<p>Financial development is recognized as a basic pillar of any country’s economy, particularly in energy-intensive and resource-rich economies. In such contexts, the way energy infrastructure is financed and natural resource rents are managed can strongly shape the stability and efficiency of the financial system. It interacts with different economic variables as a key determinant and affects the economic performance, respectively. This paper examines how public-private partnerships investment in energy and natural resources affects financial development by utilizing time-series data of China from 2000 to 2021. For this purpose, we implemented an extensive empirical investigation and applied the Zivot-Andrews and ADF unit-root with structural break(s) for examining stationarity in the data. Our results of the cointegration analysis tests present a long-run connection between the variables. Long-run estimates are obtained from a generalized linear model (GLM), the ML-ARCH framework and robust least squares, supplemented by Granger causality tests to explore the trend of linkages. The long-run analysis indicates a negative connection between public-private partnerships investment in energy and financial development. Natural resources also have a negative relationship with financial development following a resource-curse pattern. While digitalization, export diversification, and climate change postulate a significant positive relationship with financial development in China. These findings highlight the need to improve the design and governance of public-private partnerships investment projects and to manage natural resource revenues more prudently, while at the same time promoting digitalization, export diversification and climate-related policies that can support a more resilient financial system. </p> Graphical Abstract <p>Source: Author’s calculations</p> <p></p>