Aligning finance with low carbon economy
: perspectives from green finance policies

  • Anh Vu

Student thesis: Doctoral ThesisDoctor of Philosophy

Abstract

The thesis revolves round sustainable finance policies. Sustainable finance or green finance policies are a relatively new toolkit of central banks and financial regulators in a transition to a low-carbon economy; therefore, studying the driving forces of their issuance around the world as well as the interaction of these policies with current institutions such as social movements, financial actors, and traditional policies constitute important research themes in the literature. In exploring these themes, the thesis employs large panel datasets and appropriate econometric designs to generate insights to build on theory in this emerging literature on sustainable finance policies.

The first chapter provides research motivation, and related literature on sustainable finance policies in the context of investment banking, central banking and financial supervision, and finally on a specific type of green finance policies – green taxonomy. The second chapter – the first research project – focuses on the interactions of sustainable finance policies with such actors and institutions as investment banks, divestment movements, and environmental innovation with data aggregated on a financial centre’s level. It investigates how financial centres with investment banks acting as deal brokers for fossil fuel companies, have been fuelling the climate crisis. Leveraging financial geography’s typology of financial centres, I classify brokerage activities of investment banks into domestic, export, import, and platform based on nationalities of the banks’ parent companies. In this manner, the chapter examines how the distribution of these types of fossil fuel brokers across financial centres is driven by green finance policies and divestment movements. By analysing 840,000 primary multi-assets deals from 2000 to 2018 and using a within- and between estimator, the study shows that the amount of fossil fuel financing within each financial centre and between financial centres is negatively affected by the introduction of voluntary green finance policies. In addition, empirical findings demonstrate that financial centres, through the brokerage activities of investment banks headquartered therein, shift from equity financing to bond and loan financing for fossil fuel companies. Another shift occurs in terms of the typology of financing deals based on nationalities of investment banks (financial service providers) and companies (clients).

The second research project sheds light on the driving forces of green finance policies. Literature on the subject has not explored what drives governments and central banks around the world to issue sustainable finance policies, and how these policies are formed by traditional environmental policies, green bond financing and government fossil fuel subsidies. Building statistical models from a novel dataset from the Green Finance Measures Database (GFMD) spanning from 2000 to 2019 for 33 countries, this study seeks to address these gaps. I hypothesise that four main factors have been the driving forces behind the issuance of green finance policies. They are an exponentially growing sustainable finance market; financial stability concerns for central banks on climate change and other related risks; ‘carbon pricing gap’ – created by the slow progress of traditional environmental policies in effectively facilitating a transition to a net-zero emissions world; and strong pressure from social movements such as divestments and climate change lawsuits. Applying survival analysis on the GFMD dataset, the results show that social movement pressure, proxied by fossil fuel divestment, mainly drives the initial issuance of green finance policies. Moreover, concerned about the risk of stranded assets, countries with high state fossil fuel subsidies tend to be the first in issuing green finance policies.

The final paper focuses on green finance taxonomy – a novel policy aimed at scaling up sustainable finance in many jurisdictions. Green taxonomy, in general, is a list of economic activities that are considered environmentally sustainable. The literature on green taxonomy is still limited as it is a relatively novel policy that was first implemented in 2015. To navigate this literature, I build on the multilevel perspective (MLP) to place the policy in the socio-technical regime of finance and hypothesise that green taxonomy plays the role of an emerging bottom-up niche breakthrough with the potential to influence various normative and regulatory pillars of the financial sector, which has already gradually evolved to accommodate top-level concerns such as climate change and biodiversity loss. I then empirically examine whether the shaping of the South African Green Finance Taxonomy (RSA GFT) criteria is dependent on the economic and financial forces between South Africa and the EU. The findings suggest that EU investors’ bond holdings in South African companies seem to positively affect the level of ambition of the RSA GFT as compared with that of the EU Taxonomy. Moreover, as the South African economy is heavily dependent on economic activities related to metal mining and commodity manufacturing, they play a crucial role in the country’s transitions to a low-carbon economy in terms of emissions mitigation and climate change adaptation. The study’s results highlight this aspect of the South African economy in that for commodities of which the export volume to the EU is high, the corresponding criteria of the RSA GFT are more ambitious/ more detailed than that of the EU Taxonomy.

Date of AwardJul 2025
Original languageEnglish
Awarding Institution
  • Queen's University Belfast
SponsorsInternational Sustainable Finance Centre of Excellence
SupervisorDeclan French (Supervisor) & Lisa Sheenan (Supervisor)

Keywords

  • sustainable finance
  • green finance policies
  • fossil fuel financing
  • divestments
  • green finance taxonomy

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