Public procurement is considered an important driver of an economy and has a considerable power in orienting the market, including toward environmental protection policies and strategies. This study examines the green public procurement practiced at the level of local Romanian authorities with the aim of understanding the real context by highlighting the mix between what is required and/or expected from local authorities and what is actually happening in terms of green public procurement. The research is based on the results of an online survey conducted from 16 August 2019 to 18 September 2019. The research results show that green procurement is not a subject approached in many administrative units; however, it appears that environmental protection in the context of public procurement is considered important. In line with other research, our results enrich the current knowledge on green procurement practices at the local government level and indicate that increased regulatory pressure for green public procurement may lead to market development and innovation for green goods and services.

This review explores the interplay between renewable energy and monetary policy, highlighting how central banks can contribute to renewable energy development. Although the shift towards renewable energy is tremendous for sustainable development, it also comes with notable economic and financial challenges. Supervenient, the energy transition has raised significant interest among decision-makers and academia, prompting them to explore new innovative policies and strategies; as a result, these actions acknowledged that research in this field is essential for identifying optimal solutions. Moreover, recent global crises, including the energy crisis, have emphasised the important role of macroeconomic policies in crisis management. Within this framework, it’s essential to investigate how monetary policy, as the main tool of central banks, can foster renewable energy development. This comprehensive review systematically examines existing literature through a semi-structured literature analysis, which allows for a more flexible, complex, and thorough approach to identifying key issues and providing insights into the potential of monetary policy to address renewable energy challenges. We identified four main clusters of research: sustainability and development, economic growth and energy, monetary policy and investment, and emissions and renewable energy. Furthermore, exploring the interaction between monetary policy and renewable energy objectives to uncover paths for harmonizing monetary strategies with the goals of renewable energy development contributes to highlighting the existing gaps in the field and represents a starting point for further research topics. This study provides a comprehensive overview of the existing knowledge, identifies gaps in the literature, and suggests directions for future research.

This paper investigates the factors associated with enterprise e-commerce adoption across the European Union and whether Eastern and Western Member States are converging toward a shared digital-commerce equilibrium. Focusing on firms with ten or more employees in wholesale and retail trade, we use Eurostat data for 25 EU countries observed annually from 2009 to 2024 and estimate panel regressions with country and year fixed effects. A formal specification test strongly favours a fixed-effect approach, indicating that unobserved country-specific characteristics are correlated with the included regressors. Once country differences and common time trends are controlled for, income per capita is the only statistically significant correlate in the preferred specification, while individual online-shopping rates and household internet access lose explanatory power. Cross-country dispersion in adoption rates has widened over the period, despite faster percentage growth among countries starting from lower levels. No statistically significant difference is identified between Eastern and Western countries in the estimated relationship between consumer demand and enterprise e-commerce adoption, and the East–West gap narrowed only modestly, from roughly seven percentage points in 2009 to under six in 2024. The findings suggest that broader economic conditions may remain more closely associated with closing the gap than further increases in already widespread household connectivity alone.