Many local governments wanting to finance construction of water pollution control facilities through the sale of municipal bonds are required to obtain authorization from the electorate in the form of a bond referendum. Since defeat of such a bond issue can result in significant delay in implementation of the Federal Water Pollution Control Act, it is important that EPA understand the factors which affect the outcome of these elections. The study contains conclusions and recommendations about the process by which the project is planned, the role of the bond market, and the referendum as an approval mechanism for public expenditures.

Today, as a result of the developments and widespread use of information and communication technologies, the weight of online shopping in the economy has increased. The environmental impacts of this new order, which is an important part of electronic finance, are discussed. In this study, the effect of electronic finance, economic growth, renewable energy consumption, and urbanization on emissions in EU member countries is examined using the panel vector autoregression (PVAR) approach for the period from 2005 to 2018. The main results suggest that e-finance has a positive and statistically significant effect on CO₂ emissions. However, the renewable energy consumption-increasing effect of e-finance is greater than its emission-reducing effect. Moreover, renewable energy consumption has a statistically insignificant effect on emissions. Therefore, the contribution of e-finance on environmental quality weakens. The requirement for EU member countries to prioritize the use of environmentally friendly energy to benefit from the environmental contribution of e-finance in the most optimal way is stated as the main policy implication of this study.

With the introduction of national carbon neutrality targets, carbon emission reduction actions in developed countries have become a hot topic as part of the international community’s drive to take action to mitigate climate change. Carbon emission efficiency is an important indicator that can be used to measure progress toward carbon emission reduction targets. The relationship between green technology innovation and carbon emission efficiency has not been adequately studied, and the transmission mechanism is not yet clear. Based on the above research gaps, taking 32 developed countries that have proposed carbon neutral targets as research samples, this paper used spatial econometric models to explore the impact of green technology innovation on carbon emission efficiency and adopted spatial mediation model and spatial moderation model to analyze the transmission effects of economic development, urbanization, and financial development on environment-related green technology and carbon emission efficiency. This paper aimed to provide a policy basis for developed countries to mitigate carbon emissions and achieve carbon neutrality goals as soon as possible. The following results were obtained: (1) Luxembourg, Norway, and Switzerland were found to be efficient in terms of carbon emissions, while most developed countries were in an inefficient state. (2) Environment-related green technology innovation significantly improved carbon emission efficiency. (3) Economic development and urbanization had a mediating role on green technology innovation and carbon emission efficiency. In other words, green technology innovation could have an indirect impact on carbon emission efficiency by influencing economic development and urbanization. (4) Financial development could positively moderate the sensitivity of carbon emission efficiency to green technology innovation. Improving the level of green technology innovation is one way to improve carbon emission efficiency, and the mediating effect of economic development and urbanization can be used as a focus point to improve carbon emission efficiency. The pressure of carbon emission reduction can be moderated by finance development. The results of this study provide theoretical support that will assist developed countries in achieving their carbon neutrality targets.

This paper studies the effects of financial development, economic growth, and climate-related financial policies on carbon emissions for G20 countries. The focus is particularly on financial policies implemented to scale up green finance and address climate-related financial risks from 2000 to 2017 and represent this paper’s value added. The empirical results obtained by relying on the panel quantile regression approach indicate that the impacts of the different explanatory variables on carbon emission are heterogeneous. Specifically, the effect of the stock of short-term financial policies on carbon emissions is negative, and its effect becomes smaller at higher quantiles. The stock of long-term policies also shows significant negative coefficients, but its impact is stronger for higher quantiles. No significance is reported for the lowest quantile. Financial development contributes to improving environmental quality, and its impact is larger in higher emission countries. Energy consumption increases carbon emissions, with the strongest effects occurring at higher quantiles. Our results also support the validity of the EKC relationship and positive effects of GDP and population on high carbon emissions levels. Estimation results are robust to alternative model specifications and after controlling for the role played by adopting international climate change mitigation policies as proxied by the adoption of the Kyoto Protocol.

Finance has a strong role in promoting green development; however, there are very few studies quantifying this relationship. To this end, based on the official green development indicator system of the Chinese government and province-level data from 2006 to 2017, the quantile regression model was used to analyze quantitatively the impact of finance on green development. The results show that financial development contributed significantly to green development, and furthermore, financial efficiency and green finance have a strong positive effect with the increase of the quantile, and financial scale also has a significant positive effect, but a diminishing marginal effect. In addition, the impact of financial development on green development has regional differences. In the eastern region, the finance factors can promote green development, but the financial scale and the green finance promotion function weaken along with the quantile increase. The financial scale and green finance do not support green development significantly in the central region. Financial scale, efficiency, and green finance support green development in the west region.

