The clean development mechanism in Eastern Europe: an in-depth exploration.

The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), a partnership tool founded under the Kyoto Protocol, grants potential opportunities to help developing countries achieve sustainable development. The present research examines the CDM projects in Eastern Europe (Moldova, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, and Albania). Although there were far fewer projects in this region than, for instance, China or India, it has some specific features that make it worth studying. Major findings are that most CDM projects in Eastern Europe involved a changing combination of two or more sources of financing, and the distribution of projects in the region was uneven. Moreover, although there was a small number of projects overall, they were all cost-effective, long-term and large-scale. The findings of the research call for improvements to be made to the governance of the CDM, by strengthening the international and national regulation of projects and by aggregating the scales of decision-making and actions so that real multi-scalar transnational governance - from the global level down to the local level - is implemented in a coherent manner. It is also recommended to carry out ex-post project evaluations, following which readjustments could be made.

Do environmental regulations matter on Spanish foreign investment? A multisectorial approach.

A gravity model is used to investigate the impact of the stringency and enforcement of the environmental regulation on Spanish investment flows abroad during the period 2008-2018. From the pollution haven hypothesis' (PHH) perspective, the research tests if offshoring and outsourcing processes from Spanish multinational enterprises (MNEs) were due to movements through FDI of high-polluting industries seeking refuge in countries with a low standard of legal environmental protection framework. The analysis includes FDI into primary, manufacturing, construction, wholesale and retail, professional services, leisure services, utilities, and other services. When no sectoral approach is developed, PHH seems to be not held. However, the multisectoral perspective states that MNEs in primary and manufacturing sectors seek refuge in countries with a low standard of legal environmental protection framework.

An economic evaluation of public programs for internationalization: the case of the Diagnostic Program in Spain.

This paper evaluates the Diagnostic Program in Spain which is a publicly funded program to promote internationalization of companies located in Andalusia (south of Spain). The methodology used is the propensity score-matching. The treatment group consists of companies which participated in the Program until 2008. The control group has companies which planned to participate in the Program but had not done so up to that date. The response variable measures the ratio of export to total sales for each company. Four covariates have been taken into account: activity, location, sales and number of employees. The analysis leads to the conclusion that the companies that participated in the Program improved their ratio of exports to total sales by about 10 percentage points.