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China is a significant energy consumer with increasingly severe resource constraints and environmental problems, requiring low-carbon energy transformation and encouraging high-quality energy development (HED). Green finance significantly affects the effect on HED as a cutting-edge financial strategy to support environmental improvement and encourage green development.

Using panel data from 30 provinces from 2007 to 2019 and the system-generalized method of moments method, this paper investigates the impact of green finance on HED, and further explores their threshold effect, heterogeneous and asymmetry analysis.

The main results indicate that: (1) green finance positively affects HED in China; in other words, a 1% increase in the green finance index will boost HED by an average of 0.767%; (2) as the economy improves, the positive impact of green finance on HED will be even more significant and (3) the contribution of green finance to HED is more significant in the northern provinces and areas with lower HED levels.

This paper puts forward relevant policy suggestions to further improve the construction of the green financial system.

Basing himself on the premise that present economic progress cannot follow the ‘Business as usual paradigm’ and hope for continued and unlimited progress, the author holds that we need to look into the larger dimensions of growth and development, which include social, environmental and other complex factors. So in this chapter, the author makes some pertinent suggestions for a sustainable growth model inspired by green growth and degrowth.

The first section evaluates the salient features of green growth and its drawbacks. It is followed by a discussion on the notion of degrowth, with its challenge to change the direction of growth (economic, ecological, social and cultural), without which human civilisation, as we know it today, may not survive. Finally, in the concluding chapter, based on these two notions of green growth and degrowth, an all-inclusive and sustainable regrowth model is propounded.

By creating an awareness of the need to shift development goals and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), the author argues that we could use economic regrowth strategically and responsibly to make the world more sustainable and viable. Responsible corporates will make their contribution to such an organic, resilient and sustainable regrowth and their CSR activities could be the starting point for this change, without which humanity's future is seriously threatened.

Finally, the author acknowledges that humanity has profited from the tremendous technological and economic progress we have made in the last four centuries, learnt from its mistakes and are ready to reorient ourselves individually and collectively towards a sustainable economic regrowth.

This study aims to examine the relationship between financial development (FD), financial risk, green finance and innovation related to carbon emissions in the G7 economies.

This quantitative study examines the roles that financial development [FD: Domestic credit to private sector by banks as percentage of gross domestic product (GDP)], economic growth (GDP: Constant US$ 2015), financial risk index (FRI), green finance (GFIN: Renewable energy public research development and demonstration (RD&D) budget as percentage of total RD&D budget), development of environment-related technologies (DERTI: percentage of all technologies) and human capital (HCI: index) have on the environmental quality of developed economies. Based on panel data, the study uses a novel approach method of moments quantile regression as a main method to tackle the issue of cross-sectional dependency, slope heterogeneity and nonnormality of the data.

The study confirms that increasing economic development increases emissions and negatively impacts the environment. However, efficient resource allocation, improved financial systems, and green innovation are likely to contribute to emission mitigation and the overall development of a sustainable viable economy. Furthermore, the study highlights the importance of risk management in financial systems for future emissions prevention.

The study uses a reliable estimation procedure, which extends the discussion on climate policy from a COP-27 perspective and offers practical implications for policymakers in developing more effective emission mitigation strategies.

The study offers policy suggestions for a sustainable economy, focusing on both COP-27 and the G7 countries. Recommendations include implementing carbon pricing, developing carbon capture and storage technologies, investing in renewables and energy efficiency and introducing financial instruments for emission mitigation. From a COP-27 standpoint, the G7 should prioritize transitioning to low-carbon economies and supporting developing nations in their sustainability efforts to address the pressing challenges of climate change and global warming.

In comparison to the literature, this study examines the importance of financial risk for G7 economies in promoting a sustainable environment. More specifically, in the context of FD and national income with carbon emissions, previous researchers have disregarded the importance of green innovation and human capital, so the current study fills the gap in the literature related to G7 economies by exploring the link between the identified variables related to carbon emissions.

The objective is to develop an empirical model estimating the relationship and interaction amongst the factors affecting and enhancing green finance (GF) in developing economies like India.

Around nine growth-accelerating enablers of green financing were found through literature and unstructured interviews and analysed using the total interpretive structural modelling (TISM) method. The hierarchical link between each factor is established using TISM, and further to evaluate the driver-dependent relationship the Matriced’ Impacts Croises Appliquee Aaun Classement (MICMAC) approach is utilised.

The findings demonstrate an interrelationship between growth-accelerating factors, where the political environment and information and communication technology (ICT), have minimal dependency but a strong driving force. Political environment and ICT are found as strategic-level factors lying at the bottom of the model driving towards the dependent variables. The government should focus on enacting effective policies such as the green credit guarantee scheme and carbon credit and establishing a regulatory framework to enhance green financing.

This study examines the literature to generalise the findings and focus on the primary motivators for developing green financing. To increase green financial activity, practitioners must concentrate on aspects with significant driving forces. Furthermore, it makes organisations more profitable, efficient and competitive and promotes long-term growth.

