Does the green finance initiatives transform the world into a green economy? A study of green bond issuing countries.

Green finance initiatives have received global support in modern times, relatively in response to safeguard the environment and preserve natural resources through channelizing the investments to create a green economy. This paper attempts to evaluate and compare the green finance growth in green bond issuing nations across the world. This study also assesses the effect of green finance growth on the dependence of non-renewable energy resources especially fossil fuels that have been creating several environmental issues for the past years. This study develops a pressure-state-response framework to evaluate the comprehensive system of green finance growth that depicts the interaction of sub-aspects. We employ the entropy technique to calculate the weights at each level within the evaluation system. We also constructed empirical models to assess the relationship between green finance growth and dependence on fossil fuel consumption and found that there exists a negative relationship between the two. The results convey that proliferation of green finance instruments can reduce the dependence on fossil fuels and smoothen the transition towards a carbon negative world.

Hydropower, human capital, urbanization and ecological footprints nexus in China and Brazil: evidence from quantile ARDL.

The relations among ecological footprints, biocapacity per capita, gross domestic product per capita, natural resources, urbanization, human capital, and hydroelectric consumption are analyzed from 1971Q1 to 2017Q4 for Brazil and China. The novel quantile autoregressive distributive lag method was employed to analyze the long-run and short-run dynamics of environmental degradation. The findings revealed that economic growth has a positive role in the environmental degradation of both countries. However, human capital, natural resources, and hydropower have heterogeneous effects across quantile distribution and between the two countries. Based on the quantile dynamics of environmental degradation, the present study mentions policy implications for sustainable development.