Green loan as a tool for green financing

Abstract

The article describes one of the main tools of green financing - the green loan. This is a loan designed for environmental projects related to agriculture, renewable energy sources, environmentally friendly industry, etc. The tasks are to analyze the current research on this topic, to study the regulatory aspects of green lending, its main types, impact on the bank economic indicators, advantages and disadvantages. The analysis of the current research has shown insufficient development of the idea of the green loan. It is only the theoretical aspect of its influence on the bank activities that has been defined, not its practical effect. The authors studied the green loan impact on the results of the bank activities on the example of overdue loans. For the analysis, they used the panel data of 10 out of 24 largest banks in China in 2012-2017. The evaluation is based on a random effects model. The calculations have been done by means of the generalized least-squares method in MSEXCEL. It has been revealed that green loans in the loan portfolio of the bank contribute to the overdue loans decrease. It has been determined that the main factors influencing the decision making by the borrower and the lender are reputation, public, equity and regulatory pressure, alternative capital pools, credit profiles, availability, capital requirements. However, there is no standard credit documentation for the green loan today. To make this financial tool efficient and sound, it is necessary to further develop regulations, to change approaches to disclosing information on sustainability issues in the non-financial part of annual reporting. The authors have made a conclusion about the rapid development and expansion of the green loan due to the flexible conditions for its provision and availability.