Green Financing for Carbon-Free Growth: Role of Banks Marketing Strategy

Nowadays, the climate change problems are on the international agenda, while increasing attention is paid to the role of green finance and bank activity in developing a climate-neutral future. This paper aims to investigate the scientific background devoted to bank marketing to determine the role of green finance in carbon-free economic growth and identify the potential research directions under this issue. The systematization of scientific publications presented in the Scopus database showed the growing tendency in publication activity concerning bank marketing and carbon-free economic growth. However, the scientific problem is a gap in studies devoted to investigating the role of financial marketing strategies in the bank sector for intensifying carbon-free economic growth. To gain the research goal, the authors conducted the bibliometric analysis using the VOSviewer software tools. Methodological tools of the research were the method for visualizing similarities between keywords. This study operates with the scientific articles published in the journals indexed in the Scopus database. The research period is 2000-2020. The research theoretically proved that green finance is one of the main triggers of carbon-free development. The obtained results of the bibliometric analysis identified four main research directions concerning the investigated topic such as 1) financial marketing in sustainable development; 2) financial management in environmental protection; 3) carbon markets; 4) international regulation in emission trading. The authors determined the contribution of scientists in developing the investigated issues. Most productive journals were highlighted. The findings determined the pioneer countries in exploring the analyzed topic. The current study findings are limited by the articles presented only in the Scopus database. Therefore, future research should expand the study sample to compare the articles presented in other reliable scientific databases such as the Web of Science.


Introduction
Nowadays, climate change issues are on the agenda. The consumption of hydrocarbon resources galvanizes the growth of CO2 emissions. Therefore, the above affects environmental stability with devastating 72 consequences. The international community declares the severity of climate change and the necessity to adapt economic, political, organizational, and legal measures to reduce and optimize the anthropogenic impact.
Following the above, the investigation of current international measures is highly relevant in overcoming and mitigating greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. It stands to note that in 2005, the Kyoto Protocol to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change introduced the carbon market as an innovative mechanism towards reducing environmental emissions (Lyulyov et al., 2021). Remarkably, the carbon market is one of the effective climate mitigation tools in regulating CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions. Recently, the CO2 regulation has become an essential component of international climate policy and the national energy, economic and technological policies.
It stands to note that the pollution credit under the Kyoto Protocol obligates the signatory states to reduce the greenhouse gases due to trading or repurchasing emissions. The Paris Agreement under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change suggests that specific measures to overcome climate change should reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Besides, the countries are obligated to develop specific national measures and meet them. Therefore, the Paris Agreement established the transition toward carbon-free economic development Tambovceva et al., 2020). In turn, it provides the gradual refusal of traditional producing, processing, and using fossil resources for the account of green technologies.
Thus, carbon-free economic development, emission reduction, and regulation are under focus not only on international climate policy. Most developed and developing countries consider carbon-neutrality a significant competitive advantage on the global market (Palienko et al., 2017) and an effective tool to raise investments into modernization and innovations (Chygryn, 2017;Pimonenko et al., 2018;Pimonenko et al., 2019b).
While the interest in carbon-free economic development and carbon trade raises, the banks pay more attention to environmental, social, and administrative issues (Mursalov, 2020). They diversify their bank product range, focusing on socially responsible products. Indeed, financial institutions would be instrumental in carbon-free economic transformation. Thus, banks have started to move towards increasing their green reputation to protect their funds. Remarkably, the investments into fossil fuels are expected to become the dead equity. Therefore, the good bank marketing strategy attracts green and socially responsible clients and stakeholders while contributing to carbon-free economic development.

Literature Review
The analysis of scientific papers on bank marketing and carbon-free economic growth presented in the Scopus database showed the growing interest among the scientists in these topics. Figure 1 demonstrates the treatise of scientific articles devoted to bank marketing (3854 publications) is higher than those focused on carbonfree economic growth (2556 publications) for 2000-2020. However, since 2019, scientists have become more interested in carbon-free economic issues. Remarkably, it could be caused by introducing the European Green Deal in 2019, which calls for gaining climate neutrality in the EU until 2050.  . Therefore, the scientists determined the 'going green' approach in the banking sector to be a prospective direction in developing a carbon-free future. Herewith, many articles are devoted to examining the green brand image in the banking sector. The Turkish researchers Ibe-enwo et al. (2019) considered the marketing perspectives in green banking practice. The authors concluded that green banking activities increase bank loyalty and attract interest to environmental issues. In the studies (Nguyen and Nguyen, 2018), the authors indicated that green bank equity could be enhanced due to improving the main components of the green marketing scale, such as the development of the green product, strengthening green corporate social responsibility, and intensifying the green internal process in a bank.
The Indian researcher Singh (2015) explored the role of green banking in environmental management. The author confirmed the bank activity's contribution to environmental welfare. Besides, the scientist categorized the main phases of green marketing operations in the bank activity.
Abdur Rouf (2012) concluded that microfinance and renewable energy programs contribute to economic and green development. In turn, the researcher emphasized the importance of developing effective bank marketing strategies to promote green micro-financing and green micro-business growth.
The preliminary scientific treatises analysis showed many publications devoted to a carbon-free economy and bank marketing strategies. However, there is still a gap in investigating the role of financial marketing strategies in the bank sector for carbon-free economic growth. Therefore, this study aims to conduct a bibliometric analysis to determine the linkage between bank marketing strategies, green finance, and carbonfree development.

