Is corporate social responsibility effective in improving environmental quality? Literature review

With the emergence of the global COVID-19 pandemic in 2019, a process of transformation of the modern economic system took place, which requires new approaches to assessing economic processes. One of such processes is the assessment of public welfare. The purpose of this study is to develop an approach to assessing the level of public welfare of the population of Ukraine in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and economy digitalization. To solve this problem, the methods of artificial intelligence, in particular the method of fuzzy sets theory, which allows using the incomplete information and making high-quality forecast calculations, are used. The factors influencing the level of public welfare during the COVID-19 pandemic have been identified. These are the following factors: gross domestic product, poverty rate, welfare index, human development index, subsistence level, and indicators that characterize the COVID-19 pandemic (i.e. the total number of COVID-19 cases, the total number of deaths from COVID-19, and the total number of vaccinations from COVID-19 in Ukraine). Using fuzzy sets theory, an economic-mathematical model for assessing the level of public welfare in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic in Ukraine was built. Two-dimensional dependences of the level of public welfare of Ukraine in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic on indicators such as gross domestic product, subsistence level, and the total number of cases of COVID-19 in Ukraine were obtained. The results of the study established that the level of public welfare in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic on the 0-100 scale is predicted to be as follows points: 2021 – 17, 2022 – 23, 2023 – 27, 2024 – 19, 2025 – 35 and will not meet international standards.

In the 21st century, in addition to the generally well-known indicators of material well-being, in the modern paradigm of the welfare state, the quality of the ecological environment is gaining an ever-increasing role. Besides that, the modern definition of welfare state takes into account not only environmental dimension, but also the quality of institutions through the governance system that affects the supply of environmental goods. The study provides the classification of countries according to indicators that can ensure the identification of welfare states and the assessment of the classification role of the criteria for environmental state.
The strong direct correlation between environmental state and government efficiency has been established. The results of the classification of the studied countries obtained by k-means clustering methods indicate the possibility of using the Environmental Performance Index (EPI), Government Effectiveness Index (GEI) and government expenditures indicators as complementary attributes to the classical criteria for the welfare state.
The level of country EPI can be regarded as an important complementary criterion for the welfare state. The country environmental state is much more determined by the government efficiency, the quality of state institutions and their activities, rather than by an extensive increase in the funding of such institutions and environmental measures.

According to an inclusive growth framework, the top objectives of the economic policy shift from increasing incomes themselves to well-being. While banking sector development has conventionally been considered a growth factor, there is no clear understanding of its impact on inclusive growth. This article explores how the banking sector’s qualitative development, measured in dimensions of the services availability, lending supply, stability, and reliability of banking activity, relates to inclusive growth. To define the relations between banking system development and inclusive growth, the panel regression was employed for a sample of 46 economies selected based on the prescribed principles of sources reputability, methodology consistency, limits in data blanks, and differentiated into groups according to the World Bank’s classification.
The regressions’ assessment and involved tests show evidence of the quality of constructed models and present the following results. The banking availability, approximated with the number of automated teller machines, fosters inclusive growth regarding all groups of countries. In contrast, the increase in the number of commercial banking branches has inverse relations between high-income and upper-middle-income countries, and direct for lower-middle-income countries. The bank credit expansion negatively influences the inclusive growth for high income and lower-middle-income countries. The banking sector stability approximated with bank capital to assets ratio matters in terms of inclusive growth for high-income countries only, while this indicator for upper middle and lower middle economies is statistically insignificant.