A bibliometric-qualitative literature review of green finance gap and future research directions

Abstract

Green finance (GF) supports the global fight against climate change and its impacts. It is critical to attaining the Paris Agreement and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Since GF is regarded as the future of finance and investment, it needs to be fully understood. This paper presents the first mixed-methods systematic review with both bibliometric and qualitative analysis of the state-of-the-art and trends in GF research. A bibliometric review was performed to quantitatively examine 995 related publications retrieved from Scopus and validated with the Web of Science, Google Scholar, and ScienceDirect. Results showed that GF is still relatively an immature but interdisciplinary research area. A further qualitative-systematic analysis of 60 selected publications was conducted to identify the key findings, challenges, and recommendations for future research. Findings revealed six major research hotspots in GF: (i) green bond market and greenium, (ii) green credit (loan), (iii) carbon investment and market, (iv) green banking, (v) market stress (e.g. the COVID-19 pandemic) and GF, and (vi) domestic and international climate finance policies. This study provides insights into key applications of GF as it applies to specific research fields, a and as the pathways to realize the accruable benefits of GF to enhance research and development.