1 Introduction: circular economy, equity crowdfunding and renewable energy sources

The theme of circular economy (hereafter, CE) has become of primary importance for economic growth. Although its formulation dates back to the early 70s, it has found a wider consensus and application in recent years, especially in the EU and China (Stahel, 2016). Nowadays, CE is considered a key element for sustainable development to solve the tensions due to scarcity of primary resources, loss of biodiversity and pollution, proposing fresh solutions for waste management and energy use (Ghisellini et al., 2016; Gatto, 2023). Sustainable development has come a long way to reach its mainstreaming globally (Gatto, 2020). Among the most common and explanatory definitions of sustainable development, we find “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (Brundtland et al., 1987). So CE can be the key to reaching the prime goal of reaching sustainable development.

The emergence of tensions related to pollution has fueled a series of international discussions on the complex and dynamically interconnected nature of the environment, society and the economy (Kates et al., 2005). The formula that determines the interaction between human and environmental factors was modeled by Holdren and Ehrlich in 1974: the IPAT equation. The environmental impact (I) is thus summarized by the interaction of three variables: population (P), economic well-being (A = affluence) and technology (T = technology by per unit of consumption impact per unit of consumption). Population and economic well-being are directly related to environmental impact (Holdren and Ehrlich, 1974).

As the world's interest in this issue grew, more and more companies looked for ways to integrate into this new paradigm their strategies, to be successful and achieve benefits for the firm itself and for the society of which they are a part (Gatto, 2020). Nevertheless, to meet this target, there is a need for access to financial resources identified by scholars and experts (Gangi et al., 2021a). The limitation of the financial system is the lack of financial access, adequate external financing and the consequent need to elevate the financial ecosystem to support the transition to CE and cleaner manufacturing (Polzin, 2017; Gatto and Sadik-Zada, 2022); in addition, the implementation of CE business models leaning to sustainability requires a significant amount of time and investment by the company to progress step by step towards sustainability—as well as continuous monitoring and improvement of the product life cycle (Bressanelli et al., 2018).

A crucial sector for reaching CE and sustainable development is energy. As a principal resource for mankind and as a main source of carbon emissions, energy use mitigation is envisaged as a premier sector to be regulated (Drago and Gatto, 2022). The energy transition is, indeed, considered a pillar of the overall ecological transition happening in Europe and all around the world. In this vision, getting more considerate energy production and consumption and leaning towards more sustainable, renewable and cleaner energy mixes is seen as a priority for many countries and industrial sectors (Gatto, 2022; Cicchiello et al., 2023).

As regards the European regulatory plan, net zero policies have been outlined by the Paris Agreement which plays a significant role globally to reduce global warming to 1.5 °C (Runsen et al., 2022; Van Soest et al., 2021). The idea of net zero emissions is to reduce society's influence on the environment and climate. There are many pressures facing national economies including improving social and economic characteristics, ensuring energy security and fighting inequality (Tiwari et al., 2023). Collaboration between neighboring countries could encourage the development of a green economy to achieve common sustainable growth (Abban et al., 2023). Countries can pool resources to research innovative carbon mitigation technologies, share carbon concentration technologies and facilities in Europe, cooperate on environmental policy, and adopt environmental protection laws (Abban et al., 2023). Considering that the total impacts of economic growth on CO2 emissions are positive, this implies that economic growth could exacerbate CO2 emissions in the long run. Therefore, policies such as green finance and climate finance (i.e., carbon emissions trading market, green bonds and green credits) could be encouraged (Abban et al., 2023).

Renewable energy sources are essential to mitigate climate change and reduce carbon emissions, both through an accelerated transition and greater diversification. Fossil fuels are also subject to a volatile market influenced by a variety of circumstances, such as shortages of resources and armed conflicts such as the one in Ukraine. Various research (Giljum et al., 2016; López et al., 2017; Greiff et al., 2017; Schandl et al., 2018; Jiang et al., 2019; Ansari et al., 2020; Karakaya et al., 2021; Wang et al., 2022) focused on the ecological footprint and renewable resources. The ecological footprint (EF) is the most used environmental indicator in the literature and is known as the most complete because it includes many environmental factors. According to Ahmad et al. (2021), renewable energy reduces environmental footprint and institutional integrity promotes sustainability by moderating the association between economic complexity and environmental footprint.

