Analyzing the nexus of green economy, clean and financial technology

Abstract

The connection between the green economy, technology, and finance has recently become a popular topic for analyzing economic and policy matters. Financial technology can provide not only an opportunity to tap into new pools of private capital to finance green and sustainable projects through innovative financial instruments but also provide support to clean technologies through the adoption of voluntary sustainability codes of conduct. However, there is still a lack of clear scientific evidence in the literature about how the green economy interacts with these relevant indicators of sustainable finance. Thus, this paper examines the time-varying causal relationship between indexes of financial technology (FinTech), clean technology (CleanTech), and the green economy (GECON), by applying the novel method proposed by Shi et al. (2018, 2020) on daily data from June 15, 2012 to December 15, 2021. This study finds a higher volatility and causality running from GECON to CleanTech and FinTech for the entire period. Furthermore, the green economy Granger causes FinTech and CleanTech with very significant episodes, especially at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. The robustness of the results was checked with a rolling window and recursive evolving techniques that overall confirm bidirectional causal relationships between green economy and technology variables. The findings imply that global initiatives to achieve low-carbon economies need to be complemented with the use of clean technologies in the production process and the continuous digitalization of financial sectors. The promotion of clean technology production by governments and the increased interest of investors in FinTech industries will stimulate green economic growth.