Impact of Investment Sources for Sustainability on a Country’s Sustainable Development: Evidence from the EU

Abstract

All countries face several issues while running the process of sustainable development—the absence of a uniform means of sourcing investment for sustainable development and the lack of a unified index for the evaluation of sustainable development. No doubt, ensuring sustainable development requires constant financial investments. Hence, it is essential to examine the investment sources for sustainable development at the country level and to comprehend if the current financial investment has a direct impact on the results of a country’s sustainable development. The article aims at identifying the financing sources for sustainable development for each of the European Union (EU) countries and assessing their impact on each of the EU countries’ sustainable development, which is expressed as the Integrated Sustainable Development Index (ISDI). After the detailed analysis of investment sources for the sustainability of the EU countries, two sources of investment, assignation of budget and the EU structural funds, were selected, and ISDI calculation was applied for twenty-five of the EU member states for the period 2003–2017. Correlation analysis (using SPSS software) helped to identify the strength of the connection and to select countries for the Johansen Cointegration Test (using Eviews software) in order to determine how variables interact. The results show that the combination of the assignation of budget and the EU structural funds has a positive impact on the coherence of five (Czech Republic, Denmark, Spain, Slovenia, and Austria) out of twenty-four countries.

Synergies and Trade-Offs in Reaching the Sustainable Development Goals

“…Studying progress and causal relationships in select regions with a more similar baseline level of development would be valuable for informing context-sensitive strategies to achieve the SDGs, see e.g., [16,41]. Further research is also needed to understand the impact of different forms of interventions and policies targeting one goal specifically, such as development investments in specific sectors and peacekeeping missions, across a wider set of SDGs, see e.g., [42,43]. Last but not least, countries do not develop in isolation.…”

Sustainable Entrepreneurship: Romanian Entrepreneurs’ Funding Sources in the Present-Day Context of Sustainability

“…A study concerning the impact of funding sources on sustainable development across 24 countries in the European Union reveals that the combination of their own resources and European funds has a positive impact on sustainable development in only five countries (the Czech Republic, Denmark, Spain, Slovenia, and Austria). In the rest of the countries, the use of European funds has a positive impact on sustainable development [13].…”

Estimation of the Imperative of Rural Area Development on Panel Data in the Process of Managing Agricultural Holdings in Poland

“…The possibility of obtaining and using aid from EU funds [12] changes the quality of the processes of agricultural holding management. Knowledge in this area is necessary and at least as important as knowledge on rearing and cultivation techniques [13][14][15], and includes not only management functions accepted in theory, but also those adapted to the specificity of agricultural holdings.…”