Stepping towards the Green Transition: Challenges and Opportunities of Estonian Companies
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The manuscript sustainability-2223152 was aimed at studying the challenges and opportunities of the green transition in Estonia based on an online survey carried on with 532 firm representatives, as well as a focus group and individual semi-structured interviews with 42 experts from various sectors.
To improve the quality of the manuscript, I propose the following:
(1) Please consider refining your abstract, according to the journal's recommendation, especially according to this point: the abstract should include information on the background – a broad and brief presentation of the general context of the analyzed issue.
(2) The introduction starts too abruptly – the second paragraph is dedicated (already) to partially explaining the research objective. The amount of references from the literature is rather low. I propose developing the introduction with a brief overview on the green and digital transition in the EU. Some papers that can be referenced in this regard:
Ortega-Gras, J. J., Bueno-Delgado, M. V., Cañavate-Cruzado, G., & Garrido-Lova, J. (2021). Twin transition through the implementation of industry 4.0 technologies: Desk-research analysis and practical use cases in Europe. Sustainability, 13(24), 13601. https://doi.org/10.3390/su132413601.
Popescu, M.-F., Constantin, M., & Chiripuci, B. C. (2022). Transition to a sustainable energy production and consumption model – mapping the patterns of success. Journal of Business Economics and Management, 23(4), 915–936. https://doi.org/10.3846/jbem.2022.17022.
Bianchini, S., Damioli, G. & Ghisetti, C. The environmental effects of the “twin” green and digital transition in European regions. Environ Resource Econ (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10640-022-00741-7.
(3) Please rethink the paragraphing style, because, for example, the Introduction consists of one-line-and-a-half paragraphs (see line 104-105; 125-126).
(4) The Introduction lacks to highlight the research gap identified in the literature and this needs to be improved. The novelty factor of this empirical research should be emphasized more, as well.
(5) The Spearman correlation matrix lacks the p-values. Please revise this and also consider restructuring the paper, as now some results (lines 459-488) are presented in the Materials and Methods section.
(6) Regarding Tables 6: Please consider naming the first VIF column "VIF – Model predicting Green costs"; and then, in the same table, add one more column named "VIF – Model predicting Green opportunity".
(7) Considering the title of the manuscript, I was expecting a more in-depth discussion on challenges and opportunities of the green transition for the Estonian companies (line 723). Please consider further developing this part of the paper, as it is supposed to be at the core of the paper.
(8) The discussion lacks a connection with the dedicated literature papers dealing with the twin transition in the EU. Please consider analyzing convergence and divergence points based on your empirical research findings and those that emerged from the papers already published in this field.
(9) The references list does not follow the template instructions. Therefore, I kindly ask the authors to format the references list according to the requirements of the Sustainability journal, which can also be found here: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainability/instructions#references.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
Thank you for taking the time to review our manuscript sustainability-2223152. We appreciate your thoughtful comments and suggestions. In this response, we have addressed each of your points. Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
Dear authors,
thank you for this contribution. The manuscript is well-written and structured. I am, however including a few suggestions for minor improvements:
Line 86 – 90 – the statements are not substantiated by any source. Please, indicate a source
Line 125 – 126 is confusing. Please, revisit
Line 175 – 197 – are more suitable for the conclusion. I suggest removing this part and integrating it into the conclusion. On the other hand, I suggest you still briefly highlight the key learnings from the study in this introduction section.
The general comment for the introduction is to shorten it a little – there are several repetitive lines, for instance, in lines 62-75 and 86 – 96, which are similar to the literature you present in chapter 2 analyzing studies in lines 266 – 315. The text reads very repetitively. I suggest downsizing it in the introduction and removing repetitive text, and going directly to the Nordic / Baltic / Estonian context in the introduction. This is because the literature review in section 2 already presents the results of a few studies in the European context.
Results – “increasing the cost of their company” – is about the value of the company? Or the expenditures inflicted upon the company?
One of the research questions is “How do these perceptions vary across different respondents?” – it seems to me that this part is not properly addressed in the main results and discussion part. I suggest you include a condensed summary of the difference in perceptions across respondents (at least the missing part regarding sectorial differences). I see that Appendix 2 presents a good summary, but I suggest including some learnings from the sectorial analysis in the main text.
Line 789 – this sentence seems to contradict itself “The limitations of the current study exploring the challenges and opportunities of 789 green and sustainable entrepreneurship in Estonia is not limited to following:..” please revise. The phrasing 'limitations' and 'not limited to' are confusing.
Discussion – the practical contribution is well summarized in policy suggestions. I am, however, missing a description of the theoretical contribution of your study. Please, include it.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
Thank you for taking the time to review our manuscript sustainability-2223152. We appreciate your thoughtful comments and suggestions. In this response, we have addressed each of your points. Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
The authors have improved the quality of the manuscript.
