Serhiy Lyeonov

A significant size of the shadow economy is a threat to the sustainable functioning of a country’s economy, its ability to finance economic and social programs. The paper studies the influence of the shadow economy on the macro-financial stability of the EU countries. The dependence between macro-financial stability and the size of the shadow economy was estimated using the quadrocentric (considering the four channels of the shadow economy) recursive (takes into account direct and inverse relationships between them) model. Dependence between indicators was analyzed using Euler’s methods, Calvo’s and Dixit Stiglitz’s principles, Taylor’s and Smets-Wouters’ function. It has been proved that shadow economy channels affect the macro-financial stability almost equally (an increase in the size of the shadow economy in Slovenia by 1% leads to a decrease in macro-financial stability by 0.562% for tax, 0.56% for investment, 0.572 for institutional, and 0.444 for social channels). At the same time, the growth in the volume of shadow transactions through one channel forms an impetus for the increasing intensity of use of the remaining channels to hide income. With the help of the payment matrix, the optimal level of drivers of shadow economy by which the targeted value of the level of macro-financial stability is achieved was determined. It was concluded that ensuring good governance in the direction of preventing shadow schemes of capital withdrawal should be carried out in terms of institutional, tax, social, and investment channels of the shadow economy.

Acknowledgment
This work was supported by the Slovak Research and Development Agency under the contract No. APVV-16-0602.

Changes in the logistics of energy resources and their potential shortage are causing a review of the EU energy policy. The energy sector significantly affects the progress toward achieving climate policy goals due to significt greenhouse gas emissions. The REPowerEU plan, implemented in the EU27 to overcome the energy crisis, requires new forecasts of greenhouse gas emissions due to a change in European energy policy.
This paper aims to examine the consequences of the management of the energy crisis caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on EU climate policy. This study focuses on forecasting greenhouse gas emissions in the EU until 2030 and uses the Seasonal ARIMA model based on quarterly time series in the EU27.
Depending on energy management and changes in energy policy to overcome the energy crisis, a positive or negative scenario for greenhouse gas emissions may occur. An important parameter that should be considered when determining the scenario of the EU energy development according to climate policy was defined by correlation analysis.
According to the negative scenario and under the influence of the effects of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the value of greenhouse gas emissions in the EU at the beginning of 2030 will be 0.752911 tons per capita. The positive scenario shows greenhouse gas emissions can be reduced to 0.235225 tons per capita.
The study results proved two extreme scenarios of greenhouse gas emissions, depending on how to overcome the energy crisis.

Acknowledgment
The authors appreciate the copyright holder: © European Union, 1995–2022, as well as the source of the extracted data, which is the European Commission website, Eurostat http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat (accessed on 16 October 2022).
This study was funded by the European Union (the project No. 101048079 – EU4SmartED – ERASMUS-JMO-2021-HEI-TCH-RSCH); by the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine (projects No. 0122U000788, 0122U000769, 0121U109553, 0120U102001, 0122U000777).
This research was funded by Faculty of Organization and Management of the Silesian University of Technology (grant number: 13/990/BK_23/0178).

The rapid development of information technologies poses challenges to various processes of the financial departments of companies or the state. The aim of the paper is to substantiate the main directions of global research on information technologies for financial control and accounting for a better perception and derivation of the potentially associated requirements, challenges, and risks under the evolutionary magnifier. Applied bibliometric and network analysis, comprising analytical and visualization tools of Scopus and VosViewer, reveals the constantly increasing research interests of scholars in the field of research that has reached its maximum in 2022 and continues to rise, especially in the countries with the frontrunner affiliations (the United States, China, and the United Kingdom). The cluster analysis identified 19 total thematic clusters, eleven at the state and eight at the corporate levels, that determined the focal research points Big Data, Blockchain, and Artificial Intelligence are similar for financial control and accounting at the state and corporate level and underlined the partial similarity in terms of technical specification (cryptocurrency) as well as differences in specific levels (social networking issues at the state level) that are reflected in the recommendations for the elaboration of significant technology interfaces for both levels under investigation.

This study aims to conduct a bibliometric analysis on the topic of public policy and financial regulation in preventing and combating financial fraud using a variety of bibliometric methods and tools, including the in-built tools of Scopus by Elsevier (SciVal) and Web of Science by Clarivate Analytics, as well as VOSviewer software. The most relevant publications related to the search terms were identified. Based on the results, a map illustrating the interrelationships of concepts such as “financial fraud,” “public policy,” and “financial regulation” with other categories was created, allowing for the identification of five clusters, each of which was characterized in detail. The results of the evolutionary and temporal analysis of scientific research showed that before 2000, scholars focused on the legislative aspects of combating financial fraud; from 2000 to 2015, on risk management and the impact of financial fraud on economic growth; from 2016 to the present, on the search for methods and tools to detect and combat financial fraud. The spatial analysis confirmed a predominantly intercontinental connection between researchers. The comparison of subject areas demonstrated the interdisciplinary nature of the study, with a predominant focus on the fields of “computer science” and “economics, econometrics, and finance,” which is logical considering the economic nature and the ongoing technological transformation of financial fraud. The results can be utilized to develop new strategies, policies, and legislative initiatives to ensure financial integrity and increase confidence in financial systems.

Acknowledgment
This study is funded by the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine and contains the results of the projects No. 0123U101945 “National security of Ukraine through prevention of financial fraud and money laundering: War and post-war challenges”, 0121U109559 “National security through the convergence of financial monitoring systems and cyber security: Intelligent modelling of financial market regulation mechanisms” and by the Vega Agency No. 1/0638/23.

