The effect of green bond issues on sustainable development in Turkey

The development of countries is realized through economic growth and development and the high welfare level of the social structure. However, the concepts of sustainability and sustainable development, which have emerged with environmental degradation from the recent past to the present, have gained great importance. This concept has emerged by integrating economic and social phenomena with the environment in order to prevent the pressure of human activities on the ecosystem from threatening living life and future generations. In this respect, when sustainable development is divided into its dimensions as economic, social and environmental sustainability, the decisions made by the institutional and individual structures that ensure the efficiency of production factors by taking these issues into account directly affect sustainable development. This thesis aims to determine the direction of the relationship between the conventional bonds issued by Industrial Development Bank of Turkey and Akbank to raise long-term debt and the green bonds issued by Akbank to finance its green projects and the employment rate, subsistence index and BIST sustainability index, which are associated with the dimensions of sustainable development. In this direction, the variables were firstly analyzed by evaluating their descriptive statistics, finding their stationarity degrees with unit root tests and analyzing them with Toda-Yamamato causality test. At the same time, conventional bonds and green bonds are compared. In the findings of the analysis, the variables that are found to have causality are employment rate, subsistence index and BIST sustainability index, respectively. In the inter-bond evaluation, it is found that traditional bonds are less correlated with the variables than green bonds.