Growing awareness of the impact of business activity on the environment increases the pressure for governing bodies to address this issue. One possibility is to encourage or force the market into green behaviours. However, it is often hard to predict how different actions affect the market. Thus, to help with that, in this paper, we have proposed the green behaviour spreading model in the bank-company multilayer network. This model allows assessing how various elements like the duration of external influence, targeted market segment, or intensity of action affect the outcome regarding market greening level. The model evaluation results indicate that governing bodies, depending on the market "openness" to green activities, can adjust the duration and intensity of the proposed action. The strength of the impact can be changed by the public or private authority with the use of obligatory or voluntary rules and the proportion of influenced banks. This research may be helpful in the process of creating the optimal setups and increasing the performance of greening policies implementation.

Sustainable financial systems are gaining importance in light of the increasing impacts of ESG risk in the real and financial spheres. It is believed that sustainable financial systems effectively support the management of this risk on national, international and global scales, hence the, inter alia, UNEPFI recommendations. Work on building sustainable financial systems differs in the degree of advancement at the level of individual countries and institutions. The aim of the article is to show that the level of advancement of activities in building sustainable financial systems depends on the attitude and awareness of financial managers and financial institutions and, consequently, on the banking system model. As a result of the research, it was shown that bank finance managers (German-Japanese model) were more aware of the role and importance of sustainable financial systems in the management of financial institutions than financial managers who represent capital market institutions (Anglo-Saxon model).

Entrepreneurs perceive and build sustainable business models in different ways. The actual and declared entrepreneurs’ attitudes and actions towards sustainable business models differ. The aim of the study was to determine whether the declarations of enterprises referring sustainable business models are coherent with actions they have taken to build sustainable business models. The basis of the study was data collected during focus interviews conducted in 2019 among business owners or their financial directors. The survey involved 60 respondents representing enterprises, including 34 referred to as micro and small enterprises, 17 medium enterprises, and 9 large enterprises. The study used the development pattern method described by Z. Hellwig. As a result of the study, four typological groups of enterprises were obtained, the first being the best and closest benchmark, and the fourth being the worst and the most distant from the benchmark. As a result of the study, it was confirmed that enterprises that declare a sustainable business model are more likely to undertake social and environmental activities than enterprises that delineate that they do not implement such a model. However, this is not a general conclusion, because in the fourth typological group, in which sustainability activities were sporadically identified, no enterprises declared a sustainable business model, and vice versa, in the first typological group, one company declared that they did not have a sustainable business model.

Finance and financial markets are the engine of sustainability. Financial institutions are one of the main channels influencing entrepreneurs. By determining the conditions of access to financial services, the financial market affects the decisions and attitudes of entrepreneurs, including their business models. The purpose of this article is to diagnose whether (and to what extent) banks affect the decisions and business models of enterprises. The research material is based on data obtained by survey, supplemented by in-depth interviews with 60 Polish enterprises operating in ESG-sensitive sectors. The study uses correspondence analysis, a method of multivariate analysis. The results of the study indicate that financial institutions have an impact on enterprises that have a business model and such enterprises declare their will to co-operate with the bank and to implement the ESG risk reduction measures recommended by the banks. On the other hand, enterprises that do not have developed business models do not succumb to the bank’s influence and co-operation with the bank is limited to a minimum; usually considering only account keeping and monetary settlements related to it.

Environmental degradation is currently one of the biggest challenges for policy makers designing public policies. In particular, the emission of greenhouse gases as side effect of human activity is a significant problem. One of the methods and instruments used in the public sector to limit the progressing environmental degradation are environmental taxes. It is an element of fiscal policy used by countries around the world, including in the European Union, although it has no compulsory nature. So far, studies on the effectiveness of environmental taxes are not explicit. The effects of environmental taxes differ in EU countries, also environmental taxes systems are of different construction, and tax policies in this scope vary as well. This paper uses the taxonomic measure based on the Weber median to analyse the link between environmental taxes and environmental degradation. 23 EU countries belonging to OECD were analysed for 2016, on the basis of the Eurostat dataset. The study attempts to answer the question whether environmental taxes are an effective instrument for shaping environmental policy and whether they can become an important tool in the decision-making process at the government level. The paper assumes that the role of environmental taxes and their impact is different in developed and converging economies. The results prove a positive relationship between environmental taxes and environmental performance in the case of one indicator (Share of renewable energy in gross final energy consumption) for others a negative link is reported.