Methodology and research methods
This study operates with the scientific articles published in the journals indexed in the Scopus database. The research period is 2000-2020. The paper aims to investigate the linkage between bank marketing strategies and a carbon-free economy to determine the role of green finance in carbon-free economic growth and identify the potential research directions under this issue.
The analysis of the role of bank marketing strategies in carbon-free growth faces some methodological and analytical restrictions since a lack of full and relevant statistical data to estimate the contribution of green financing in carbon-free economic development. Besides, there is a risk of losing the topicality since scientific papers are published with some time delay. Therefore, this study involved the bibliometric analysis following the methodology proposed in the papers (Bilan et al., 2020; Dubina et al., 2020; Akhundova et al., 2020) to achieve the research goal. Following the above, this study presents the findings on evaluation analysis by the metrics of publication activity, journals, countries, authors, institutions, and funding sponsors. For determining the potential research directions, the method for visualization of similarities was applied.
It stands to note that there is a diversity of meaning for a carbon-free economic growth (such as no carbon, carbon-neutral, zero carbon, free of carbon, climate positive, carbon neutrality, etc.). Thus, the combinations of the above synonyms with keyword phrased 'bank or finance marketing' were applied to form the study sample.
The search of articles by the above keyword phrases was conducted in the titles, abstracts, and keywords. The obtained results were limited by the subject areas: Business, Management and Accounting, Energy, Social Sciences, and Economics, Econometrics and Finance. Besides, the bibliometric analysis dealt only with scientific articles written in English.

Results
With the purpose to analyze the role of banks' marketing strategy in financing carbon-free growth, the cooccurrence analysis included the articles indexed by different definitions describing carbon-free development (such as carbon, green, carbon-free, no carbon, carbon-neutral, zero carbon, free of carbon, carbon-neutral, climate-neutral) and bank marketing. Figure 2 visualizes the obtained results.

Figure 2. Network visualization the linkages between bank marketing and carbon-free growth
Sources: developed by the authors based on the Scopus data (2021) using VOSviewer tools.
The findings indicated the strong linkages between carbon-free development and financial services marketing (1687 linkages with total link strength of 2716). Therefore, it could be concluded that banks employ different financial services marketing techniques to support and contribute to carbon-free development. The keyword network determines four main directions the scientist concentrated on: 1) financial marketing in sustainable development; 2) financial management in environmental protection; 3) carbon markets; 4) international regulation in emission trading.
The most significant cluster is red. It consists of 39 items primarily focused on exploring the financial marketing tools in sustainable development. Besides, it stands to note the strong link strength (31) between keywords finance and marketing. These couple of keywords occurred mainly in the analyzed scope of articles. Therefore, in 2000-2020, the scientists primarily were concentrated on exploring the finance marketing mechanism to boost the carbon trade.
The second cluster (green) consists of 39 keywords determining the significant role of financial management in environmental protection. Thus, the cluster combines the works devoted to analyzing carbon emissions, their environmental impact, and their influence on the economy. Subsequently, the third (blue) and fourth (yellow) clusters are massively smaller. The blue cluster consists of 18 items focused on green marketing and financing mechanisms in developing carbon markets. The fourth cluster combines 14 keywords. This cluster indicates the research interests in analyzing emission trading regulation on the international level under growing renewable energy.     It stands to note that most papers were published in the high-ranked scientific journals as follows: To determine the most influential works and authors, Table 1 systemized TOP-10 articles by the number of citations in the Scopus database from 2000 to 2020.   Energy policy 11 113 10 Emission control 9 110 Sources: systemized by the authors based on the Scopus data (2021). Table 2 presents the most influential keywords in the scope of the analyzed articles. Therefore, the keyword 'marketing' has the most significant total link (578), while it occurred 79 times. In turn, the keyword 'finance' is in second place. It appeared 38 times, while the total link strength with other keywords is 299. Remarkably, the total link strength of the keyword 'carbon' is 299 too. However, it occurred approximately two times less than the previous one. Table 2 concludes that financial marketing was directed toward promoting carbon trade and decreasing the emission burden due to renewable energy.

Conclusions
The findings of bibliometric analysis confirmed the linkages between green finance in carbon-free economic growth. The obtained results of co-occurrence analysis showed four main research directions concerning the investigated topic such as 1) financial marketing in sustainable development; 2) financial management in environmental protection; 3) carbon markets; 4) international regulation in emission trading.
However, there is a limited amount of articles devoted to marketing in banks. Thus, the role of marketing bank strategy is still undeveloped well in scientific circles. Besides, the current study limitations could be the narrow keywords combinations and investigating the articles presented only in the Scopus database. Therefore, expanding the study sample and comparing the articles presented in other reliable scientific databases such as the Web of Science is appropriate for further researches.