Abstract
All countries face several issues while running the process of sustainable development—the absence of a uniform means of sourcing investment for sustainable development and the lack of a unified index for the evaluation of sustainable development. No doubt, ensuring sustainable development requires constant financial investments. Hence, it is essential to examine the investment sources for sustainable development at the country level and to comprehend if the current financial investment has a direct impact on the results of a country’s sustainable development. The article aims at identifying the financing sources for sustainable development for each of the European Union (EU) countries and assessing their impact on each of the EU countries’ sustainable development, which is expressed as the Integrated Sustainable Development Index (ISDI). After the detailed analysis of investment sources for the sustainability of the EU countries, two sources of investment, assignation of budget and the EU structural funds, were selected, and ISDI calculation was applied for twenty-five of the EU member states for the period 2003–2017. Correlation analysis (using SPSS software) helped to identify the strength of the connection and to select countries for the Johansen Cointegration Test (using Eviews software) in order to determine how variables interact. The results show that the combination of the assignation of budget and the EU structural funds has a positive impact on the coherence of five (Czech Republic, Denmark, Spain, Slovenia, and Austria) out of twenty-four countries.
Highlights
Sustainable development has been gaining more and more attention from both scientists and society, i.e., it is becoming more applicable at different levels, such as the global, national, business, and household levels
The null hypothesis was rejected in the following countries: Slovakia, Estonia, Czech Republic, Poland, Denmark, Spain, Slovenia, the European Union (EU), and Austria, which indicates that investment sources can be interpreted from the long-term perspective
In Slovakia, in the long-run, the EU funds have a positive impact, while budget assignations have a negative effect on the Integrated Sustainable Development Index (ISDI), on average, ceteris paribus
Summary
Sustainable development has been gaining more and more attention from both scientists and society, i.e., it is becoming more applicable at different levels, such as the global, national (country), business, and household levels. It is essential to examine the investment sources for sustainable development at the country level and to comprehend if the current financial investment has a direct impact on the results of a country’s sustainable development. There is lack of scientific literature investigating not the sustainable finance itself, but the impact of different financial sources on a country’s sustainable development. The current study is exceptional, as it provides new research outcomes in the field of supporting mechanisms of sustainable development. It contributes to the scientific literature by providing systemized investment sources for sustainability for almost all EU countries. The problem of the current study is to determine if the different financing sources of a country influence the results of the country’s sustainable development. The period of research covers the years of 2003–2017, as there are still no updates for 2018 and 2019
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