The Determinants of Green, Social, and Sustainability Bonds Issuance: Insights from European Countries

Achieving sustainable development represents one of the foremost challenges of the twenty-first century. In this context, funding environmentally and/or socially impactful projects becomes vital. Consequently, in recent years, the green, social, and sustainability [GSS] bonds have become a ‘trending’ topic, with more and more countries being interested in promoting their issuance. Through our research, we aim to advance a two-fold contribution to the field of economic studies on GSS bonds, as follows. First, we perform a brief bibliometric analysis on a dataset of 950 scientific documents extracted from the Web of Science Core Collection database, spanning the years from 1976 to 2024. The results highlight a growing interest in the subject of GSS bond issuance in the last few years. Second, we assess the manner in which various factors might influence the GSS bond issuance for a sample of 28 European countries between 2018 and 2022. In this respect, we apply a comprehensive statistical technique—Bayesian Model Averaging, with a ‘uniform’ model prior, noninformative priors for the constant and the error variance, and Zellner’s prior with ‘Empirical Bayes local’ $$g$$ g parameter for regression coefficients. The econometric results suggest that carbon dioxide emissions are a primary determinant of GSS bond issuance, followed by overall governance quality and unemployment. These outcomes are in line with previous studies on the issuance of GSS bonds.