Carlo Drago

Renewable natural capital, one component of the comprehensive wealth whose maintenance per head defines sustainability in wealth accounting, is falling per capita across most of the world. This study asks what the decline records and whether environmental, social and, in particular, governance (ESG) indicators carry information about the asset base once demographic dilution is held constant. Using the World Bank Sovereign ESG Data Portal and the Changing Wealth of Nations accounts for 149 to 151 countries over 1995–2020, it decomposes per capita growth exactly into stock growth and population growth. On a fixed sample of 148 countries, the global stock grew by 5.9 per cent while population rose by 36 per cent, although fisheries, mangroves and timber declined in most countries holding them; within countries, per capita growth is mostly stock change, and across countries, mostly population growth. Joint specifications on a common sample, with pillar equations from six panel estimators as benchmarks, measure what each pillar adds. The environmental pillar carries almost all the incremental within-country information, with climatic stress acting through hydropower. Once demography is held constant, governance adds little information, no more than about two percentage points of explanatory power across countries, and ranking countries by total-stock growth reverses its association with measured sustainability. Per capita criteria should be complemented by total-stock growth and asset-level reporting, since neither measure records stewardship, and governance scores should not be read as proxies for it.

Does digital adoption raise regional prosperity in the region where it occurs, or does it work through neighbouring regions? We assemble a georeferenced panel of 234 EU NUTS-2 regions observed from 2017 to 2024, linking Eurostat data on GDP per capita in purchasing power standards, household broadband and internet use, employment and social exclusion to NUTS 2024 boundaries. Global Moran's I is positive and significant for every variable and year (0.39–0.78), and LISA maps reveal persistent high-income and low-income clusters. Non-spatial estimators give a positive digital coefficient: 0.21% higher GDP per capita per percentage point of adoption under two-way fixed effects, and 1.83% when lagged adoption instruments a noisy, survey-based regressor. However, fixed-effects residuals remain spatially autocorrelated, and a Spatial Durbin Model (ρ = 0.70) shows that the own-region (direct) effect is not significant, while the spillover (indirect) effect is positive (0.20% per point, p = 0.039) and robust across three spatial weight matrices. Of six clustering algorithms compared on eleven validity indices, Ward hierarchical clustering performs best and identifies seven spatially contiguous regional profiles. Of six machine-learning regressors, a random forest validated by region-grouped cross-validation performs best (out-of-sample R² = 0.57). Its SHAP decomposition reproduces the econometric signs: own adoption dominates in levels, while neighbours' adoption and employment dominate within regions. Digital policy in the EU should therefore be targeted at the level of functional macro-regions, not individual regions.

Nuclear power is usually treated as a determinant of emissions rather than as an outcome to be explained, and the few studies that explain it examine environmental, social and governance conditions one pillar at a time. Using an unbalanced panel of twenty-nine nuclear economies over 2004–2020, with 466 country-year observations, we analyse the nuclear share conditional on possessing capacity and estimate a single equation in which all three pillars enter jointly, comparing six estimators that separate variation between countries from variation within them. Fossil dependence is negatively associated with the nuclear share under every estimator, but the robustness is cross-sectional rather than temporal. Electoral democracy reverses sign across dimensions, positive between countries and negative within them, where it rests on a small number of closure episodes. Female parliamentary representation is negatively associated with the nuclear share across cross-sectional estimators, which provides ecological evidence consistent with the gender gap in nuclear risk perception; the mechanism itself is not observed. The methodological implication concerns validation: with 13.9 per cent of the variance being temporal, random cross-validation overstates the performance of flexible algorithms through panel leakage. The estimates are associations, rather than causal effects or evidence on adoption.

The European Innovation Scoreboard classifies medium- and high-technology exports among the impacts of innovation, implying that institutions and public demand shape what European economies export. We test that premise on thirty-nine economies, 2017 to 2024, applying panel econometrics, unsupervised clustering and machine-learning regression to one non-circular specification. All three give a negative answer. Institutional quality explains 1.5 per cent of the cross-country variation and carries a standardised effect of −0.27; procurement carries nothing. The employment share in high and medium-high technology carries 0.725 and raises the fit to 0.617. An unsupervised partition reproduces the Scoreboard's ranking at a Cramér's V of 0.929 while leaving the outcome unseparated. Validation designs that do not separate countries return out-of-sample R² above 0.94, which unit-separated folds drive below zero.

