The paper is devoted to identifying the level of social safety of society, taking into account the indicators of shadow economy, and developing its strategic scenarios as a component of sustainable development of Ukraine by 2030. The authors used the modern methods of normalisation, threshold vector determination, and dynamic weight coefficients in order to identify the level of social safety of society. The authors developed the structure and a list of indicators considering three components of social safety: The standard of living, the demographic component, and the quality of life. This method allows determining the list and severity of threats, comparing the dynamics of integral indices with integral thresholds in one scale, identifying the state of security, and defining strategic goals and strategies. The suggested approach is universal and can be used by any country, region, economic activity, or business to develop evidence-based medium-to-long-term sustainable development scenarios.

https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/21/8953/pdf

Social Safety of Society for Developing Countries to Meet Sustainable Development Standards: Indicators, Level, Strategic Benchmarks (with Calculations Based on the Case Study of Ukraine)

Industry 4.0 technologies provide critical perspectives for future innovation and business growth. Technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), Big data, Machine Learning (ML), and other advanced upcoming technologies are being used to implement Industry 4.0. This paper explores how Industry 4.0 technologies help create a sustainable environment in manufacturing and other industries. Industry 4.0 technologies and the crucial interrelationships through advanced technologies should impact the environment positively. In the age of Industry 4.0, manufacturing is tightly interlinked with information and communication systems, making it more scalable, competitive, and knowledgeable. Industry 4.0 provides a range of principles, instructions, and technology for constructing new and existing factories, enabling consumers to choose different models at production rates with scalable robotics, information, and communications technology. This paper aims to study the significant benefits of Industry 4.0 for sustainable manufacturing and identifies tools and elements of Industry 4.0 for developing environmental sustainability. This literature review-based research is undertaken to identify how Industry 4.0 technologies can help to improve environmental sustainability. It also details the capabilities of Industry 4.0 in dealing with environmental aspects. Twenty major applications of Industry 4.0 to create a sustainable environment are identified and discussed. Thus, it gives a better understanding of the production environment, the supply chains, the delivery chains, and market results. Overall, Industry 4.0 technology seems environmentally sustainable while manufacturing goods with better efficiency and reducing resource consumption. 

Understanding the adoption of Industry 4.0 technologies in improving environmental sustainability

This paper aims to check the impact of investment and institutional determinants on the energy efficiency gap. The findings of the bibliometric analysis confirmed the growth of research interests in identifying the core determinants of the energy efficiency gap. The central hypothesises are: the increasing quality of the institutions leads to an increase of green investments in the energy sector and the dual relationships between investment and institutional determinants lead to additional synergy effects, which allow boosting the decline of energy efficiency gaps of the national economy. For the analysis, the times series were collected from the World Data Bank, Eurostat, Bloomberg, for Ukraine for the period of 2002–2019. The following methods were used: the unit root test—for checking the stationarity of data—and the Johansen test and VEC-modelling—for the cointegration analysis. The findings prove that to reduce the energy efficiency gaps in Ukraine by 1% next year, it is necessary to increase green energy investments by 1.5% this year, and the political stability and public perception of corruption by 3% and 1%. The increase of the public perception of corruption by 1.47 points and of political stability by 2.38 points leads to maximising the recovery speed of the Ukrainian energy sector. Thus, while developing the policy to decrease the energy efficiency gaps, the Ukrainian government should consider the level of public perception of corruption and political stability.

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The Impact of the Government Policy on the Energy Efficient Gap: The Evidence from Ukraine

The strengthening of ecological conflicts due to the increase of the destructive impact from industrial companies on the environment provokes the development and implementation of the eco-innovation technologies. Besides, such technologies should allow obtaining not only the ecological benefits (the decrease of the negative impact on the environment) but also the economic and social advantages which correspond to sustainable development principles. This paper aims to justify the social, ecological and economic effects from implementing a new electricity production technology from post-process gas heat at companies. The data for empirical justification were obtained from the experiment of applying the electricity production technology from post-process gas heat at Polish industrial companies. In the first stage, bibliometric analysis was used for highlighting the scientific background of economic evaluation of the innovative activity on energy technologies of industrial companies and its impact on the environment and public health. Secondly, the economic and ecological efficiency of electricity production technology for the selected company was estimated. The results of the analysis confirm that new technologies allowed increasing the energy efficiency of the company by decreasing energy consumption, increasing productivity, etc. The findings prove that one of the ecological effects was the decrease of CO2 and SO2 emissions in the air. In this case, the link between the volume of CO2 emissions and the rate of morbidity if such innovative technologies were scaled was checked. The findings show that decreasing CO2 emissions by 1% leads to a decline in the death rate by 0.5%. If the new technology were scaled and implemented among similar industrial companies, it could decrease the rate of morbidity by 0.01% The results obtained could be used by the companies’ management and policymakers in the framework to achieve sustainable development goals.

https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/13/22/6106/pdf

Efficiency of Electricity Production Technology from Post-Process Gas Heat: Ecological, Economic and Social Benefits

