Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors are increasingly analysed to identify the risks and opportunities in contemporary economies. The banking sector influences the whole economy through the credit channel and balances its stability. The interplay of these elements motivated our main question, whether ESG scores impact European financial stability, measured for the banking sector. To this aim, we employ the cross-quantilogram methodology, which explores dependences at all levels of the distributions of two random variables. To determine the quantile dependence, we resort to methods of measuring systemic risk (Marginal Expected Shortfall—MES, CoVaR, and ΔCoVaR) for all commercial banks listed on European stock exchanges. While our approach provides a dashboard for analysis of the dependence of financial stability on ESG pillars, our findings indicate that such a connection is valid and cannot be identified with standard approaches that explore average distribution levels. We also document the differences in these impacts across the ESG pillars.

The development of sustainable agriculture is treated as a priority at the EU level, and the importance and role of agriculture, in general, and sustainable agriculture, in particular, is undeniable. The European Commission pushes for sustainability in agriculture in rural areas across the EU through the common agricultural policy (CAP), and the achievement of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development targets becomes essential. Through our research, we aimed to investigate the status of sustainable agriculture development in EU Member States by assessing the current level of the achievement of SDG 2 targets, as well as the potential achievement of these targets by 2030. Based on data collected from Eurostat, we forecast the evolution of indicators for each country considered until 2030 using the ARIMA model and dynamic indicator analysis. The results obtained suggest, on the one hand, the existence of positive developments at the level of European countries, but also highlight a number of existing disparities, together with evidence of potentially significant deviations from the targets assumed by the 2030 Agenda.

In modern societies, digitalization plays a tremendously important role for people and businesses. Apart from an economic representation, competitiveness characterizes a society from political, cultural, or human points of view. In this article, we aim to highlight the role of digital development from a competitiveness perspective, as there are few studies related to this relationship. The empirical investigation is based on panel data analysis for European Union countries for 2017–2022, considering the digital economy and society index (DESI) and the index developed by International Institute for Management Development (IMD), respectively IMD world competitiveness index. The results obtained are reported both for general indices and for the components of DESI, presented separately for the groups of Central and Eastern European countries and Western European countries. They indicate different influences for the two groups of countries, with only a few common aspects. The most obvious is the case of skilled labor. This aspect demonstrates the link between the various dimensions of digitalization and changes in human capital development strategies, as they appear in the specialized literature.