The Importance of Green Investments in Developed Economies—MCDM Models for Achieving Adequate Green Investments

Abstract

Green investments help to create less harmful alternatives and adequate funds that contribute to economic growth, sustainable development, and social well-being. The paper aims to evaluate decision making on the choice of green investments based on multi-criteria decision making (MCDM). The applied methods are empirical and analytical based on the study of the literature, multi-criteria modeling, the determination of weights, and the ranking of criteria in deciding the green investment mapping of indicators, and mapping the indicators. The research used groups of indicators that reflect the main characteristics of green growth from the OECD database. The idea is to decide on the best green investment based on green growth criteria, which consist of grouped indicators according to the areas of the green economy rather than according to their values. The results of the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP method) showed that half of the investments in the green economy come from public sources (0.51) and the other half are private (0.25) and institutional investors (0.24), while the Best/Worst Method (BWM) revealed that the best criterion for the decision to invest in the green economy is the environmental and resource productivity of the economy, and the worst is the base of natural assets. This paper aims to enable decision-makers to use these results as weights for the overall assessment of green investments in ESG and to simplify the decision-making approach in future analyses.