This paper explores how the war in Ukraine changed the interest in higher education of Ukrainians who stayed on the territory of Ukraine and emigrated to other countries. The methodology is based on Google Trends Analysis and peak approach with Google Trends Scale of Internet user inquiries about higher education from June 20, 2021 to June 20, 2023 with a middle point on February 24, 2022. Dynamics of changes in the queries of Internet users by keywords regarding studied higher education are: 1) exclusively from the territory of Ukraine; 2) from the territory of Poland, Slovakia, Germany, the Czech Republic, Great Britain, Spain, Italy, Bulgaria, Romania, Moldova, Austria, i.e., top-10 countries by number of registered Ukrainian refugees according to the UN Refugee Agency. The key results are: 1) increased interest of Internet users in higher education after beginning of the full-scale war: Poland – 22.9%, Romania – 28.9%, Ukraine – 31.2%, Hungary – 32.4%, Slovakia – 35.8%, Moldova – 49.0% of average number of «university» inquiries; 2) increased requests for professional education (42.2%), distance education (25.6%), distance learning (34.1%) after February 24, 2022; 3) correlation between negative trends of interest per 32% from July 2021 (100 GT Scale) to July 2022 (68 GT Scale) in Ukraine and positive trends of this indicator in European counties in August 2022 (80-100 GT Scale). Chi-square test showed statistical significance of changes in interest in higher education (p-value = 0). Key findings demonstrate the following trends after February 24, 2022: distance learning development, increased Internet users’ orientation towards professional education for high-paying jobs, popularity of flexible schedules.

Acknowledgments
The educational outcomes in this publication were created with the support of the EU Erasmus+ program within the framework of projects ERASMUS-JMO-2021-HEI-TCH-RSCH-101048055 – «AICE – With Academic integrity to EU values: step by step to common Europe» and ERASMUS-JMO-2022-HEI-TCH-RSCH-101085198 «OSEE – Open Science and Education in Europe: success stories for Ukrainian academia».

Transparency is a fundamental necessity for the insurance market in the modern fast-changing and digital world. The study aims to establish, based on bibliometric analysis, the research trends and subject areas of the insurance market transparency, including the impact of digital technologies, regulatory initiatives, and the internal policies of insurance companies. A bibliometric analysis of papers published in the journals indexed by the Scopus database for the years 1988–2023 was conducted to achieve this goal. Five clusters have been identified based on the analysis of the shared use of keywords, demonstrating the multidisciplinary nature of the research subject. They cover government regulation and risk management; ethics; technological innovations in increasing transparency; transparency of prices and costs in health insurance; and state medical insurance transparency. The analysis of insurance market transparency trends has allowed identifying four key stages of development: post-crisis regulatory mechanisms (2013–2016), Solvency II regulation effectiveness (2017–2019), transparency during the pandemic (2020–2021), and the impact of digital innovations since 2021. Spatial clustering made it possible to identify five groups of countries whose representatives are co-authors of research on insurance market transparency. The leading countries in research on insurance market transparency are the USA, the UK, and Germany.

Acknowledgment
This research was funded by the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine (projects No. 0122U000774 “Digitalization and transparency of public, corporate and personal finance: the impact on innovation development and national security”, No. 0123U101945 “National security of Ukraine through the prevention of financial fraud and money laundering: war and post-war challenges”). This research was funded under the research subsidy of the Faculty of Organization and Management of the Silesian University of Technology in Poland for the year 2023 (13/990/BK_23/0178).

Considering Ukraine’s corruption scandals at all levels of public governance, combating corruption and enhancing transparency have become a pivotal factor in maintaining the trust of Ukrainian citizens and foreign partners in central and local authorities. It is also an essential prerequisite for Ukraine’s prospective membership in the EU and the allocation of financial assistance from external donors. The study aims to examine how transparency in local governance influences the level of corruption in regional cities of Ukraine. The paper examines how transparency in local authorities relates to different types of corruption, including bribery within municipal services, healthcare, and other public sectors. Utilizing panel data from 24 Ukrainian cities collected between 2017 and 2020 (all-Ukrainian sociological municipal survey and project ‘Transparent, Financially Sound and Competitive Local Governments in Ukraine’), the study employs both random and fixed-effects panel regression analyses to assess the impact of various governance indicators on corruption levels across different sectors, including municipal services, healthcare, and education. The findings suggest that higher transparency of the local authorities is generally associated with lower levels of bribery in the housing and communal services sector (estimation coefficient = –0.204226), in registration and licensing institutions (–0.5353756), in healthcare institutions (–0.2032171), and experience of bribing local authorities (–0.2505674). The analysis concludes that enhancing transparency may significantly reduce corrupt practices within local government operations, thereby strengthening public trust and bringing Ukraine closer to meeting European Union standards.

Acknowledgment
Serhiy Lyeonov, Serhii Drozd, and Yaroslаv Reshetniak thank the project 0123U101945 “National security of Ukraine through prevention of financial fraud and money laundering: war and post-war challenges” for carrying out their part of this research.
This study was funded by the European Union grant “NextGenerationEU through the Recovery and Resilience Plan for Slovakia” (No. 09I03-03-V01-00130) and project VEGA – 1/0392/23 “Changes in the approach to the creation of companies’ distribution management concepts influenced by the effects of social and economic crises caused by the global pandemic and increased security risks.”