The paper examines the sustainability commitment–implementation gap in Textile, Apparel, and Fashion (TAF) in-dustries by analyzing over 12,300 business media news articles published between 2019 and 2023. Using quantita-tive co-occurrence frequency metrics. We categorized communications as either forward-looking commitment an-nouncements or retrospective result reporting across defined sustainability indicators. The findings reveal a signif-icant imbalance: 83 % of sustainability-related coverage focused on announcing initiatives, commitments, or future targets, while only 27 % reported measurable outcomes or achievements. Specific, quantifiable metrics of environ-mental, economic, or social impact remained rare even within outcomes reporting. The findings suggest that sus-tainability communication in TAF industries remains more strongly oriented toward future sustainability commit-ments than toward implementation-related evidence and measurable sustainability outcomes. The study contributes to sustainability communication and organizational decoupling research by demonstrating how business media discourse may reflect imbalances between sustainability commitments and implementation-related sustainability practices in TAF industries.
This study conducts an empirical analysis on the influence of lagged R&D investment on the financial performance of manufacturing companies listed on mainland China exchanges (A-shares) from 2015 to 2023. It investigates the dynamic relationship between R&D investment and financial performance during the COVID-19 pandemic. First, it examines the relationship between R&D investment and financial performance in the manufacturing companies of different ownership structures. It concludes that a lag in R&D investment will significantly affect financial performance and their relationship follows an inverted “U”-shape pattern. Second, it found that the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted this inverted “U”-shaped relationship. Third, it discovered that in non-state-owned manufacturing companies, the inverted “U”-shaped relationship between R&D investment and financial performance is significant, while this relationship is not significant in state-owned manufacturing companies.
Why do European Union member states that invest nearly as much in public research as the innovation leaders produce a fraction of their innovation output? This paper argues that the answer is structural rather than parametric. The EU innovation space is not a continuum of greater or lesser efficiency operating on a common production function - it contains two qualitatively distinct regimes separated by a threshold in private absorptive capacity, below which the standard conversion mechanisms between knowledge inputs and innovation outputs break down simultaneously. Where private capacity to absorb and commercialise knowledge falls short of this threshold, the symptoms compound rather than offset one another: public research generates knowledge that has nowhere to go; doctoral graduates emigrate to systems capable of deploying their skills; and internationally mobile researchers use peripheral academic environments as waypoints rather than destinations. The conventional policy reflex - to raise public research investment in the expectation that outputs will follow - therefore misdiagnoses the constraint, treating a structural discontinuity as a matter of degree. Drawing on a decade of European Innovation Scoreboard data, the paper identifies the private R&D threshold that separates these regimes and documents the sign reversal in the innovation returns to researcher mobility across them. The central policy implication follows directly: capacity building must precede - not merely accompany - investment in public knowledge production, since absent a private sector able to absorb it, additional public research deepens the very leakage it is intended to remedy.
The paper’s objective is to examine the relationship between sustainability and financial performance for a sample of 575 listed energy companies, extracted from the LSEG database. Sustainability is captured both through ESG scores and SDGs reporting indicators. Financial performance is assessed in terms companies’ size (turnover) as well as profitability (proxied by return on common equity and operating income). To capture both direct relationships and indirect mechanisms between variables, the research method combines robust regressions, generalized structural equation modeling and Bayesian networks. The results show that the link between sustainability and performance is not uniform and suggest that the effects of sustainability on performance cannot be reduced to a single direct relationship. Firms' performance reflects the interaction between their structural characteristics, especially size, and the different components of sustainability. ESG scores appear closer to observable financial results, while SDG reporting reflects companies’ strategic orientation rather than immediate economic effects.
Food security is vital to national security, and digital transformation boosts grain firms’ competitiveness. This paper explores the relationship between digital transformation peer effect, and corporate welfare, using the data of China’s Shanghai and Shenzhen A-share listed grain-related enterprises from 2012 to 2023 as a sample. The study reveals substantial positive regional and “industry” peer effects stemming from the digital transformation of grain-related enterprises, both of which can improve corporate welfare, as demonstrated by a number of robustness and endogeneity tests. Mechanism tests indicate that the digital transformation peer effects of grain-related enterprises enhance corporate welfare by alleviating financing constraints and improving technological innovation; corporate ESG performance amplifies the impact of this peer effect on corporate welfare. Heterogeneity analysis reveals that the digital transformation peer effects of grain-related enterprises have a more significant effect on the welfare enhancement of industry-leading enterprises, enterprises in non-major grain-producing regions, and mature enterprises.
