The article focuses on assessing the global competitiveness of countries in the context of their environmental regulatory stringency. The article analyzes the views of scientists on the need to slow down economic growth and transition to stable economy, the relationship between economic growth and environmental changes in the form of environmental Kuznets curve, as well as environmental policy instruments along with the degree of their stringency. The authors put forward and confirm the hypothesis that the quality of institutions and the value assessment of environmental goods directly affect the competitiveness of national economies, regardless of environmental stringency. A comprehensive statistical analysis of the perennial indices of global competitiveness, environmental performance and stringency of environmental regulations on a large sample of countries confirms the hypothesis that significant stringency of environmental regulations in welfare states can be internalized and that their global competitiveness remains high against the background of high-quality environmental goods.

The article is devoted to the consideration of the ethical and ecological aspect of the framework conditions for the welfare state formation. The hypothesis of the negative influence of high ethnic fractionalization on the ecological situation in a country that in the classical welfare states is offset by the high efficiency of government through the initiation of the function of balancing the interests of ethnic groups in the transmission buffer mechanism is tested in the paper. The study used correlation and regression analysis tools using the application statistical software package STATISTICA. The hypothesis of an inverse relationship between the degree of heterogeneous society and the ecological quality is empirically substantiated. It is proved that the quality of governance can weaken the inverse relationship between ethnic fractionalization and the ecological situation in the country. In the welfare states, the neutralization factor of ethnic fractionalization by the quality of governance institutions is traced, which testifies to the existence of an institutional transmission buffer mechanism in the relationship between the structure of society and the offer of environmental goods.

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The virtual nature of digital money is fueling the conflict between usability, functionality and trust in the digital form. Institutional trust drivers should move forward in understanding the nature of confidence in digital money. Do central banks digital money (CBDC – central bank digital currency) and private cryptocurrencies demonstrate the same or different trust patterns? The paper used the general regression method to discover the relationship between trust in different forms of digital money and selected variables that may generate this trust. Simple empirical tests were sufficient to find the fundamental importance of age as a confidence driver relevant to CBDC and cryptocurrencies. It is found that traditional factors associated with the inflation history and quality of monetary order (central banks independence and rule of law) do not play a role in the case of CBDC, but are important in the case of cryptocurrencies. Structural features (like FinTech development or social trust) that should support trust in digital money are not found to be important. Societies with larger fraction of younger generations demonstrate higher confidence in centralized and decentralized forms of digital money. This challenges the traditional approach to money and calls into question the future role of monetary stability institutions in the digital age. Digitalization is perceived as an improvement in welfare only when fiat money institutions become fragile. The efficiency and credibility of central banks are not a bonus to confidence in CBDC. This is a challenge for the institutional design of the future digital-based monetary order.

This article introduces the hypothesis that resource-rich countries display a low degree of central bank independence (CBI). This hypothesis is proven based on multivariable regression, but the influence of resource factors is not considered JEL Codes: E58, E59, O23, Q33Keywords: central bank independence, indexes of central bank independence, "resource curse", commodities export, exchange reserves, exchange rates, quality of institutions А. IntroductionThe instability of price trends for commodities increasingly corresponds to strengthening of globally-centric determinants of behavior of primary resources markets. Scales of fluctuations of prices for commodities, synchronization of cycles of price trends with the global liquidity cycle, and strengthening of the relationship between world prices for commodities, capital flows, and global financial imbalances prove that resource-rich countries, for which the export of commodities or semi-finished products made from them is important to the economy's structure, fall within a qualitatively different macrofinancial framework compared to countries, where fluctuations in terms of trade are not so essential and these fluctuations are not followed by significant changes of capital flows and their allocation. It is not a coincidence that, building on already established concepts of "Dutch disease" and "resource curse," the interests of commodity-exporting countries for macroeconomics has significantly risen during the last decade. It is proven both by special investigations of international financial organizations on optimal fiscal regimes for resource-rich countries and inclusive growth and steady development. In numerous publications, macroeconomic dilemmas of these countries are actually considered from a different point of view. The institutional, political, and economic aspects of analysis of the macroeconomic profile of commodity economies indicate that the benefits of "rent seeking" fully deform macroeconomic policy, due to which conventional macroeconomic tools often become direct welfare redistribution levers. Monetary policy authorities can be directly involved in redistributive political dilemmas or into realization of infrastructural projects and projects for economic diversification. The status of the central bank in commodity economies is being distorted under the influence of institutional deformities.First, the central bank can come under pressure on account of the impact of serious fluctuations of commodity prices on internal monetary processes. A combination of serious fluctuations of export prices with fluctuations of terms of trade and reverses of capital flows should somehow correlate how the behavior of aggregate demand is being transmitted to inflation, economic growth, and employment. Analogously, how inflation behavior impacts export sector competitiveness through its