The paper highlights the connection between the European Union banking system and a set of representative factors—macroeconomic, social, and governance factors—selected from the perspective of sustainability and well-being. The analysis is carried out as a panel regression on EU member countries with annual data for 2005–2018, and it explores the impact of the selected factors on the robustness of the banking systems in the European Union countries. The analyzed variables to reflect the robustness of the banking system were the domestic credit to the private sector and the nonperforming loans (NPL) rate. Those indicators are of high relevance and concern within the current pandemic context. The results show that the banking development degree influences the increase of private-sector lending and the decrease of the NPL rate. Social and governance factors impact differently the level of private sector and NPL rate. All macroeconomic indicators used to influence the level of private-sector lending. The research reflects the fact that to promote and adopt a culture of sustainability and to ensure well-being, a close collaboration between all sectors of an economy is needed, together with a strong policy interconnection and harmonization between micro and macro.

The research presents the interrelationships between banking performance, competitiveness and sustainability of the three banking systems and the impact of each sustainability variable selected on the other macroeconomic indicators in short, medium and long-time horizon. The empirical study involved the use of a panel Auto Regressive Vector methodology and was based on macroeconomic indicators relevant to the performance of the banking system (return on assets, return on equity, an annual growth rate of Gross Domestic Product), as well as indicators that can be assimilated to sustainability (renewable fuels used, CO2 emissions). The dependent variables were return on assets and the annual growth rate of Gross Domestic Product. The global sample analyzed comprises 29 countries, spread over three continents (Europe, North America, Asia), with data collected over a 10-years period (2011-2020). These countries together account for approximately 62% of global GDP (data from 2020). The research results show that as banks invest in green energy and sustainable products, competitiveness will also increase, which will have a negative impact on profitability in the short term. In the medium and long term, this impact will become positive also in terms of profitability increase. This strategic move to develop sustainable business models and to finance a higher percentage of green investments also adds extra competitive advantages, such as reputation and smart differentiation, from other less sustainability-oriented banking systems. The process impacts the systemic level, the macro perspective, the banking organizational level, the micro perspective, together with the perception of the customers.

This research addresses the problem of the synergistic relationship between the sustainable development of the green economy (bioeconomy) at the European level and the commercial flows with food. Mainly, two components were analyzed and integrated: A qualitative one, on the perspective of the development of the bioeconomy at the European level, and a quantitative one, on the study of the nature of the inter-correlation between the exogenous indicators of foreign food trade (exports and imports) and the relevant endogenous indicators (the labor force, gross added value of agriculture, forestry and fisheries, research and development expenditure, forest area, fossil fuel energy consumption, and renewable energy consumption), for 24 European countries over a 22 year period. Exports and imports of food products are positively influenced by the added value of the agricultural sector and by the share of research and development expenditures, both in the short and long term. Renewable energy consumption influences exports in the short term, but in the long term, the forest area has a significant positive impact. Imports are negatively influenced by renewable energy consumption. The findings of this research can provide support for the future mix of policies.

This paper explores the relative stock market performance of well-diversified gender equality equity indices in comparison with the overall market, taking both a cross-sectoral and a financial sector approach, for the period January 2017 to March 2020, with a sample of 11 indices and 834 daily observations, and using several different statistical and econometric methods. Our results show a high level of dynamic conditional correlation of daily returns among the gender equality and the overall indices. We also found comparable levels of conditional volatility (resulting from an Exponential Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity (EGARCH)model) and an elevated degree of synchronization of the volatility regimes (identified by a Markov switching model). Calibrating simple linear quantile regressions, we found that the value of the slope coefficients of the hypothetical linear relationship between the gender equality indices and the overall market indices are close to one, and relatively stable in relation with the value of the quantile. Using separate Vector Autoregressive (VAR) models for the cross-sectoral indices and for the financial sector indices, we found only very little evidence of causality and spill-over effects. Based on these results, we argue that the daily returns of the gender equality indices exhibited very similar characteristics with the daily returns of the overall market indices. In our interpretation, this could mean that, limited to our sample and methods of investigation, there were not significant differences in the investors’ preferences towards the equity issued by public companies committed to supporting gender equality, in comparison with their approach towards listed equity in general. It could also mean that investors do not yet anticipate the significantly different financial performance of listed companies stemming from their approach towards gender equality.