Do banking sector development, economic growth, and clean energy consumption scale up green finance investment for a sustainable environment in South Asia: evidence for newly developed RALS co-integration

Concern about climate change is spreading around the globe. The urge to comprehend the environmental effects and take action is sharply rising. Regarding this, the banking industry has a great chance to offer a solution in terms of green financial solutions and can meet the needs of carbon-conscious organizations to combat and defend our planet. Therefore, in light of this, according to the greatest understanding of the authors, this is the first study to investigate the role of banking sector development, economic growth, and clean energy consumption in scaling up green finance investment in South Asian nations, taking carbon emissions, foreign direct investment, remittances, inflation, and trade openness as control variables. This study uses a novel residual augmented least squares—Engle and Granger (RALS-EG) co-integration to test the long-term link and the quantile autoregressive distributed lag (QARDL) econometric approach to extract the association across the quantiles (q0.05–q0.95) for the period 2000–2020. The outcomes of QARDL show that banking sector development, economic growth, clean energy, carbon emissions, foreign direct investment, remittances, and trade openness play a positive role in attracting green finance in the long term. However, only inflation has a negative influence on scaling up finance in South Asian nations. Therefore, the concerned authorities (government, central banks, environmentalists, and policymakers) are urged to implement green finance policies and strategies as suggested and recommended by the results of this study.