The present paper provides empirical evidence of the opportunities and challenges surrounding green finance (GF), looking at the financial issues that might prevent the investment decisions of green companies. To this end, we explore the case of Italian biomass producers by means of a discourse analysis supported by a survey administered to a pool of experts. Although our findings suggest that GF provides an opportunity for achieving environmentally sustainable innovation pathways, experts recognize that it does not actually prevent biomass producers from facing institutional and financial criticalities in funding their investment projects. Such criticalities include: uncertainty about government policies, the minimal involvement of financial suppliers in the biomass sector, the short-term orientation of financial instruments and the limited knowledge of financing options and technical expertise within companies. The results indicate that effective policy interventions should ensure that objectives are orientated towards the long term with the aim of reducing the risks perceived by financial institutions in funding biomass producers.

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Foreign direct investment (FDI) from Multinational Enterprises (MNEs) can be beneficial to host countries, since it may generate positive externalities to domestic firms, contributing to the increase of their productivity. These positive effects can take place both within an industry ("horizontal” spillovers) and across industries ("vertical” spillovers) as in the case of technology transfers to domestic suppliers or customers in the production chain. Using a firm‐level panel data, in this paper we analyse productivity spillovers from FDI in the Italian manufacturing firms both within and across industries. Our results suggest the existence of “vertical” spillovers and no evidence of “horizontal” ones.