Greenwashing as an Example of Ecological Marketing Misleading Practices

Nowadays, world-wide recognized corporations seek methods and instruments which enable them an effective flow of information concerning their actions as far as environment and sustainable development issues are concerned. It seems that marketing tools work well within this field. That is how ecological marketing (EM) originated with its advantages and drawbacks including greenwashing. The paper is committed to the analysis of this phenomenon, used to describe the unjustified appropriation of environmental virtue by a company to create a pro-environmental image. The article also presents common mechanisms of EM, shows how greenwashing works in practice and shares research results concerning purchasing habits (focusing on environmental issues) in China, USA and Great Britai

Impact of the Credit Rating Agencies on the Financial Crisis 2007–2009

The paper presents some ethical aspects of the credit rating agencies (CRAs) market in the light of the latest economic crisis of 2008. A historical background is also shown and how the CRA market emerged. It is emphasised how the functioning of CRAs contributed to the outbreak of the crisis and what were the consequences of over- or underestimated rating grades. The downgrading of a country has a significant influence on the deterioration of the economic condition. Simultaneously, it afflicts the citizens, who have to pay for it e.g. with higher tax rates. It is believed that overestimated ratings lead to a speculative bubble, which ends up with the crisis. The paper indicates the problems connected with the way that CRAs operate and how they relate to business ethics. The fact that those institutions are profitprofile entities, which earn their income from clients, whose financial instruments are assessed, may bring about a conflict of interests. Moreover, it is outlined how the governmental policies of countries left CRAs without any particular control, which in the end was a significant factor, too. Finally, some potential solutions are discussed, and how the approach of CRA managers should change in order to prevent the market from similar situations in the future

Non-Homogeneous Hydrodynamic Systems and Quasi-St\"ackel Hamiltonians

In this paper we present a novel construction of non-homogeneous hydrodynamic equations from what we call quasi-St\"ackel systems, that is non-commutatively integrable systems constructed from appropriate maximally superintegrable St\"ackel systems. We describe the relations between Poisson algebras generated by quasi-St\"ackel Hamiltonians and the corresponding Lie algebras of vector fields of non-homogeneous hydrodynamic systems. We also apply St\"ackel transform to obtain new non-homogeneous equations of considered type

Invertible coupled KdV and coupled Harry Dym hierarchies

In this paper we discuss the conditions under which the coupled KdV and coupled Harry Dym hierarchies possess inverse (negative) parts. We further investigate the structure of nonlocal parts of tensor invariants of these hierarchies, in particular, the nonlocal terms of vector fields, conserved one-forms, recursion operators, Poisson and symplectic operators. We show that the invertible cKdV hierarchies possess Poisson structures that are at most weakly nonlocal while coupled Harry Dym hierarchies have Poisson structures with nonlocalities of the third order

St\"ackel transform of Lax equations

We construct Lax pairs for a wide class of St\"ackel systems by applying the multi-parameter St\"ackel transform to Lax pairs of a suitably chosen systems from the seed class. For a given St\"ackel system, the obtained set of non-equivalent Lax pairs is parametrized by an arbitrary function