Do green financial and non-financial policies achieve the carbon neutrality target?

Abstract

Due to the pressing need to combat climate change, reaching carbon neutrality-defined as having net-zero greenhouse gas emissions-has elevated to the status of a worldwide priority. While non-financial policies concentrate on regulation and incentives to promote environmentally friendly behavior, green financial policies strive to move investment toward low-carbon and sustainable initiatives. Therefore, the study aims to examine how green financial and non-financial policies affect carbon neutrality in China from 1995 to 2021. For analyzing the linear and nonlinear estimates, the study has employed the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) and nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag (NARDL) frameworks. The findings suggest that in the linear framework, green finance policies and environmental policy stringency encourage renewable energy consumption and discourage CO2 emissions. In the nonlinear framework, the positive shocks in the green finance policies and environmental policy stringency increase renewable energy consumption, and the negative shock in both types of policies discourages renewable energy consumption. In the CO2 model, a positive shock in green finance policies and environmental policy stringency reduces CO2 emissions, and a negative change in both these policies is insignificant. Since the positive and negative changes in both these policies significantly and differently impact renewable energy consumption and CO2 emissions; thus, policymakers should take into account positive and negative changes in both these policies while formulating policies for carbon neutrality targets in China.