Search results

The essence of finance has become essential in the sustainability discussion in recent times as a result of the capital intensive nature of sustainable projects. This has motivated financial experts and institutions to develop various financial instruments and mechanisms to further advance the course of protecting the environment, and decreasing the release of excess carbon and GreenHouse Gases. This is to also provide the opportunity for funding Green or sustainable infrastructure development. This chapter advances a discourse on matters relating to sustainable financing of infrastructure projects. The fundamentals of sustainable or green funding of infrastructure projects, and sustainable schemes of financing green infrastructure projects are discussed.

Research management and administration (RMA) is a globally emerging field, but it is not yet established in Romania. The chapter analyses what are the formal expectations regarding RMA in the Romanian research system, and how these tasks are resolved on the ground. First, policy documents and informational packages of the major research funding calls are examined. Second, interviews are conducted with research project leaders, who undertook projects in different research organisations (state financed or private universities, state financed research institutions, or private foundations) in Romania. The interviews focussed on the challenges project leaders experienced in the grant seeking and implementation process, and on how they see the institutional and policy environment they work in.

In the concluding parts of the chapter, concrete policy recommendations are formulated that could help in resolving the research management related challenges, and in establishing RMA as a profession in the country.

This chapter investigates the importance of fashion houses in the progressive redefinition of tourism geography within a metropolitan context. The purpose is to highlight how these brands manage both to integrate marginal urban areas into the tourist circuits and to co-construct market-oriented heritage policies. Through the case of Fendi Roma and the EUR district (Rome, Italy), this chapter explores their degrees of involvement in the processes of requalification and estheticization of peripheral urban areas. The study found that the involvement of the luxury brand in Roman urban governance is symptomatic of evolutions in the political strategies pursued by public actors in their relations with private investors.

John Kenneth Galbraith’s social balance theory is an important theme in many of his books, particularly The Affluent Society, The New Industrial State, and Economics and the Public Purpose. Galbraith’s social balance theory states that forces driving private consumption in an industrial society will outpace the development and provision of public goods and services with consequences on the well-being of society (Stanfield, 1996, p. 49). The theory leads to several questions: (1) What is the specific relationship between private and public goods and consumption? (2) What is optimized with social balancing? (3) Does the relationship between private and public goods change over time? and (4) How do we evaluate the types of public goods we need? This chapter explores these questions and examines the type of public goods we need today to serve our communities better. For example, police presence and activities in many minority communities are now viewed negatively, as evidenced by the “defund the police” movement. Conversely, some have advocated for greater public spending on community mental health programs and new initiatives to deal with racism in communities.

We study the potential effects of pension underfunding on corporate investment, financial constraints and improved employee bonding using 10 Pacific-Basin countries (including the United States, Australia, and eight Asian countries) at heterogeneous economic development stages and different regulatory environments. We document that corporate pensions are significantly underfunded in most countries of our sample in the period of 2001–2017, when interest rates were ultralow in most countries. In addition, firms from countries with stronger employee protection and more generous retirement benefits tend to show higher levels of underfunding in their defined benefit (DB) pension plans. To the extent of pension underfunding imposing constraints on corporate investment, we find that firms in these countries can face more constraints on investment when their pension is underfunded.

Healthcare is indispensable for any civilisation to attain a good quality of life and well-being on both mental and physical levels. The healthcare domain primarily falls under pharma, medical, biotechnology, and nursing. Also, other fields may be aligned with these primary fields. Healthcare amasses the contemporary trends and knowledge of upcoming techniques to improve healthcare processes. The practitioners are primarily doctors, nurses, specialists and health professionals, hospital administrators, and health insurance.

It is a fundamental attribute needed for any society to attain good quality of life and well-being in mental and physical health. It is a fundamental right of people to receive good healthcare where drug treatment and hospitalization are available at a nominal cost, as a requirement of today’s modern era. There appears to be a significant disparity in the availability of good healthcare in rural areas compared to urban in India. Even though we enter the digital era with the facilities offered in Industry 4.0 and other advanced technologies brings about a significant change of overall processing within healthcare systems. During the pandemic of COVID-19, there has been digital transformation with success globally. Healthcare cooperatives are a new norm to support the healthcare systems globally. The chapter discusses Gampaha healthcare cooperative and reviews Ayushman Sahakar scheme in India. The reforms require time to evolve.

Implementing the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) unarguably demands huge financial investments. However, the United Nations has acknowledged the huge financial gap militating against the implementation of the SDGs worldwide, leading experts to question the possibility of complete implementation of the goals by their terminal dateline of 2030. While the bulk of the finance currently outlaid on the SDGs comes from traditional sources including foreign direct investments (FDIs), there is the need to focus more attention on developing and exploiting impact investments that are more suitable for financing development programmes and projects. In this chapter, the SDG implementation profiles of the 12 Arab West Asia countries concerning the five most targeted SDGs were evaluated and sustainable finance issues were discussed. Secondary data were retrieved from World Bank's DataBank. The data were descriptively analyzed. Based on the profiles generated, debt relief is put forward as a possible impact investment mechanism suitable for funding the SDGs. Specifically, this chapter recommends that outright cancellation of debts based on the debt-for-SGD swap could serve as some of the impact investments needed to boost the global drive for a developed, peaceful, and just world.

In February 2022, the Finance Minister of India in the Union Budget 2022 announced that the government proposed to issue sovereign green bonds to mobilize assets for green infrastructure. These bonds are a sort of fixed-income instrument where the money raised from investors is used exclusively to finance projects having a positive environmental impact. The announcement was in sync with India's commitment to achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2070. However, many issues come with it such as the complexity of green data, and the lack of uniform standards to measure the impact of green investments leading to allegations of “greenwashing,” among others. Its solution lies in the digital tokenization of green bonds using blockchain technology. Foreign investors scout for green bonds issued by growing markets like India, which have attractive valuations and good growth prospects. Marketing and issuing green bonds properly would have a far greater potential to bring investment to the security markets and the much-needed advancement in the sustainable sector. It is much more likely that green bonds will bring investment to the security markets and much-needed advancement to the sustainable sector if they are marketed and issued through digital tokenization. Financial regulators and policymakers can create a global framework for the application of blockchain technology in sustainable finance. This might entail tokenizing eco-friendly assets, issuing eco-friendly bonds, trading renewable energy and 2-2 carbon credits in a decentralized ecosystem, and decentralizing crowdfunding for eco-friendly enterprises.

This chapter seeks to demonstrate how blockchain technology can help issue green bonds and increase the overall efficiency of green finance in the economy. It also aims to scrutinize how such digital tokenization of green bonds would affect the security market and increase the standards of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) worldwide. While discussing how this process is shaping up and impacting the economies of various countries, it also seeks to provide suggestions to be taken into consideration while adopting the digital tokenization of green bonds.