Description
While green bonds have attracted significant scholarly interest over recent years, there has to date been limited focus on exploring variation in green bond issuance and performance across national financial systems. Through this paper, I construct a typology of national varieties of sustainable finance that differentiates between systems according to the predominant issuer type in a given setting. Where green bond issuance is dominated respectively by states, financial institutions, and non-financial institutions, I classify the national systems as ‘interventionist’, ‘financialised’, and ‘industrial’. I explore variation in the scale of green bond issuance across these varieties of sustainable finance system, and in the extent to which green bonds attract lower borrowing costs for issuers. Overall, I show that there is scope for effective performance across all three models of sustainable finance, suggesting the multiple pathways exist toward effectively incorporating green bonds into national systems.