European packaging policy is built almost entirely around treatment, while the accompanying prevention obligation lacks an equivalent apparatus of measurable objectives. This article addresses this upstream question directly: what determines the quantity of plastic packaging waste that European economies place on the market? Using Eurostat data, we regress per capita plastic packaging waste on the three pillars of the World Bank Sovereign Environmental, Social and Governance framework for 29 countries between 2014 and 2023. Each pillar is examined through three modules. The first is a panel comparison of pooled, between, fixed-effects, random-effects, weighted, and dynamic estimators, with inference reassessed using a wild cluster bootstrap. The second is an unsupervised classification comparing six algorithms across eleven validity indices, with the dependent variable withheld for external validation. The third is a supervised comparison of six learners under leave-one-out cross-validation, used to validate functional form rather than to forecast. Three findings emerge. Energy intensity and carbon intensity per capita are robustly associated with generation and survive correction for multiple testing, yet environmental country types do not significantly explain differences in packaging burden. Social configurations separate generation along a binary post-transition boundary that does not survive controlling for income, and the sign reversal in life expectancy between the cross-sectional and time dimensions is confirmed independently by the learners. Internet penetration is the strongest association in the study, robust to common time effects and to income but extending to every packaging fraction and therefore not specific to delivery formats, while composite institutional quality is insignificant in every linear specification and suggests, under unrestricted functional form, a threshold rather than a gradient, a shape that a parametric test on the same cross-section cannot locate and that is therefore reported as a hypothesis. Prevention policy must therefore engage determinants beyond waste management. Among these determinants, the diffusion of online retail is currently the most informative.

The rapid digital transformation of financial services, increasing regulatory pressure and the growing strategic relevance of sustainability are reshaping financial intermediaries and how they are perceived by younger generations. In this context, traditional monetary compensation schemes are increasingly insufficient to explain how financial institutions are perceived in terms of trustworthiness, legitimacy and long‐term relevance both as service providers and as potential employers. Instead, nonmonetary rewards, including institutional trustworthiness, technological orientation, ethical values and sustainability commitment, emerge as key components of an integrated institutional and employer reward mix shaping early expectations. Drawing on a survey‐based analysis of 462 young individuals in a pre‐labour‐market phase, this study adopts a forward‐looking perspective to examine how nonmonetary rewards are internalised before direct market or organisational involvement. Using multiple correspondence analysis and cluster analysis, the findings reveal substantial heterogeneity in younger generations' perceptions of financial intermediaries, identifying distinct profiles with markedly different attitudes towards digitalisation, artificial intelligence, sustainability and financial behaviour. The results show that sustainability orientation and technological empowerment are interpreted as sources of anticipatory nonmonetary value, being associated with more favourable evaluative perceptions and attitudinal orientations among digitally engaged and career‐oriented profiles, while remaining less salient for more sceptical or disengaged groups. By highlighting these differentiated patterns, the study contributes to the understanding of how younger generations evaluate financial intermediaries and offers insight into how digital and sustainability strategies may be aligned with the evolving expectations of the future workforce and customer base. The study advances research by showing how anticipatory nonmonetary rewards are associated with early‐stage legitimacy perceptions and trust‐related attitudes in highly regulated industries.

Comprehensive wealth accounting defines net investment in natural capital as the change in the stock, yet country-level ESG research has concentrated on flow measures of environmental pressure and left this outcome unexamined. Drawing on the World Bank Sovereign ESG Data Portal, this paper takes the annual change in renewable natural capital per capita, from the Changing Wealth of Nations accounts, as its dependent variable, for 149 to 151 countries between 1995 and 2020. It is explained three times, through parallel equations differing only in the ESG pillar of origin of their regressors, so that the three sets of determinants are estimated as distinct and comparable effects rather than compressed into a composite index. Each equation is developed through panel econometrics across six estimators, a comparison of six clustering algorithms ranked on eleven internal validity indices, and six supervised learners used to validate the specification rather than to predict. Median renewable natural capital per capita falls by 29.7 per cent and its share of comprehensive wealth halves, yet the aggregate stock is roughly constant: the coefficient on population growth is −0.913, indistinguishable from the value implied by the accounting identity, and becomes insignificant on the total stock. The decline is therefore demographic arithmetic. Climatic stress is the most robust environmental determinant, and its coefficient more than doubles when agricultural land is excluded from the dependent variable. Institutional trajectory dominates institutional level, a distinction recovered independently by the clustering. Relationships differ systematically between the two panel dimensions, and the renewable energy share reverses sign across them.

