Striving towards environmental sustainability: how natural resources, human capital, financial development, and economic growth interact with ecological footprint in China.

On the economic side, China has attained rapid development; yet, the ecological aspects pose threats to its sustainable development. The nexus between economic growth, natural resources, human capital, and financial development has an important inference for the environment, and therefore, this endeavor examines the influence of said variables on the ecological footprint in China via adopting the novel dynamic simulated ARDL approach by utilizing the data from 1985 to 2018. The outcomes of the analysis confirm that natural resources and financial development have a considerable positive short- and long-run relation with the ecological footprint. Besides, this depicts that natural resources and financial development lead to an upsurge in ecological footprint in China. Furthermore, human capital also upsurges the negative influence on the environment. Economic growth also upsurges the ecological footprint; however, the outcomes also yielded an interesting insight lending credence to the existence of the environmental Kuznets curve in China. So, it is important to offer awareness sessions to the community as well as to human resources working in different sectors regarding the significance of sustainability by giving training related to the reduction of the excessive consumption of scarce resources. Moreover, a watchful deliberation must be given while implementing strategies about sustainability concerning the specified factors and their potential impact on ecological footprints so that the targets of Sustainable Development Goals 7, 8, and 13 could be accomplished by the Chinese economy.

Assessing the Best Supplier Selection Criteria in Supply Chain Management During the COVID-19 Pandemic.

In the last 10 years, organizations and researchers have recognized the importance of sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) because of the consumers, -profit and non-profit organizations, laws and regulations, and consumer social and corporate responsibilities. Supplier selection, environmental effects such as social cooperation, and other SSCM programmes, can all help to achieve the "triple bottom line (TBL)" of economic, environmental, and social advantages. Sustainable supplier selection (SSS) and firm performance are important factors in supply chain management (SCM). Organizations will traditionally consider a new framework when evaluating SSS performance to obtain all-encompassing criteria/sub-criteria of the sustainability index by encapsulating sustainability. This paper compiles 12 subcriteria for three sustainability pillars, namely economic, environmental, and social performance. Despite the fact that many articles on SSS and evaluation were published during COVID-19, there seems to be little research on sustainability issues to date. The goal of this study is to suggest a fuzzy multicriteria approach to SSCM planning. Additionally, using the TBL method, the problem of determining a current model for SSS in the supply chain was investigated. The linguistic value of the subjective preference of experts is represented by triangular fuzzy numbers. Fuzzy TOPSIS (technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution) is proposed to use standard weights to rank SSS for qualitative performance evaluation. COVID-19, on the other hand, has a detrimental impact on SSS and company results. The organization's performance suffers as a result of the COVID-19 shutdown. The proposed method is demonstrated using an example.

Nexus between corporate social responsibility and financial and non-financial sectors' performance: a non-linear and disaggregated approach.

The objective of this study is to examine the relationship between corporate social performance (CSP) as proxy of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and corporate firm's performance (CFP) in the context of Pakistani financial and non-financial firms sectors. This study comprises two main firm's performance indicators such as market base (excess stock returns) and accounting base (returns on assets and returns on capital). The data set starts from 2011 to 2017 and consists of three hundred and fifty (350) firms on equal numbers of financial and non-financial firms. This study uses a non-linear and disaggregated approach for data analysis. The results of the linear model indicate that CSP and returns on capital have a negative relationship, while the non-linear model of CSP and accounting base performance as CFP have positive association in the domain of long run. There is a significant relationship that exist among environmental social governance (ESG) disclosure score, government sub-components score, and social performance. However, a U-shaped association found between CFP and government sub-components, which further suggest that governance has a vital role toward CSP and CFP components.