Circular economy and Industry 4.0 are two of the most hotly debated topics in recent decades. They gradually attracted the attention of academics, practitioners, and policymakers from around the globe. The current research looks at the impact of Industry 4.0 on circular economy practices and blockchain technology in order to boost firm performance. The closed questionnaire was used to collect cross-sectional data of 330 respondents, and the partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) modeling framework was used to demonstrate the findings of the study. The results show that blockchain technology improves circular economy practices significantly in terms of green manufacturing (GM), recycling and remanufacturing (RR), and green design (GD) in India. In addition, Industry 4.0 has the potential to improve business operations as well as financial performance and environmental performance significantly. As a result, the current research work offers recommendations for businesses to achieve long-term goals by incorporating Industry 4.0 into manufacturing systems.

Green innovation is essential for improving the environment and realizing sustainable economic development. In this research, we use a sample of Chinese listed firms from 2011 to 2018 to examine whether and how digital finance affects corporate green innovation. The proof we provided shows that digital finance has a positive effect on green innovation. The result is consistent with a series of robustness tests. Further analyses show that digital finance promotes green innovation by alleviating financial constraints and increasing R&D investment. And the effect is more pronounced in economically backward regions and high-polluting industries. This research provides practical guidance for promoting finance development and improving the ecological environment.

Green finance is a priority for alleviating environmental degradation pressures. Based on panel data of 30 provinces in China from 2009 to 2017, this study utilizes the spatial Durbin model (SDM) and the threshold model to examine the effect of green finance on environmental quality. The empirical results are as follows: (1) Green finance and environmental quality have significant positive spatial autocorrelation; the development of green finance in China is still in the lower-level range, while high-high and low-low are the dominant spatial clustering types. (2) Green finance has a significant positive effect on local environmental quality but has negative effects on that of its neighbors during the research period; however, the spatial spillover effect of green finance is heterogeneous in the three subsamples. (3) There are double threshold effects of green finance on environmental quality, and the effect decreases with the promotion of green finance. These empirical insights provide spatial references for policymakers to formulate strategies for the target of coordinated and integrated regional development.

Recently, the rapid development of digital finance in China has exerted a subtle influence on many aspects of social and economic development. However, the research on the impact of digital finance on corporate green innovation is rather lacking. In order to fill this gap, this paper uses the “Peking University Digital Finance Index” to evaluate the micro impact of financial innovation development on environmental governance from the firm level. The results show that digital finance can significantly improve the quantity and quality of corporate green innovation, and this effect still exists after considering endogeneity and a series of robustness tests. The promotion effect of digital finance on the quantity and quality of corporate green innovation is more obvious in state-owned, eastern, and mature enterprises. In addition, we find the mechanism behind the positive relationship between digital finance and corporate green innovation: digital finance makes firms more transparent and funds flow more convenient. Overall, this paper provides a micro explanation of environmental governance for the accelerated popularization of digital finance in emerging markets, which is urgently needed for most emerging economies seeking high-quality development.

The interaction between green finance and other factors, such as ecological environment, has been a research hotspot nowadays. Especially, the reasonable guiding of capital into energy conservation and environmental protection industries would greatly affect those factors, so as to the relation between them. This paper aimed to analyze the relationships between green finance, technological progress, and ecological performance quantitatively. The entropy method was used to respectively construct the system of index for green finance and technological progress, and index for ecological performance was measured by the super-SBM model. The panel vector autoregressive (PVAR) model was selected to empirically analyze dynamic relationships based on datasets from 30 provinces in China during 2008–2019 period. The results told that (1) from 2008 to 2019, China’s overall level of green finance, technological progress and ecological performance increased to varying degrees. Spatially, the areas with high-developed green finance greatly coincided with those such as large cities or the eastern coast that had good financial development. The distribution of technological progress index were similar, except some underdeveloped areas with relatively advanced scientific research institutes. The ecological performance, however, was high in the South and low in the north. (2) In the lag for 3 years, the influence of green finance on ecological performance in different regions was all positive for that all the coefficient symbols that passed the significance test were above 0, while that on technological progress was negative first and then positive. And the effects of technological progress on ecological performance were positive in ecological regions and negative in low ecological regions (0.0893 and -0.1211 in the case of three-stage lag respectively). (3) The contribution of green finance to ecological performance was high according to the results of variance decomposition, maintained at about 30%, and that of technological progress increased year by year (from 0.000 to 0.039). Therefore, we proposed to strengthen the development of green finance in underdeveloped regions. The emphasis should be laid on the researches and applications of green technology, the formulation of financing policies in innovation compensation and the establishment of a dynamic monitoring system for the ecological environment.