European packaging policy is built almost entirely around treatment, while the prevention obligation that accompanies it lacks an equivalent apparatus of measurable objectives. This article addresses the upstream question directly, asking what determines the quantity of plastic packaging waste that European economies place on the market. Plastic packaging waste generated per capita, from Eurostat, is regressed on the environmental, social and governance pillars of the World Bank Sovereign ESG framework for twenty-nine countries between 2014 and 2023. Each pillar is examined through three modules: a panel comparison of pooled, between, fixed effects, random effects, weighted and dynamic estimators, with inference re-assessed by wild cluster bootstrap; an unsupervised classification comparing six algorithms across eleven validity indices, with the dependent variable withheld for external validation; and a supervised comparison of six learners under leave-country-out cross-validation, used to validate functional form rather than to forecast. Three findings emerge. Energy intensity and carbon intensity per capita are robustly associated with generation and survive correction for multiple testing, yet environmental country types carry no information about packaging burden. Social configurations do separate generation, along a binary post-transition boundary, and the sign reversal on life expectancy between the cross-sectional and time dimensions is confirmed independently by the learners. Internet penetration is the strongest association in the study, while composite institutional quality is insignificant in every linear specification and emerges under unrestricted functional form as a threshold rather than a gradient. Prevention policy must therefore engage determinants that lie outside waste management, of which online retail is currently the most important.

Nuclear power is almost universally treated in the empirical literature as a determinant of emissions rather than as an outcome to be explained. This study reverses the direction of analysis and asks which environmental, social and governance conditions sustain nuclear generation within a national electricity mix. Using a balanced panel of the twenty-nine countries operating civil nuclear capacity between 2004 and 2020, comprising 466 observations, we estimate a single equation in which all three ESG pillars enter jointly rather than the pillar-by-pillar specifications common in this field, and we document that separate estimation reverses the sign of three of nine coefficients. Six estimators are compared: Pooled OLS, weighted least squares, random effects, two-way fixed effects, Between and correlated random effects. Fossil dependence is negative and significant at the one per cent level in every specification, consistent with technological lock-in. Water stress carries a positive coefficient, reflecting industrial concentration rather than resource abundance. Population ageing displays an inverted-U profile with a turning point at 14.3 per cent, and female parliamentary representation is negatively associated with the nuclear share, providing the first aggregate evidence consistent with the gender gap in nuclear risk perception. Electoral democracy reverses sign across dimensions, positive between countries and negative within them. All three pillars are jointly significant in five of six estimators. An unsupervised classification identifies four national configurations accounting for half of the cross-country variance, and country-blocked cross-validation shows that the linear specification outperforms every flexible algorithm, whose apparent superiority under random partitioning is an artefact of panel leakage.

This article examines how distinct segments of the financial system—bank-based finance, market-based finance, and long-term institutional investors—relate to CO₂ emissions per capita in 38 OECD countries over 2004–2020. Unlike studies treating financial development linearly and in the aggregate, we combine panel econometrics, clustering, and machine learning. Fixed-effects estimates associate private credit positively with emissions, consistent with a scale effect, and mutual and pension fund assets negatively, a pattern consistent with capital reallocation; that channel is not observed in data recording the size of institutional portfolios but not their composition, and is advanced as an interpretation rather than a tested mechanism. These are conditional associations, not long-run or causal quantities: the cointegration evidence is mixed, a residual-based test not rejecting a unit root in the residuals of the level regression while the conditional error-correction term is significantly negative. Robustness is uneven, and we report which result survives which estimator. Mutual fund assets retain significance under system GMM and pension fund assets under Mean Group estimation, neither under both, and the former depends in levels on Luxembourg; private credit and government effectiveness survive neither. GDP growth is the only regressor significant with a stable sign throughout. What is robust across every method is not the magnitude of any coefficient but the structure of the relationship: eight regimes in which similar emission levels arise under different financial configurations, and substantial nonlinearity. Policy implications are accordingly restricted to disclosure of portfolio carbon composition, improved data infrastructure, and regime-specific rather than uniform prescriptions.