The study is the first in the literature which identifies the growth-accelerating factors of green financing using the TISM and MICMAC-based hierarchical models.

Accelerating the green economy’s transition is a practical means of lowering emissions and conserving energy, and its effects on the greenhouse effect merit careful consideration. Growing environmental deterioration has compelled decision-makers to prioritize sustainability alongside economic growth. Policymakers and the business community are interested in green investment (GRE), but its effects on social and environmental sustainability are still unknown. Based on this, this study aims at looking into the time-frequency interplay between GRE and carbon dioxide emissions and assessing the impacts of economic growth, financial globalization and fossil fuel energy (FUE) usage on this nexus in Vietnam across different time and frequency domains.

The authors employ continuous wavelets, cross wavelet transforms, wavelet coherence, Rua’s wavelet correlation and wavelet-based Granger causality tests to capture how the domestic variance and covariance of two-time series co-vary as well as the co-movement interdependence between two variables in the time-frequency domain.

The results shed new light on the fact that GRE will increase the levels of environmental quality in Vietnam in the short and medium run and there is a bidirectional causality between the two indicators across different time and frequencies. In addition, when the authors observe the effect of economic growth, financial globalization and fossil fuel energy consumption on this interplay, the findings suggest that, in different time and frequencies, any joined positive change in these indicators will move the CO₂ emissions-GRE nexus.

Policymakers and governments can greatly benefit from this topic by utilizing the function of economic institutions in capital control of GRE and CO₂ emissions and modifying the impact of GRE on the greenhouse effect by accelerating the green growth of economic industries.

The current work contributes to the current literature on GRE and CO₂ emissions in several dimensions: (1) considering the sustainable development in Vietnam, by employing a new single-country dataset of GRE index, this paper aims to contribute to the growing body of research on the factors that influence CO₂ emissions, as well as to provide a detailed explanation for the relationship between GRE and CO₂ emissions; (2) localized oscillatory components in the time-domain region have been used to evaluate the interplay between GRE and CO₂ emission in the frequency domain, overcoming the limitations of the fundamental time-series analysis; (3) the mediation role of economic growth, financial globalization and FUE in affecting the GRE-CO₂ relationship is empirically explored in the study.

Considering the evolving importance of green finance, this study uses climate-related development mitigation finance as a proxy of green finance and investigates the impact of green finance on ecological footprint as an indicator of environmental quality along with the influence of economic growth, renewable energy, greenhouse gas emissions, trade openness and urbanization across 47 developing countries over the period 2000–2018.

After finding the presence of cross-sectional dependency among variables, the second-generation panel unit root test was employed to detect the order of integration among the variables. Since all the variables were found to be stationary, Westerlund cointegration technique was employed to detect the long-run relationship among the variables. Then, the long-run elasticity among the dependent and independent variables was tested using fully modified ordinary least squares (FMOLS), dynamic ordinary least squares (DOLS) and pooled mean group–autoregressive distributed lag (PMG–ARDL) approaches.

The empirical findings suggest the presence of long-run relationship among all the variables, namely, ecological footprint, green finance, economic growth, renewable energy consumption, greenhouse gas emissions, trade openness and urbanization for the selected developing countries in the sample. Furthermore, economic growth, greenhouse gas emissions, trade openness and urbanization, all have a positive and significant impact on the ecological footprint, whereas renewable energy consumption and green finance have a significant and negative impact on the ecological footprint, which supports the view that environmental quality is improved with the greater use of renewable energy technologies and allocation of greater amounts of more green finance.

The empirical results of this study offer policymakers and regulators some implications for environmental policy for protecting the countries from ecological issues.

This study aims to propose a refined dynamic network slacks-based measure (DNSBM) to evaluate the efficiency of China's regional green innovation system which consists of basic research, applied research and commercialization stages and explore the influencing factors of the stage efficiency.

A two-step procedure is employed. The first step proposes an improved DNSBM model with flexible settings of stages' input or output efficiency and uses second order cone programming (SOCP) to solve the non-linear problem. In the second step, least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) and Tobit models are used to explore the influencing factors of the stage efficiency. Global Dynamic Malmquist Productivity Index (GDMPI) and Dagum Gini coefficient decomposition method are introduced for further discussion of the productivity change and regional differences.

On average, Chinese provincial green innovation efficiency should be improved by 24.11% to become efficient. The commercialization stage outperforms the stages of basic research and applied research. Comparisons between the proposed model and input-oriented, output-oriented and non-oriented DNSBM models show that the proposed model is more advanced because it allows some stages to have output-oriented model characteristics while the other stages have input-oriented model characteristics. The examination of the influencing factors reveals that the three stages of the green innovation system have quite diverse influencing factors. Further discussion reveals that Chinese green innovation productivity has increased by 39.85%, which is driven mainly by technology progress, and the increasing tendency of regional differences between northern and southern China should be paid attention to.

