The virtual nature of digital money is fueling the conflict between usability, functionality and trust in the digital form. Institutional trust drivers should move forward in understanding the nature of confidence in digital money. Do central banks digital money (CBDC – central bank digital currency) and private cryptocurrencies demonstrate the same or different trust patterns? The paper used the general regression method to discover the relationship between trust in different forms of digital money and selected variables that may generate this trust. Simple empirical tests were sufficient to find the fundamental importance of age as a confidence driver relevant to CBDC and cryptocurrencies. It is found that traditional factors associated with the inflation history and quality of monetary order (central banks independence and rule of law) do not play a role in the case of CBDC, but are important in the case of cryptocurrencies. Structural features (like FinTech development or social trust) that should support trust in digital money are not found to be important. Societies with larger fraction of younger generations demonstrate higher confidence in centralized and decentralized forms of digital money. This challenges the traditional approach to money and calls into question the future role of monetary stability institutions in the digital age. Digitalization is perceived as an improvement in welfare only when fiat money institutions become fragile. The efficiency and credibility of central banks are not a bonus to confidence in CBDC. This is a challenge for the institutional design of the future digital-based monetary order.

The article is devoted to the consideration of the ethical and ecological aspect of the framework conditions for the welfare state formation. The hypothesis of the negative influence of high ethnic fractionalization on the ecological situation in a country that in the classical welfare states is offset by the high efficiency of government through the initiation of the function of balancing the interests of ethnic groups in the transmission buffer mechanism is tested in the paper. The study used correlation and regression analysis tools using the application statistical software package STATISTICA. The hypothesis of an inverse relationship between the degree of heterogeneous society and the ecological quality is empirically substantiated. It is proved that the quality of governance can weaken the inverse relationship between ethnic fractionalization and the ecological situation in the country. In the welfare states, the neutralization factor of ethnic fractionalization by the quality of governance institutions is traced, which testifies to the existence of an institutional transmission buffer mechanism in the relationship between the structure of society and the offer of environmental goods.

Evolution of digital money demonstrates that CBDC (Central Bank Digital Currency means a digital form of traditional fiat currencies) design is really challenging. While technically possible CBDC solutions are visible, much of institutional aspects are rest to be unsolved. One of the issues is a degree of privacy and anonymity. All historical forms of money had intrinsic property of non-traceability of transactions and only now this feature of non-digital money is recognized as strong institutional advance. At the same time, privacy and anonymity preferences could relate to cultural attitudes. However, money may distort expected logical relations between such patterns like “less hierarchies more privacy-anonymity” or “more egalitarianism less privacy-anonymity”. This potentially means that money may posit extra propensity to privacy-anonymity that is going beyond the cultural attitudes. Basing on the survey, we demonstrate some contradictions in how respondents perceive the preference of functional usability over anonymity of transactions. The same is relevant when cultural patterns are taken into account. It is more likely to find cultural closeness across respondents from different regions than strong determinacy of privacy-anonymity preferences by propensity to hierarchies or egalitarianism. Additionally, we checked hierarchies or egalitarianism attitudes by additional questions and found some mixed results. Also, we found some conformism culture (meaning unstable preferences) and rely it with lack of trust in public institutions. When centralized money are less trusted people faster agree to sacrifice anonymity in the benefits of functionality. The main take away is that it is unlikely to expect the unity of optimal CBDC design across countries. Aside of behavioural distortions, culture still matter and it is likely to expect future variety of digital money from functional usability privacy-anonymity trade-off.

This article introduces the hypothesis that resource-rich countries display a low degree of central bank independence (CBI). This hypothesis is proven based on multivariable regression, but the influence of resource factors is not considered strong enough compared with previous inflationary experience and the characteristics of the political regime. It stresses that the impact of the commodity wealth factor on CBI choice is direct (through the share of commodity exports in total export) and indirect through the lower level of democracy in commodities countries that feature more dependent central banks. Also, this hypothesis is proven based on the grouping of countries. Such grouping shows that despite a general tendency of CBI increase in the world, a group of commodity exporting countries experiencing a substantially lower level of mean GMT-index, ECWN-index, and transparency-index resulted in lower CBI compared with groups of emerging markets and developing countries. Explaining these phenomena is rooted in features of institutional distortions in commodity economies, the specific structure of interventionist policy to overcome a "resource curse", and the specific role of the exchange rate and FX reserves in intertemporal macroeconomic policy.

The purpose of this study was to explore the indirect and direct relationships of Big-5 and dark personality traits (i.e., extroversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness, narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, sadism, and spitefulness) with job performance via perfectionism, stress, and social media addiction. A total of 514 private sector employees filled out a query sheet that included the assessment tools for the variables. Path analysis using a multiple mediation model indicated that neuroticism was negatively directly and indirectly related to job performance via stress and social media addiction. Machiavellianism and spitefulness were directly positively associated with job performance, and Machiavellianism-related higher social media addiction diminished the direct positive effect of Machiavellianism on job performance, indicating complex relationships. Furthermore, stress, social media addiction, and perfectionism were related to different personality traits positively and negatively. Findings of the present study suggest that an anti-social personality may promote higher job performance. However, job performance may be adversely affected by the adverse consequences relating to these traits. Professionals and firms that attempt to increase job performance should take anti-social personality traits and their complex effects on job performance into account.