As energy consumption increases economic output, the shift to renewable energy sources supports both economic growth and environmental protection goals, as previous research has shown that renewable energy has a smaller ecological footprint. Also Usman et al. (2021) argue that the use of renewable energy slows environmental deterioration while accelerating economic growth. To date, energy productivity is an essential component for reducing environmental damage. Increasing efficiency or greater energy consumption leads to an expansion of economic activity (Tiwari et al., 2023) and consequently promoting policy alternatives in this sector includes expanding the use of renewable energy sources, accelerating technological advances in the energy sector or implementing new green technologies (Xie and Jamaani, 2022).

In this interaction, sustainable finance is a valuable asset for generating improved financial access to the vulnerable and meeting sustainable development goals (SDGs) (Drago and Gatto, 2022). Due to the central position of finance in the present economies, it turns pivotal to assisting those ongoing transitions. The financial sector can even play a critical role in the transition to the CE by providing the necessary financial resources (Aranda-Usón et al., 2019); to this end, environmental, social and governance (ESG) criteria can design possible blueprints to meet these needs (Gangi et al., 2021b). However, new financing methods are needed to feed circular business models and innovations at scale (Geng et al., 2019; Goovaerts et al., 2018). Significant support may come from practice—in the last few years, besides certificates, labeling, ISO and compliance, the CSR culture has been consolidating the spread of socially-responsible investment (SRI), socially-responsible funds and green finance (Gangi et al., 2021c).

Based on this, recent studies have shown that the rise of financial technology (FinTech) can implement the transition of companies to more sustainable business models leading to better integration of CE practices by influencing the money supply in the CE (Pizzi et al., 2021a, b).

Belonging to the FinTech companies, crowdfunding platforms have recently emerged as a novel form of financial intermediation ensuring funding in a digital environment (Cicchiello and Leone, 2020). As a new and powerful tool for entrepreneurs, crowdfunding can help push the boundaries of existing theories and help develop new ones (Cumming et al., 2021; Vismara, 2019). Crowdfunding provides innovative early-stage companies with a way to secure funding from a large number of investors who share the aims and values of the company rather than applying the risk assessment analysis of an institutional investor or a venture capitalist (Valančienė and Jegelevičiūtė, 2014). On top of that, crowdfunding can foster socially-responsible initiatives (Gangi et al., 2021d) with paramount financial, economic, social and environmental results.

The shreds of evidence highlighted brought to the necessity of acquiring and managing new databases and fungible datasets. Specifically, new datasets exploring and merging the discussed issues altogether are needed. 

This work aims to provide a new dataset and data descriptor based on two databases: the first one collects data on energy and is the World Bank (WB)’s World Development Indicators (WDIs) (WB, 2022). The second database treats crowdfunding and business performance and is issued by Zephyr Bureau Van Dijk (Zephyr Bureau Van Dijk, 2022).

The paper is organized in this way: sect. 2 analyzes the methodological premises to construct the new dataset. Next, sect. 3 discusses the two sources of data and their description. Following, sect. 4 proposes the results and its positive externalities connected to an innovative system based on sustainability.

2 Methodology: data on crowdfunding for green entrepreneurial growth

In spite of the fact that growing scholarship is getting interested in sustainable development and energy issues, data papers and data descriptor publications are still in their infancy. Some previous publication has studied data for oil-producing countries to test institutional quality and sustainability (Gatto et al., 2022), energy efficiency, innovation and resilience policy (Aldieri et al., 2023; Gatto et al., 2021), or to validate the effectiveness and biases of data for energy sustainability, development and transition, focusing on the Eurobarometer (Gatto and Panarello, 2022) or green growth (Sarkodie et al., 2023). However, to date, we are unaware of data papers dealing with renewable energy and equity crowdfunding at the same time.

