Given the high resilience of the Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) banking sectors during the last financial crisis and their major role in the CEE region in financing the economy and supporting the high growth rates achieved there, our paper investigates the determinants of banking profitability in the CEE banking sectors based on a Generalized Method of Methods (GMM) approach using data between 2009 and 2018. We have selected determinants from the macroeconomic factors and from the financial-banking specific factors using a two-step GMM method. Our findings demonstrate that unemployment rate, inflation, budget balance, non-governmental credit, non-performing loan rates, concentration rate and capitalization rate negatively impact on the banking profitability in the CEE banking sectors. According to these findings, some policy recommendations were elaborated.

The European Union’s environmental goal by 2050 is to become the first climate-neutral continent in the world. This means specific efforts for diversifying the energy mix and investing in low-carbon energy. Our study investigates the nexus among carbon emissions, energy consumption and mix, and economic growth in a modified framework that includes the contribution of inward foreign direct investments and international trade to lowering air pollution. We have used a two-step approach to explore in more detail the links between these variables in 24 EU countries over the period 1995–2018, followed by a panel VECM analysis. Our results indicate that there is a unidirectional link between economic growth and CO₂ emissions, which should imply a decoupling of environmental improvement measures from the pace of economic growth. We also find bidirectional causal relationships between low-carbon energy shares in consumption and CO₂ emissions, as well as between low-carbon energy share in consumption and GDP per capita, which confirms both pollution haven and the halo effect hypotheses for FDI on gas emissions. However, in the long term, FDI, exports, and imports have positively impacted the reduction in CO₂ emissions; therefore, stronger EU investment and trade integration should be promoted to improve the quality of the environment.

This paper proposes a new approach toward understanding the financial performance dynamics in the EU retail sector (pre-pandemic); we focus on the connection between indebtedness and solvency risk and other areas of corporate performance (e.g., liquidity, assets efficiency, and profitability). Its contribution resides in identifying the drivers behind solvency risk in a sector that went through significant transformations in recent decades, as well as the links between the various areas of performance of retailers, and their impacts on solvency risk, using the machine-learning random forest methodology. The results indicate a declining trend for solvency risk of EU food retailers after the global financial crisis and up until the beginning of the pandemic, which may reflect their maturity on the market, but also an adjustment to legal changes in the EU, meant to equalize the tax advantages of debt versus equity financing. Solvency risk accompanied by liquidity risk is a mark of the retail sector, and our results indicate that the most critical trade that EU retailers face is between solvency risk and liquidity, but is fading over time. The volatility of liquidity levels is an important predictor of solvency risk; hence, sustaining a stable and good level of liquidity supports lower risks of financial distress, and may mitigate the shock impacts for EU retailers. A higher solvency risk was accompanied by increased efficiency of asset use, but reduced profitability levels, which led to higher returns available to shareholders for high solvency risk retailers. Overall, retailers should focus on operational performance evidenced by financial indicator levels than on the volatility of these indicators as predictors of solvency risk.

The paper explores the relationship between education, digitalization, and financial development between 1996 and 2019 with the aim of showcasing the differences between developed and emerging economies in Europe. We use a Bayesian VAR framework that includes variables related to education, digitalization, and financial development, as well as several endogenous variables to control for differences between countries in terms of nominal GDP growth, unemployment rate, and trade openness. Our findings clearly demonstrate the dynamic interdependence between financial development—including its two main components, financial institutions, and financial markets, digitalization, and education. Furthermore, we find that education is a leading variable in the financial development–education–digitalization nexus, whereas financial development and digitalization are laggard variables. These findings open possibilities for influencing joint policies on digitalization, education, and financial development, particularly in emerging European countries.