Green Finance—A Necessity in the Context of the Green Deal and Sustainable Development Goals. A Bibliometric Analysis

Greening the economy has become an objective for the European Union within the framework of the Green Deal, but also worldwide, given the Sustainable Development Goals most countries have been trying to achieve. In this context, all activities within the economy and society need to be reconsidered, including those that regard which activities or projects should be financed. Financing green activities is therefore in line with this large desiderate. This paper aims to perform a bibliometric analysis of the existing green finance academic research. Although there have been similar endeavors in the literature, our research is new and different in that we propose an up-to-date analysis of all-time academic output regarding green finance using VOSviewer while investigating solely articles indexed in the Web of Science database. Our four research questions are formulated around topics such as: research trends and subjects; emerging topics; most prolific and most cited countries, organizations, authors. We discuss the main results, as well as the practical, research and policy implications. By looking at a large number of papers (n = 1,513) and without particularly limiting our search to the exact phrase ‘green finance’, we manage to obtain a useful overview of research interest and output, which can help in conducting future research, drawing attention to key areas from a policy perspective and setting the bases for future research networks.