Efficient allocation of capital toward environmental, social, and governance (ESG) objectives has become a critical challenge for emerging economies pursuing sustainable development and financial resilience. While prior research has primarily focused on ESG investment volumes, considerably less attention has been devoted to the efficiency with which financial and institutional systems transform capital into measurable sustainability outcomes. This study introduces the concept of ESG-Oriented Capital Allocation Efficiency (ECAE) and develops a hybrid multicriteria decision-making (MCDM) framework to evaluate its performance across 24 emerging market economies during the period 2021–2025. The proposed framework integrates DEMATEL, ANP, entropy weighting, TOPSIS, and VIKOR methods to capture causal relationships, interdependencies, weighting structures, and comparative efficiency rankings. The results identify governance effectiveness, ESG policy stability, and regulatory quality as the most influential drivers of ECAE, while higher ESG investment volumes alone do not necessarily generate superior sustainability outcomes. Sensitivity analysis confirms the robustness of the ranking results across alternative weighting scenarios. The findings suggest that strengthening institutional quality, policy coherence, and governance effectiveness is essential for improving sustainable finance outcomes. The study contributes to the sustainable finance literature by providing a policy-oriented framework for evaluating how effectively emerging market economies translate ESG-oriented capital into tangible sustainability performance.

This study examines changes in personal attitudes towards entrepreneurship, subjective norms, perceived behavioural control, and entrepreneurial intentions among STEM students after a single-semester entrepreneurship course. Grounded in the Theory of Planned Behaviour, the study uses the Entrepreneurial Intention Questionnaire to assess short-term differences between PRE and POST measurements. The sample comprised 99 PRE and 102 POST responses from undergraduate students enrolled in the Multimedia, Design and Application and Electrical Engineering programmes at University North. As responses were anonymous and could not be matched individually, PRE and POST measurements were analysed as an unmatched aggregate pre–post comparison using independent-samples t-tests. A statistically significant increase was found only in perceived behavioural control. The largest improvements related to students’ knowledge of the steps needed to start a business and their ability to develop an entrepreneurial project from idea to implementation. The findings indicate that the course was associated primarily with stronger perceived entrepreneurial capabilities.