In our pursuit of Agenda 2030’s Sustainable Development Goals, and the Paris Agreement, this chapter examines if markets can promote sustainable development. It discusses the challenges posited by climate change and sustainable development. Furthermore, considering their limitations, should markets as a main vehicle for sustainable development be discarded, or can their shortcomings be overcome? Can markets become sustainable in the sense of fostering sustainability outcomes?

This handbook brings together a collection of seminal research on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and investigates the effectiveness of the 17 goals for achieving transformative change toward sustainable development. As a collection of inter- and transdisciplinary research from around the world, this volume explores the applications, implications, and best practices of the goals at thematic, regional, and national levels, providing specific examples from a diverse range of places, such as Australia, Brazil, China, DRC, India, Italy, the Sahel region of Africa, and the USA, among others. The book serves as a mid-term evaluation of the SDGs, bringing to the fore comprehensive experiences and evidence related to the SDGs, whilst highlighting the interlinkages between the different goals. The handbook is divided into two parts: Part I brings together groundbreaking research to define, identify, and present conceptual frameworks for a sustainable future, whilst Part II focuses on the policies, practices, and implementation of the SDGs. The chapters identify key aspects missing from the 2030 Agenda, such as global power imbalances, cultural diversity, Indigenous rights, and unsustainable levels of consumption; they also critically evaluate the overall delivery and effectiveness of the SDGs whilst outlining potential future directions for the post-SDG 2030 Agenda. This handbook is aimed at a diverse and global audience of academics and students of economics, business studies, political science, and development studies. It will also serve as a valuable reference for leaders in the industry, the public sector, civil society, and international policymakers keen to gain a better understanding of the SDGs. 

Referred to as comprehensive, universal, anthropocentric, and utopian, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have been unanimously embraced by United Nations member states in 2015, signifying a worldwide pledge toward specific objectives to accomplish by 2030. The SDGs aim to eradicate poverty and injustice, establish socio-economic inclusion, and protect the planet and its biospheres. The SDGs function as a forum for a global dialogue on efficacious resolutions to core issues pertaining to poverty and ecological deterioration.

Criticism is mounting that market-led and state-led initiatives for environmental impact disclosure are too limited in scope and that they rest on too strong assumptions about the quality and impartiality of monitoring and enforcement, with resulting insufficient effect on environmental sustainability. It has been proposed that citizen monitoring may contribute to counteract this void. However, to our knowledge, policy analysis in general and economics in particular has not paid much attention to this role of citizen monitoring. This paper aims to bridge that gap from an economics lens, by exploring the dynamics of disclosing local environmental impact and the potential role of citizen monitoring in environmental policy. To this end, the paper addresses monopolistic versus pluralistic environmental disclosure, letting citizen monitoring represent the latter. The study uses the mining industry as an illustrative case, because of that sector's particular transparency challenges in international value chains, typically with strong negative local environmental impact. It is shown how pluralistic information provision such as citizen monitoring can contribute to incentivizing more reliable information provision, especially in countries with weak state institutions, which is particularly important in the case of high-risk environmental impact. The findings should be of use for shaping environmental policy, providing valuable insights for both policymakers and scholars.

The mention of the COVID-19 waves is as prevalent as the pandemic itself. Identifying the beginning and end of the wave is critical to evaluating the impact of various COVID-19 variants and the different pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical (including economic, health and social, etc.) interventions. We demonstrate a scientifically robust method to identify COVID-19 waves and the breaking points at which they begin and end from January 2020 to June 2021. Employing the Break Least Square method, we determine the significance of COVID-19 waves for global-, regional-, and country-level data. The results show that the method works efficiently in detecting different breaking points. Identifying these breaking points is critical for evaluating the impact of the economic, health, social and other welfare interventions implemented during the pandemic crisis. Employing our method with high frequency data effectively determines the start and end points of the COVID-19 wave(s). Identifying waves at the country level is more relevant than at the global or regional levels. Our research results evidenced that the COVID-19 wave takes about 48 days on average to subside once it begins, irrespective of the circumstances.

We examine the nexus between financial inclusion and energy poverty. Analysing data for 27 energy-poor countries in the Sub-Saharan Africa region over 2004–2021, we employ sequential (two-stage), panel-corrected standard error (PCSE) and two-step dynamic system GMM (generalized method of moments) regression models, and control for endogeneity, CSD, slope heterogeneity as well as stationarity and cointegration patterns of the variables. Our empirical results show that financial inclusion significantly reduces energy poverty in the selected energy-poor countries. The study also finds a positive significant association between energy access and GDP per capita, while oil price and energy intensity are inversely associated with energy access. The results are robust to different control variables, estimation methods and subsamples. These findings have strong policy implications for energy-poor countries and point to the need for appropriate policies to promote financial inclusion for reducing energy poverty.

A popular uprising in 2014, led to a revolution that overthrew the sitting President of Burkina Faso. We investigate if individuals' risk attitudes changed due to this revolution. We examine this impact by the main determinants of risk attitudes: gender, age and level of education. The analysis is based on unique panel survey data, allowing us to track the changes in the risk attitudes of the same individuals before, during and after the revolution. Our results suggest that individuals become risk averse during the revolution but return back to their pre-revolution risk attitudes, with a slight increase in their risk attitudes, after the revolution is over.

Using Rwandan Integrated Household Living Conditions surveys (2013/2014 and 2016/17), we investigate whether financial inclusion leads to improved nutrition in rural Rwanda. Our empirical evidence shows a robust positive impact of financial inclusion by formal financial institutions, although informal institutions like tontines were ineffective in improving food expenditure or nutrition. Furthermore, the heterogeneous marginal effects of financial inclusion reduce the gender gap between the food expenditure and nutrition of female- and male-headed households. The results, hence, suggest that the country should promote formal financial inclusion to provide wide-ranging welfare effects by improving food security, nutrition and food expenditure in its rural communities.

We investigate the market performance of negatively screened environment social and governance (ESG) portfolio or sustainable investments prior to and during crisis. A general and simple method is developed under the ESG Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) framework for the assessment. The novelty is that this method can be employed when the parent portfolio is not a market portfolio. In this situation, both coefficients, alpha and beta, in the reduced form of regression have special interpretations and are informative. This paper examines 24 negatively screened ESG indices from the S&P, DJSI and MSCI data across various regions, firm sizes, and criteria of screening, for 2017 to 2021. Markov Switching Autoregressive (MSAR) model is adopted to identify the crisis regime. Our results show that the negatively screened ESG indices provide positive investors’ surpluses for ESG-motivated investors during the crisis, when the corresponding parent indices are the market portfolios. For ESG investments where market portfolios are not their parent indices, half of ESG indices under consideration still provide positive surplus with similar systematic risks as their parent indices during the crisis. The remaining ESG indices under-performs but has relatively lower systematic risks, implying resilience as compared to the corresponding parent indices during the crisis. Furthermore, we demonstrate the sensitivity analysis of treating a parent index as a market portfolio.