Exploring the impact of ecological dimension on municipal investment: empirical evidence from Russia

Abstract

<abstract> <p>Investment has a crucial impact on the economic development of territories. Traditionally, scholars studied many factors influencing investment (cost of interest rate, labor productivity, GDP growth, financial firm's performance). At present, the existing body of literature demonstrates the shift of factors related to territorial investment attractiveness. Besides economic dimension, the ecological and social matters take key stages (the ESG concept and the triple bottom line concept). Our study is aimed at exploring the relationship between investment at municipal level and ecological factors, considering regional specifics and settlement patterns in Russia. We applied hierarchical (multilevel) modeling with spatial effects to accomplish a twofold goal: to estimate what share of investment variance attributed to municipal and regional scale; to distinguish between spatial error at regional level and influence of average investment in neighboring municipalities at municipal level. Our findings show that 32% total investment variance accounted for regional scale; investment is positively associated with population, production per capita and the ratio of circulating water and sequentially used water to used fresh water. The results of this paper could be useful in developing policy for attracting investment at regional and municipal levels. Given vast national territories, a variety of different regions and heterogeneous settlement patterns, our study lays an initial ground of assessing environmental impact on investment in Russia.</p> </abstract>