Mapping the evolution of green finance through bibliometric analysis

Implementation of SDGs is the unified goal of 193 UN Member States. FinTech plays a crucial role in achieving it. Therefore, the development of FinTech must be facilitated through proper policy-making and public finance, creating beneficial PEST conditions. However, the interaction of the FinTech PEST environment and achievement of SDGs is a topic that has not yet been addressed. The purpose of this study is to assess the link between these two indicators using statistical methods, indicate SDGs having the strongest link to FinTech PEST environment, and explain the interface to facilitate its useful application within government and financial regulations, as well as administration of the state and municipal financial entities. The results show that the economic and investment potential of Northern Europe is caused by the most favorable PEST environment for FinTech sector development, and demonstrate the existence of a statistical link between FinTech PEST environment and SDG4, SDG8, SDG9, SDG16. There is a clear trend – the more favorable the FinTech PEST environment, the better the achievement of SDGs, the better results of Sustainable Finance indicators, and the higher the Sustainable Finance typology assigned to the country. These results suggest that the goals, targets, and indicators of SDG4, SDG8, SDG9, and SDG16 contribute to the formation of a favorable environment and are conductive to the sustainable development of the FinTech industry in a country. Therefore, sustainability in the development of FinTech industry and finance, and the achievement of SDGs, is a circular process of three interacting factors.

This study presents an exploratory analysis of Quick Service Restaurants (QSR) industry in the US during 2015 by using publicly available data and open-source R software. The data analysis framework and tools utilized here were developed primarily by Hadley Wickham and are included in his tidyverse package in R. This data analysis framework consists of data import, data wrangeling, data exploration (tranformation, visualization, and modeling), and communication of results (Wickham & Grolemund, 2016). These steps are illustrated by exploring the relationship between sales, customer satisfaction, and other characteristics of 65 QSR restaurants in the US. In order to facilitate reproduction and replication of this study, the dataset as well as the R code are included in this study.

Recently, the management of the green financial sector has been widely influenced by global socio-economic concerns such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the energy crisis. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate, besides their environmental attitude, what opinions and experiences the affected stakeholders have about the sustainability-related processes in the Hungarian banking sector in the early 2020s. To assess this subject extensively, two questionnaire surveys were conducted in two consecutive years (2020/2021 and 2021/2022), involving 600 and 1,600 participants randomly chosen from banking databases, respectively. The results indicate that both residential and corporate participants have various but broadening knowledge of green financial instruments. Hungarian residential customers have pointed out the inconveniences of the most popular green loan product (Green Home Program), while there appears a distinct difference in green investment preferences between the two groups of respondents. Hungarian stakeholders are quite eco-conscious, and so are banks adopting sustainability and climate risk assessment actions, however, the implementations have much potential to exploit. Respondents also identify the energy crisis-related risks, while their trust in the banking system remains high even under volatile circumstances. These findings demonstrate that the Hungarian green banking sector has a high degree of crisis resistance with residential and corporate stakeholders behind giving trust and thereby the driving force toward the successful green transition.