Having established that crowdfunding can be an important tool in the hands of companies for sustainable development, in this paper, for the first time in the academic literature, is provided data evidence of how the renewable energy shares and the sustainability inherent approach in a country can affect the success of crowdfunding initiatives. To do this, we constructed a new dataset that furnishes key information on the success of crowdfunding campaigns and we measured the sustainability orientation with different variables.

The contribution of this paper, therefore, becomes to carry data and guide to possibly demonstrate that the success of crowdfunding campaigns is/is not closely linked to the sustainable orientation of the countries in which these initiatives take place. This is only one of the potential applications of this dataset which can fit other purposes. Thus, we propose a new dataset and a data descriptor. To test this nexus, we analyzed four energy variables: i) renewable energy consumption; ii) renewable electricity output; iii) production of electricity from renewable sources; and iv) combustible renewables and waste on a sample of 4,704 crowdfunding campaigns.

These variables can be further analyzed by means of econometric and statistical techniques—as in Cicchiello et al., (2023). The sorting results can give clear indications of the outstanding relationships between the domestic approach to energy and equity crowdfunding campaign success.

The information obtained relating to crowdfunding was collected from the Zephyr database and the results of the campaigns were checked on the relevant websites. Furthermore, from this database, it is also possible to investigate the credit of the private sector held by banks linked to the financial resources provided to the private sector by other depository companies, in relation to GDP (domestic_credit_banks). The latter allows us to clean up the database to extrapolate the information we need to answer our research question when the examined variables are potentially correlated.

Several methodological steps were taken out to compile this dataset. Data were selected, collected, cleaned, analyzed, and assembled. The two datasets were harmonized, processed, and analyzed. Missing values and data treatment techniques were followed. Missing values implied dropping the related variable. This way, a brand-new dataset ready for use was obtained and released.

3 Data description

This new dataset formed is capable of providing key information about crowdfunding campaigns and their successes related to clean energy. Selected variables from this database were assembled. The Zephyr Bureau Van Dijk database was combined with another database—i.e., the World Development Indicators (WDIs), section Energy and Mining, issued by the World Bank (WB)—used to individuate selected renewable energy determinants at the country level.

The rationale behind this methodological decision is as follows. The WB’s WDI was chosen because it is also considered by previous studies to be the most complete for performing macroeconomic development and energy analyses, while Zephyr helps us gather information on the success of (equity) crowdfunding. Considering a time dimension ranging from 2009 to 2021 and a global territorial dimension, we extrapolated a sample of 4704 observations. The table below (Table 1) represents the distribution of the sample by country.

Table 1 Sample distribution by country.
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From the sample, we can notice that Great Britain (GB) records the highest number of crowdfunding campaigns (42%) unlike the United States (USA) which instead records 5%, probably due to a lack of information which also represents a limitation of this work. However, Italy also recorded a fairly positive number (11%). These numbers must also be parameterized to the different legislatures that characterize the different countries. To identify the determinants of the renewable energy variables we used the WDIs and established the variables as follows in Table 2.

Table 2 Description of the variables
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4 Discussion and conclusions: limits, practical and political relevance

Undoubtedly, the raising of capital via the internet and more generally Fintech is speeding up the collection processes and also supports companies in increasing the volume of financial resources necessary to take part in the Circular Economy system. At the same time, the raising of capital via the internet and more generally through Fintech is speeding up the collection processes and also supports companies in increasing the volume of financial resources necessary to take part in the Circular Economy system. Companies are increasingly concerned about ecological and energy decisions at both the private and public levels to orientate their business strategies and policies. Similarly, governments need to know more about firm’s behavior to tailor more effective policies.

