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The relationship between the economic development of nations and the adoption of green initiatives by companies: a statistical study on 105 countries

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Abstract

The paper reports the results of a study whose purpose was to determine the correlations and potential directions of inter-dependence between economic development and green initiatives within national economies. The pilot study has included 105 countries with different levels of economic development, located in different continents and belonging to different integration groupings. The study was carried out by means of correlation coefficients computed between the indexes of the green initiatives implementation, and (a) the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita and (b) the GDP growth rate. The main result of the study is that the intensity of enterprises to implement green initiatives increases the levels of the internal economic development.

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Notes

  1. Major assumptions regarding the construction of these indicators stem from the conviction that economic growth contributes to the increase of well-being only up to a certain point. Beyond that, the growth of GDP per capita generates costs that sometimes exceed the benefits of progress (Lawn and Sanders 1999; Lawn 2005, pp. 185–208; Slesnick 1998).

  2. The HDI has been defined as a simple (until 2010) arithmetic or (after 2010) geometric average of normalizes indices in the three dimensions, which are health, education and income (Klugman et al. 2011, p. 3). Thus, its value for a single country depends on the highest- and lowest-achieving country in a sample in terms of three components (long and healthy life, access to knowledge and decent standard of living). Although the criteria for choosing the lower and upper bounds of the three dimensions changed over time (Klugman et al. 2011, pp. 3–4), the HDI value for a single country reflects still, as noted by Anand and Sen (1994, p. 8), the “relative performance across countries at a point of time”.

  3. For example: Kuznets (1941), Samuelson (1961), Hirsch (1976), Sen (1976), Dasgupta and Mӓler (2000), Bergh (2009), Costanza et al. (2009), Giannetti et al. (2015).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Public Administration, Faculty of Economy and Public Administration, Cracow University of Economics, Cracow, Poland

    Marek Ćwiklicki

  2. Department of Applied Economics, Faculty of Commodity Science, Cracow University of Economics, Cracow, Poland

    Łukasz Jabłoński

  3. Department of Human Sciences, University of Verona, Verona, Italy

    Riccardo Sartori

  4. Business Department, Faculty of Business, Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

    Marius Dan Gavriletea

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  1. Marek Ćwiklicki
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  2. Łukasz Jabłoński
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  3. Riccardo Sartori
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  4. Marius Dan Gavriletea
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Correspondence to Riccardo Sartori.

Appendices

Appendix 1

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Table 2 The list of green initiatives.
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Appendix 2

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Table 3 Analyzed countries divided into groups.
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Appendix 3

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Table 4 Descriptive statistics of employed variables.
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Ćwiklicki, M., Jabłoński, Ł., Sartori, R. et al. The relationship between the economic development of nations and the adoption of green initiatives by companies: a statistical study on 105 countries. Qual Quant 53, 339–361 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11135-018-0756-z

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