This article aims to determine which of a firm’s resources are drivers of its decisions on sustainability policies. For this purpose, it analyses four of the resources that the literature has linked with sustainability: (1) marketing resources, (2) technological resources, (3) innovation resources and (4) financial resources. The study focuses on Spain, which has the largest surface area under vine in the world. The database for the empirical analysis was drawn up from a survey among wineries carried out during 2020 and 2021. A total of 411 observations were valid. From the quantitative analysis, based on Box–Cox models, it can be concluded that adopting sustainability policies requires placing stress on innovation and on the capacity for communicating such innovations so that consumers perceive them as a change for the better; having greater technological or financial resources seems to be insufficient and of little importance. The results indicate that promoting funding and resource availability as basic tools should be reviewed in sustainability policies for wine firms.

Depopulation is a serious problem facing developed countries, among them Spain. It is especially severe in rural areas, where some vicious circles emerge, nourished by reduced infrastructures and services, deteriorated quality of life, the low inflow of new inhabitants, low local development and an aged population. In this context, social economy institutions may be a key factor in the fight against population decline, having a leading role in reactivating economic dynamism through the creation of stable, high-quality jobs, promoting the local endogenous development of rural areas, helping enhance income in those spaces, encouraging the arrival of people and impacting positively on social cohesion, and enabling sustainable growth. This paper focuses on Castilla-La Mancha, an eminently rural region, which is among the areas most severely impacted by the loss of population in Spain. The aim is to analyze the factors that affect the settlement of population, and to demonstrate that social economy institutions may be a resilience factor of rural population. A partial least squares model, composed of 8 constructs related to 21 variables extracted from data for 2017 and 2018 on the 613 municipalities, allows us to demonstrate that the existence of social economy entities helps to anchor population and increase the resilience of this territory.

The Common Agricultural Policy 2014–2020, set up in 2015 and extended until 31 December 2022, introduced a payment instrument called Greening. The aim of Greening was to encourage agricultural practices that are beneficial for the environment while also contributing to economic and territorial dynamism. The purpose of this article is to study the effect that Greening has had in Spain. We consider five difference-in-difference models, one for each of the variables proposed: ecological focus areas, permanent grasslands over utilised agricultural area, CO₂ emissions stemming from agricultural land use changes and the presence of woody crops, agricultural income, and affiliates of the special agricultural regime. The data used come from the Spanish Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries, and Food, the Ministry for Inclusion, Social Security, and Migrations, and the Spanish Emissions Inventory System. For the diff-in diff estimations, we use Spain’s regions as control and treatment units from 2011 to 2018, the aim being to provide observations ex ante Greening (2011–2014) and ex post (2015–2018). The results show that Greening had a limited impact, questioning its efficiency for meeting its goal, and that it is not a sound precedent for building the new green architecture of the CAP.

In this study, we aim to find the determinants of innovation in the agrifood industry in an inland region in southeast Spain, which depends upon and specializes in this sector. The determinants we propose are firm and environmental factors. From the empirical analyses based on Box–Cox models, we deduce that a firm’s internal factors or characteristics are those that have the greatest influence on its propensity to innovate. Among them, firm size has the greatest effect. Innovation culture has the potential for exerting a multiplying effect via mechanisms such as knowledge spillovers or learning by doing.