In this work, the correlation between crowdfunding and the circular economy is highlighted. Involving small savers through easily accessible internet platforms assists the green transition process; financially because it allows bridging the financial gap suffered by start-ups who are unable to have easy access to credit from institutional investors (Pizzi et al., 2021a, b; Owen et al., 2018) and finally, it urges governments to implement a more flexible regulation (Cicchiello, 2019).

The present work proposes two contributions: on the one hand, the importance of an interconnected data framework that puts crowdfunding and renewable energy in synergy. This source can lead to further research investigations on the topic. On the other hand, the paper constructs a system for subsequent studies related to crowdfunding thanks to the use of the Zephyr Bureau Van Dijk database and energy due to WDIs explorations. Further to this, econometric, statistical or qualitative analyses can be performed in other papers. Future studies could use this new dataset to incite new policies in support of the green transition through the use of alternative investments such as crowdfunding that are accessible to private investors thanks to the fintech instrument which is able to simplify access to finance for companies replacing institutional systems. New research could also increase the study of the correlation between policies in support of renewable energy and the development of geographically more sustainable areas capable of increasing economic growth and the development of ecosystems based on a more accessible and innovative financial system that exploits new fintech tools through which crowdfunding operations can be carried out.

The dataset described highlights factors that are able to communicate with each other, increasing the involvement of actors who generally operate in the real economy. Taking part of these subjects in the financial economy allows the opening up of new opportunities and risks.

This research has important implications for companies, especially start‐ups and SMEs, financially constrained in traditional financial markets (Cicchiello and Leone, 2020). The business sector can benefit more from this opportunity: a company could strategically launch a crowdfunding campaign in a country oriented towards sustainability (and therefore more likely to be successful) by easily accessing resources and at the same time being able capable of giving better and lasting resources to society (Schiavone et al., 2020; Tubulingane et al., 2020; Zamfir et al., 2017) by pioneering and promoting innovative entrepreneurship. In addition, to create a solid system within which these variables can act in synergy, the support of new innovative policies is necessary. This would facilitate more flexible communication between the actors involved, as is already the case in Britain (Cicchiello, 2019).

Limitations in this inquiry exist. Databases issued by the World Bank and other intergovernmental organizations are usually not collected yearly. For this reason, in this work, the focus is on the most recent years ranging from 2009 to 2021. Working on such large datasets—such as that of the World Bank—implies a physiological inaccuracy due to the extensiveness of the temporal and territorial data.

The dataset may be important for future research, implementation and use in academic works, policy analysis, business, data analysis and practical use. However, this is just a simple dataset that has no ambition to be overarching or all-encompassing. The dataset should rather be considered for its fungible characteristics. Similarly, the data descriptor aims to be a guide to furnish explanations to diverse energy, economics and finance stakeholders.

Another limitation of the dataset used for this work is that it is limited to equity-based crowdfunding; moreover, due to the lack of data, we were unable to include disaggregated data on renewable energy in the analysis. Furthermore the unobserved error term in this study is subject to stochastic dependence, which can lead to bias and errors in the estimation of selection probabilities and in the parameter estimation when the occurrence of the analyzed event does not change the probability of the occurrence of the other variable considered (Cicchiello et al., 2023). Besides, we do not consider the effect of impromptu shocks—such as the ongoing Ukraine-Russia war, the energy crisis or the impact of COVID-19.

The purpose of this study is to give rise to a continuous academic debate that can analyze the correlation between crowdfunding and renewable energy so that finance and technology (crowdfunding) are able to unleash their full potential by supporting companies in the start-up process but also growth maintenance and to be successful in their business while contributing to the well-being of society.

The sketched data and the use of a new dataset can be valuable tools for investigating the success of crowdfunding related to sustainable development dynamics and CE applications. The selected features may be explored for detecting behaviors and determinants from both the private and the public sectors. These new data and the dataset are useful for understanding sustainable innovation and can be applied for research, institutions, policymaking and entrepreneurship purposes.