To achieve sustainable development, massive changes towards fostering a clean and pollution-reducing industrial sector are quintessential. The textile industry has been one of the main contributors to water pollution all over the world, causing more than 20% of the registered levels of water pollution in countries like Turkey, Indonesia and China (among the G20 group of countries) and also in Romania and Bulgaria (in the Eastern European area), with even more than 44% in Macedonia. Given the controversy created by the textile industry's contribution to pollution at a global level and also the need to diminish pollution in order to promote sustainable development, this paper comparatively investigates the contribution of the textile industry to the water pollution across Central and Eastern European countries, as well as developed countries. In addition, we employ the Holt-Winters model to forecast the trend of the total emissions of organic water pollutants, as well as of the textile industry's contribution to pollution for the top polluters in Eastern Europe, i.e., Poland and Romania. According to our estimates, both countries are headed towards complete elimination of pollution caused by the textile industry and, hence, toward a more sustainable industrial sector, as Greenpeace intended with the release of its 2011 reports.

This paper investigates causal relationships and short-term interaction mechanisms among six Central and Eastern European stock markets and the USA stock exchange, while paying special consideration to the effects of the 2007-2009 global financial crisis. We employ daily observations for the six CEE stock indexes and also for the US market covering the period January 2006-March 2009, which is subsequently divided into two sub-periods corresponding to the pre-crisis and crisis period. The study reveals that the relationships among CEE stock markets are time varying. While before the crisis stock market linkages are limited, we find that during crisis these interactions become significantly stronger. Our results further suggest that the potential for diversifying risk by investing in different CEE markets is limited during financial turmoil. Other findings reveal the leading role of the Russian market in the CEE region before the crisis. Also, before the crisis CEE markets were significantly influenced by innovations in the USA market, thus explaining why they were affected heavily by the crisis, which has managed to spread immediately in the region

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The mitigation of climate change through ambitious greenhouse gases emission reduction targets constitutes a current priority at world level, reflected in international, regional and national agendas. Within the common framework for global climate action, an increased reliance on renewable energy sources, which would assist countries to reduce energy imports and cut fossil fuel use, emerged as the solution towards achieving worldwide energy security and sustainability through carbon-neutrality. As such, this study is aimed to investigate the heterogeneous effects of relevant economic and environmental driving factors for renewable energy consumption (REC) that emerge from current policy objectives (GDP per capita, carbon intensity, and research and development) through an empirical analysis of a wide panel of 94 countries, and five income-based subpanels, over the 1995–2019 period, by using heterogeneous panel data fixed-effects estimation techniques (static and dynamic) with robust Driscoll–Kraay standard errors. The results unambiguously indicate that CO2 intensity has a significant mitigating effect on REC at world level, and this relationship is stronger for low-income and very high-income countries. Moreover, GDP per capita promotes REC when it surpasses the 5000 USD threshold, whereas research and development is a major contributor to increase in renewable energy consumption in very high-income countries. As such, for the policy makers, it is necessary to consider the heterogeneity of the drivers of REC in order to issue effective and congruent policies. The effective employment of post-COVID-19 recovery funds constitutes a timely, ideal occasion.

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