Abstract:

Ethical finance does not have one uniform history. Depending on the geographical area and cultural background in which it is practiced, differences in its development can be observed. Taking this into account, the aim of this study is to examine the development of ethical finance in Europe from the perspective of cultural paradigms as proposed by M. Gallicani in the research project “Analytic Atlas of Ethical Finance in Europe”. The authors' intention is not to undermine the paradigms, but to show the development of ethical finance in relation to these paradigms. We limited our research to a quantitative analysis of the value of socially responsible investments, some SDGs indicators, bank statistics, and others indicators that define the socio-cultural factors. In some cases, only general directions of the development of ethical finance were presented. To solve this problem, descriptive and multivariate statistics (correspondence analysis) were used. The research results show that contemporary ethical finance in European countries only partially corresponds to the cultural paradigms presented in the “Analytic Atlas of Ethical Finance in Europe”.