allowed us to analyze European Union countries from 2014 to 2017, using fairly rigorous data. The most outstanding result was that ICT accounted for most of the explained variance in GDP per capita (GDPpp), and, specifically, the most representative indicator was “digital public services.” Therefore, we concluded that investing in the deployment of ICT supports the sustainable economic development of European Union countries. These countries should focus on investing in improved connectivity in areas with poor communications, as well as in training area inhabitants in the use and development of ICT to obtain greater development using these tools and technologies.
In recent decades, the novel fact of considering corporate social responsibility (CSR) as part of the corporate strategy of companies has resulted in interest groups demanding the disclosure of such information. Likewise, considering their importance of transparency and governance today, it is necessary to make an approximation on the study of the divulgation of CSR information on companies listed on the Spanish stock market. The aim of this work is to determine whether the disclosure of the measures taken by the companies on CSR influences business profitability. Applying PLS-SEM on the information extracted from the sustainability reports of 103 companies listed on the Spanish continuous market, it is found that the disclosure of CSR measures improves business profitability in its social and economic dimensions, with no effect being found between the disclosure CSR in its environmental dimension on business profitability.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.