The current approaches to estimating the level of energy security are based on applying a comprehensive approach to selecting the factors that affect energy security and the dynamics of processes in this domain. This article reveals the application of the model of energy security estimation and strategizing based on the systemic description of energy security as an object of management: the integral system, elements and connections, functions, processes, and the system’s material. At the same time, this model is able to take into account the dynamics of technological, political, economic, and other factors operating in the country and on the global arena. The energy security estimation model developed uses a modern methodology of integrated estimation: a multiplicative form of the integrated index, a formalized definition of the safe existence limits in order to provide scientific substantiation of the threshold vector, a modified rationing method, the principal components method, and the sliding matrix method to substantiate dynamic weighting coefficients. The paper demonstrates the systemic approach application to shaping strategic goals in the energy security domain in the context of sustainable development; the trajectory of energy security development is calculated by the method of strategizing that applies the principle “future is determined by the trajectory to the future” instead of the classical forecasting “past determines the future”. In general, the article shows the possibility of unifying the process of formalizing energy security (according to the needs of the researcher: country, industry, energy network, supply chain) as an object of management, estimating energy security status, and strategizing the regulatory sphere transformation in accordance with the target values for monitoring the effectiveness of management.

https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/14/8/2126/pdf

The Systemic Approach for Estimating and Strategizing Energy Security: The Case of Ukraine

The approaches to modeling competencies have been explored in the article and a model of a strategically oriented approach to the development of management competencies of the company "Industry 40" has been built An algorithmic “fuzzy logic” model to assess the input managers' competencies and obtain a final assessment as a parameter for achieving strategic goals has been formed A methodology for using the “fuzzy logic” toolkit to assess managers' competencies in obtaining the pair impact assessment, which forms a new level of the comprehensive assessment of managers' work, has been developed

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Manager competency assessment model in the conditions of industry 4.0

A comprehensive assessment of smart grids is critical for their development. Existing scientific research testifies to the urgency and complexity of the problem of implementing smart grids effectively, both in terms of a single project performance and from the standpoint of creating a local, and later global, energy system. The multidimensionality of smart grids makes it challenging to assess the effectiveness of their implementation. Difficulties in evaluation arise because it is challenging to consider technical, technological, economic, and other relevant aspects of smart grids’ development within a single evaluation system. There are currently a significant number of smart grid assessment systems. However, it remains debatable how systematically and comprehensively they measure the efficiency of a smart grid. This, in turn, raises the question of whether there is a universal evaluation system that integrally considers all the crucial components of smart grids and is suitable for evaluating smart grid projects of different content. This article analyzes the most well-known approaches to comprehensive assessment of smart grids according to the completeness of their coverage of smart grids’ most critical components. This paper identifies the essential areas for assessing smart grids according to the most cited and authoritative research and regulatory documents of the European Union. As a result, seven groups of indicators were identified. These groups of indicators are the basis for comparative analysis of the comprehensive assessment approaches of smart grids. The results of the study should help determine the appropriateness of applying a particular evaluation system. In addition, the analysis of existing evaluation systems allows the shaping of a universal approach to evaluating smart grids comprehensively and systematically.

Comprehensive Assessment of Smart Grids: Is There a Universal Approach?

The article proposes to form the sustainable development of the company within the optimization framework of mechanisms for attracting investments. It is proposed to determine the investment needs in the coordinate system of the used investment strategy in order to optimize the input parameters of the tactical and strategic development of the company. The influencing factors on the strategic decision about the beginning of the investment realization, made by investor and the recipient company are substantiated. An algorithm for calculating the appropriateness of attracting investments into the company based on the expert evaluation model has been developed.

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Sustainable Development of the Company on the Basis of Expert Assessment of the Investment Strategy

Recently, the topic of carbon neutrality has been gaining momentum. Such trends are mainly related to the adoption of important global agreements, such as the European Green Deal, as well as the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals. Such trends have a positive effect on countries, but in such situations, states must quickly respond to the challenges and needs of the world and have an understanding of how to respond to these trends.  To date, there are many ratings that can be used to form a portrait of a country (investment, social, environmental, etc.), but currently the rating of the green brand of a country is becoming more relevant. There are problems regarding its improvement and filling, yet this is a new evaluation of a country for this period of time. It is relevant today to study the nature and architecture of the concept of a green brand, as well as the search for the main determinants of its impact. The purpose of the article is to analyse publications in order to identify patterns in the development of the green brand and the social responsibility of business. The article provides a bibliometric analysis of research in the field of green branding and corporate social and environmental responsibility. The authors selected more than 10,000 works published in 2000–2021 indexed by the scientometric databases Scopus, Web of Science and Google Scholar. Using VOSviewer, the results of the bibliometric analysis were visualized on the definition map. This made it possible to identify seven clusters that combine 58 terms. As a result of the research, using the constructed bibliographic map, the connection between the terms ‘green brand’ and ‘corporate social responsibility’ was revealed.

Mariola Dzwigol-Barosz

Papers

Manager competency assessment model in the conditions of industry 4.0

The Impact of the Government Policy on the Energy Efficient Gap: The Evidence from Ukraine

Comprehensive Assessment of Smart Grids: Is There a Universal Approach?

Sustainable Development of the Company on the Basis of Expert Assessment of the Investment Strategy

A Country's Green Brand and the Social Responsibility of Business