No abstract

Sub-Saharan Africa is considered a region with enormous economic and demographic potential. One of the main challenges it faces, included in the “Agenda 2063: The Africa We Want, implemented by the African Union”, is to provide access to electricity. Currently, 600 million inhabitants of the African continent do not have access to electricity, which is a significant limiting factor for further economic growth and socio-economic development. Moreover, the measures taken by individual Sub-Saharan African countries appear insufficient in the face of rapid population growth. The aim of the article is to analyse the opportunities and challenges of the development of Sub-Saharan Africa’s energy sector. This raises the following research question: to what extent can a sustainable energy transition be achieved in sub-Saharan African countries to ensure access to electricity? The study used Ward’s hierarchical clustering method, classification and regression tree analysis, and the distance-weighted least squares method. The results show that the level of development of the energy sector in the individual countries of Sub-Saharan Africa varies greatly. Moreover, the Sub-Saharan African region is exposed to the effects of climate change, which also affects the development of the energy sector and whether or not access to electricity can be ensured. The study contributes to assessments of the adaptive capacity and transformative potential of the energy sector in Sub-Saharan Africa. This is particularly important for achieving the Sustainable Development Goal 7, which relates to building more robust and efficient systems, as well as implementing diversified energy sources. This research is crucial to bridge the energy access gap and build a resilient and sustainable economy in Sub-Saharan Africa countries.

JEL classification: O34, G01, L66Both the financial crisis of the first decade of the 21st century, as well as the deterioration of trade relations between the European Union and the Russian Federation were events that significantly affected the functioning of the largest listed companies on the food market: on the one hand, aggravating the conditions of economic functioning, on the other hand creating a stimulus to seek new innovative solutions to help companies survive on the market. The aim of the work was to present the impact of crises on the intellectual capital of WIG-Food index companies, which is an indirect measure of innovation. The MV/BV and q-Tobin index were used for the study, as well as selected quantitative methods: multiple regression, Ward's method and seasonal additive decomposition. The results of the work indicate that the companies are divided into two groups, within which similar trends in shaping intellectual capital are observed. In addition, one of the groups clearly noticed the impact of the financial crisis and the introduction of an embargo on the shaping of intellectual capital.

The article presents the issue of corporate social responsibility as an instrument of stabilising the macroeconomic situation of a company based on building increased trust and attachment of society to a given company. Developing relationships in a proper way with stakeholders should be a guarantee to make a business an important element of the social structure, thus contributing to mitigating the impact of economic changes on the company's situations. The aim of this work is to examine the impact of selected macroeconomic variables related to the activities of enterprises (in particular. socially responsible enterprises), illustrated in the form of changes in the value of stock market indices (including listed social responsibility indexes). The cross-spectral analysis tool was used to analyse the causality of macroeconomic changes. Changes in the spectral density values of individual variables, as well as the coherence square and phase spectrum values of variables, were analysed. An additional tool was used in the study to create an index of changes in exchange values in order to conduct a comparative analysis of the development of time series relating to individual indices. The data analysed was related to changes in the value of social responsibility indexes, as well as macroeconomic data, for the period from January 2001 to the end of April 2019.

The aim of the article is to present selected aspects of food industry development, in Poland, in the upcoming decade. The food industry, as one of the most important sectors of Polish agribusiness, year by year is becoming a point of interest for many institutions that would like to indicate its achievements as well as suggest the most appropriate development options. The article deals with discussion issues concerning finding an optimal development path for possibilities of using intellectual capital, techniques and technology as well as the benefits resulting from these for the food industry in Poland at the beginning of the 2020s. Selected development paths with their advantages and drawbacks are presented, and broadly defined restrictive conditions. Quantitative methods, such as ARIMA type models and the Ward method were used in carrying out the studies. Two methods, the MV/BV method and the q-Tobin method, were used to calculate intellectual capital. A search for existing domestic and international literature and reports was also conducted.