Post-socialist governments are looking for the best options to implement a fully funded pension system along with a pay-as-you-earn pension scheme. The paper aims to establish the impact of pension assets on economic growth using the example of post-socialist countries (Hungary, the Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Poland, and the Czech Republic). The use of methods of correlation and regression analysis allows determining the type of dependence (linear, exponential, gradual, and logarithmic) of countries’ economic growth indicators on pension assets and patterns for their investment (deposits, securities of public and private sectors). The obtained economic growth indicators of the studied post-socialist countries show a strong logarithmic dependence on the size of pension assets: Gross fixed capital formation depends on changes in the pension asset amount by 76.44% and GDP by 71.01%. The economic growth of the studied post-socialist countries is most significantly influenced by pension assets invested in deposits. Investing pension savings in public and private sector securities is less effective. The proved provisions determine the expediency of moving from the predominant pay-as-you-earn pension scheme to the predominant fully funded pension system for Ukraine. Such a transformation requires a stable and efficient construction of the country’s banking system, a developed policy for reforming the pension system while considering the criteria of the internal demographic, social, and financial situation.

The ambitious goals of environmental sustainability stated in international agreements and national programs require developing strategies to achieve them. At the same time, there is a lack of empirical evidence on the environmental performance factors, which can be purposefully changed to achieve an effective result in the short and medium-term. The paper aims to find the institutional factors of national environmental performance, including financial ones, which might be effectively used as environmental sustainability management tools. For this, the relationships between the Environmental Performance Index (EPI), as the dependent variable, and the indicators of control of corruption, the effectiveness of an anti-monopoly policy, financial opportunities, undue influence, corporate culture, innovation output, GDP, and income growth among the poorest population, using a sample of 81 countries, and the technique for constructing nonlinear regression models based on the normalizing transformations for non-Gaussian data were studied.The study findings show that environmental performance can be predicted with sufficient accuracy by a linear model of its dependence on corruption control, minority shareholders protection, judicial independence, favoritism in decisions of government officials, tax incentives, ease of access to loans, and innovation output. Adding GDP per capita to the explanatory variables of the EPI model does not significantly affect the result accuracy but changes the model shape from linear to nonlinear. The paper substantiates ways to apply results for institutional reforms and sustainability management, such as inflation targeting, public credit guarantee schemes, performance-based loans, etc.

No abstract

No abstract

Globalization and liberalization processes observed in the capital market draw special attention to the international flows of investment resources. The study of the foreign investors’ interests and areas of their implementation in the Eurozone countries becomes particularly topical considering the fact that each of these countries has its own significant features in the structural framework of the economy as well as in the incentive policy formation. To prove the hypothesis of the stochastic nature specific to the influence of financial factors on the FDI attraction, a grouping of the Eurozone countries took place based on their attractiveness to foreign investors retrospectively and in 2018. For this purpose, the study relied on the cluster analysis tools, namely the Ward and Euclidean distance methods, which allowed defining four clusters of the Eurozone countries: the Netherlands represents the first cluster as a country that remains attractive to foreign investors and has a high FDI flow to GDP; the second one includes Ireland and Luxembourg (these countries were attractive to non-resident investors, but they have been showing outflows of foreign investment recently); the third cluster comprises Austria, the Slovak Republic, Portugal, Spain, Belgium, and Estonia (with a moderate FDI accumulation in the economy and a relatively stable FDI flow); Finland, Germany, France, Slovenia, Greece, and Italy refer to the fourth one as countries that are least sensitive to foreign investment and do not focus their policies on its aggressive attraction. Kendall tau rank correlation coefficients and Spearman correlation coefficients have served as a tool for determining the relationship between the foreign direct investment flow and macro- (the inflation, government debt rates, long-term interest rates referred to government bonds, the current account balance level in GDP and the corporate tax rates) and micro-level (the profitability of financial and non-financial corporations and the level of their debt as a risk factor) factors by country groups. Their analysis revealed that it is inexpedient to unify the investment policy of financial incentives for different countries because they have a differentiated structural framework of the economy; their investors are interested in different aspects of decision-making and place different expectations on the macroeconomic policies of host countries. The above refutes certain well-established theoretical views on the determined relationship between the investment activity and the financial factors influencing it.