A Bibliometric Analysis of Sustainable Finance Instruments for Small and Medium Size Enterprises

Unofficial AI-generated summary based on the public title and abstract. Not an official translation.

🔬研究者:This paper provides a comprehensive bibliometric map of the sustainable finance literature for SMEs, useful for identifying key research clusters and gaps.

🏛政策担当者:Policymakers can use the identified challenges to design better green finance mechanisms for SMEs.

Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) are playing a key role in offering job creation, market expansion, enhancing innovation, and economic growth. Though the contribution of SMEs is huge in developing nations, they are responsible for emitting 40% of commercial waste, greenhouse gas emissions, and industrial pollution. Sustainable finance instruments are a solution to meet the challenges of socio-economic and environmental issues created by SMEs. Sustainable finance instruments offer funds to accomplish environmentally sustainable projects, to conserve natural resources, combat climate change, protect biodiversity, promote social inclusion, reduce pollution, and promote sustainable development. There are numerous instruments, such as green bonds, green investment funds, sustainability-linked loans, and channel capital towards initiatives, green investment, and ESG-compliant corporate operations available in the market. Among these, sustainable funds are offering financial resources to developing nations. Nowadays, SMEs are encountering numerous challenges like misconceptions about green finance, limited knowledge and expertise in understanding financial resources, and the complexity of securing green finance instruments. All these challenges ruin even when they wish to use green finance to expand operations. SMEs should have an open mindset to embrace the greening process in their operations to make use of the sustainable financial instruments. Previous studies have proved that sustainable finance is being accessed by SMEs in the developing countries, yet the application of sustainable financial instruments on SMEs remains notably underexplored. This underscores the need to fully understand sustainable finance instruments and their application, especially to SMEs in this context. The objective of the study is to adopt bibliometric analysis to assess sustainable financial instruments and SMEs from the Scopus database between 2020 and 2025. This study will highlight the most prolific journals, highly productive authors, and countries that made contributions in the field.

• semanticscholar https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.6356338first seen 2026-05-06 00:28:51