Abstract
Despite growing international commitments to green finance, it remains an open empirical question whether such transfers translate into inclusive green growth (IGG) in developing countries. This study addresses this gap by examining how countries’ levels of development and executive corruption condition the effects of green finance on IGG. The empirical analysis draws on a comprehensive sample of 99 developing countries from 2000–2024 and employs instrumentalvariable and quantile regression techniques. Our findings show that green finance promotes IGG only in low-income countries, with the largest gains accruing to those with the lowest IGG performance. However, executive corruption significantly undermines these gains, nullifying the positive effect of green finance at a threshold of 0.6. These findings suggest that executive corruption can transform green finance from a driver of IGG into an impediment as fragilities in the institutional fabric for controlling executive corruption deepen.