Projects are instrumental to the sustainable development of organisations and society. The integration of sustainability concepts into project management is also recognized as an important global project management trend. However, the practices do not reflect this role of projects and project management in sustainability. Therefore, the research reported in this paper studies how project managers perceive the contribution of project management to a more sustainable society, as an indication of the awareness that project managers have about their role in sustainable development. The study adopted grounded theory-based research based on qualitative data collection and analysis. The findings reveal that the sustainability theme is reasonably familiar to the project managers, though mainly in the meaning of sustainability of the project. The other meanings, sustainability by the project, sustainability of the organisation, and the project manager’s ethics and behaviour towards sustainability, were much less mentioned. The findings suggest that the project managers perceive the contribution of project management to a more sustainable society primarily related to the project processes and are less aware of the role projects play in changing organisations and society towards sustainability.

Although regulators have been around for three decades, their Independence is still not fully understood as an administrative institution in the governance of modern states. Neoclassic approaches support their existence, in addition to valuable contributions made from the perspective of transaction costs, institutional economics and political economy. To improve the trade-off between independence and accountability of regulators, several conditions for the appointment and functioning of regulators have been pu forward, but this remains a hot topic. The authors discuss the integration of regulators in the democratic organization of the State, address their legitimacy, and discuss the powers and duties inherent to independence, consistent with the requirements of legitimacy and accountability. Finally, they define the requirements for regulators to be appropriately integrated in State institutions and suggest a “triangle” to support independent regulators.

In this article, we conduct an empirical comparative analysis of the Portuguese Banking System (PBS) during the 1993-2009 period. Using a dataset drawn from the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) Banking Statistics – the Financial Statements of banks database, we examine the performance, in terms of the profitability, operating efficiency, and the capitalization of the PBS, in comparison to a sample of euro area banking systems. We found concerning profitability that PBS outperformed in terms of ROA, but underperformed relative to ROE. It outperformed in terms of operating and interest income, cost to income, and net interest margin efficiency. It did not perform differently in terms of the efficiency of operating and interest expenses. It was less exposed to liquidity risk, but more exposed to credit risk, and was undertaxed relative to its control sample peers. Bookvalue capital ratios document that the PBS was overcapitalized, but undercapitalized in terms of the regulatory capital ratio.

This paper analyzes a wide range of clients from a Portuguese bank who have held participation units in mutual funds over the past two decades, in order to understand the extent to which the SRI investor differs from the traditional investor.
The analysis shows relevant differences between these investors, in terms of both demographics and trading experience. In general, SRI investors reside in large urban centers (Lisbon and Porto), have higher levels of education, financial literacy and numerical skills, and hold qualified positions. SRI investors have greater trading experience in securities, higher number of mutual fund trades, and invest in a wider range of mutual funds than investors in domestic funds.
The differences between investors in SRI funds and investors in foreign funds are more modest, except for stock, bond, derivative and range of mutual funds traded. These differences seem to point to greater dynamism, diversity and trading activity for SRI investors compared to the other investor groups. Ultimately, this search for diversity may explain the investment in socially responsible mutual funds.

This paper presents a systematic review of the literature on financial literacy and savings. A total of 183 articles published between 2005 and 2019 were analysed. The review relied on hybrid methods, namely, descriptive, semantic network and narrative analyses. The lexical analysis of the articles’ abstracts identified 11 themes: financial literacy, financial literacy measurement, correlates, savings, savings type, financial education, target group, theories, personal finance, financial preparation and financial inclusion. The findings include avenues for future research.