Increased changes in the climate and ecosystems call for a sustainable economic development, where economic growth should be compatible with the environment goals. In order to do this, it is urgent to find new ways of life and new production systems that make our ecological footprint compatible with global sustainability. The concept of the circular economy has brought relevant contributions to this problem. The central objective of the study presented here is to highlight the main insights presented through scientific literature about the concept of the circular economy within the European Union. In practice, the intention is to show what has already been done about this topic and what can/should be implemented in the future. To achieve these objectives, 144 articles were considered from the Web of Science (Core Collection) for the topics “circular economy” and “European Union”. These documents were, firstly, analysed through a proper literature review and later explored through bibliometric analysis, considering bibliographic data and the VOSviewer software. As the main findings have revealed, the increased importance of this concept within the European Union is recognized. However, this paper also identifies several challenges in the literature, namely the concentration of the identified publications in certain countries, organizations, and authors.

Fiscal transparency is considered an essential feature of public financial management and is supposed to provide beneficial governance effects such as reducing corruption. This paper adds to recent empirical literature that specifically investigates the impact of fiscal information disclosure on corruption. Country-level evidence provided by previous studies is exclusively based on cross-sectional econometric analyses, while the present contribution relies on a wide-ranging, country-level dataset of 116 countries that cover a ten-year time span (2003–2012), and on dynamic panel data estimates. These innovations in terms of data and methods provide new, robust empirical support to the claim that fiscal transparency is negatively correlated with corruption.

This article estimates the magnitude of fiscal illusion around the world and evaluates whether relationships exist between fiscal illusion and a set of potential observed variables. The index of fiscal illusion is derived for approximately fifty countries over the period 2000–08. Using MIMIC models, the authors conclude that the structure of employment (self-employment as a percentage of total employment) and nominal marginal tax rates, by increasing the visibility of the tax burden, may constitute the greatest incentives for policy makers to distort taxpayers' perceptions. Less relevant are the determinants of fiscal illusion related to the information acquisition and processing capabilities of the taxpayer (i.e., freedom of the press and tertiary education).

The sale of soccer players is a serious issue for the sustainability of professional teams. This article discusses the efficiency of the values that 183 European soccer teams have received for the sales of their players since 2007. We estimated stochastic frontiers for these soccer teams using stochastic frontier analysis. We found that teams with higher numbers of titles, with huge past acquisitions of players, and achieving good rankings in the previous season tend to receive more transfer inflows. The efficiency of these inflows can be significantly influenced if the team exhibits a long sports history or if the team participates in the Champions League or in the Europa League.