This study proposes an improved dynamic three-stage slacks-based measure (SBM) model that allows calculating output efficiency in some stages and input efficiency in the other stages with the application of SOCP approach. In order to capture productivity change, this study develops a GDMPI based on the DNSBM model. In practice, the efficiency of regional green innovation in China and the factors that influence each stage are examined.

While sustainable growth extends the use of resources, it is crucial to explore green growth (GG) that ensures growth sustainability through the adoption of renewable energy. Thus, this study is motivated to investigate the influence of renewable energy on GG in 19 emerging countries spanning a decade and a half (2000–2020). This study aims to provide a quantitative examination of how renewable energy contributes to sustainable economic growth.

This study uses advanced dynamic common correlated effect techniques to assess the long-term effectiveness of renewable energy on GG. Additionally, it uses Dumitrescu and Hurlin causality tests to identify synchronicity between the respective variables.

The findings of this study reveal that the adoption and utilisation of renewable energy effectively promote GG in emerging economies. However, in contrast, the significantly greater negative influence of trade openness on GG compared to renewable energy highlights the inadequacy and limited impact of cleaner energy alone.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, existing literature predominantly focuses on investigating the relationship between renewable energy and economic growth, with only a limited number of studies exploring the impact on GG. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study would be the first to analyse this relationship in these emerging countries. Furthermore, previous estimation frameworks used in prior studies often overlook the crucial factor of cross-sectional dependence (CSD) among countries. Therefore, this study addresses this issue using a contemporary econometric approach that deals not only with CSD but other biases, like endogeneity, autocorrelation, small sample bias, etc.

With increasing environmental issue and problems, this study aims to explore how the female directors' foreign experience and corporate green commitment in emerging economics like China from 2008 to 2020.

The authors draw data of all ‘A’ share listed firms listed on Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges from 2008 to 2020 from the renowned Chinese database China Stock Market and Accounting Research (CSMAR). The study's data collection start from 2008, because data about green commitment are not available on CSMAR before 2008 and final year is 2020 because data about green commitment is available at the time of data collection. After dropping observations with missing data, the study's final sample contains 20,255 firm year-observations. Finally, in accordance with prior studies, the authors classified enterprises according to the “China Securities and Regulatory Commission” (2012) to categorize firms.

The authors find that female directors' foreign experience enhances the green commitment in Chinese listed companies. In additional analysis, the authors find this relationship is more pronounced when one or more foreign directors. The study's findings are robustness to different economic techniques and alternative measure of dependent variables and endogeneity concerns. Overall, the study's findings show that female directors with foreign experience transmit environmental and sustainable knowledge and practices to Chinese companies.

First, the authors believe that this is the first study to analyze the impact of the overseas experience of female directors on corporate green commitment. Most previous studies have examined the influence of the presence of female directors or different attributes such as age, education and independence of female directors on board decisions, in order to protect the interests of multiple stakeholders (Elmagrhi et al., 2019; He and Jiang, 2019; McGuinness et al., 2017). This study finds that, in addition to other different attributes, the foreign experience of female directors also has a significant role in promoting corporate green commitment. By pushing corporate green commitment, these women directors leverage their experience in advanced economies abroad to add to the Chinese government's environmental and sustainability goal of achieving net zero carbon by 2060. As such, this is one of the first studies to highlight the experiences of female directors in transferring environmental and sustainability practices to Chinese companies. Second, the authors add to the literature by integrating two important board perspectives, such as gender diversity and the impact of foreign experience on corporate green commitment. Previous research has explored the presence or absence of female directors on board or foreign experience. However, this study adds to the literature by introducing important attributes of the influence of female directors' foreign experience on decision making. Third, this study provides evidence on the impact of foreign independent directors on the board. The authors document foreign independent directors enhance the relationship between female directors' foreign experience and corporate green commitment. The study's findings complement previous research by Liang and Renneboog (2017), showing that female directors with foreign experience transfer advanced levels of environmental and sustainable practice knowledge to Chinese companies.

The role of energy or emission intensive firms face contradictory demands from advancing economic development and environmental improvement and protection and thus require appropriate policy interventions to balance the two needs. China's “Green Credit” policy that restricts loans to energy or emission intensive firms provides an example to study the impact of these kinds of policy intervention.

Using the data of all A-share listed companies in Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges, our paper empirically analyzes the impact of the Green Credit Policy on performance of these energy or emission intensive firms.

(1) Using difference-in-difference (DID) and propensity score matching (PSM)-DID method and the dynamic effect method, we found that from 2012 to 2015, the Green Credit Policy had an inhibiting effect on the performance of energy or emission intensive firms. This inhibiting effect was gradually weakened in 2016, and it turned into a positive promoting effect in 2017; (2) The performance's change of these firms around 2015 showed that Green Credit promoted the green transformation and upgrading of these firms; (3) Loans were helpful to the performance of energy or emission intensive firms to some extent, but government subsidies were not significant.

The results suggest that the government, banks and other institutions should dynamically assess the implementation results of the Green Credit Policy on energy or emission intensive firms.