The paper examines the relationship between green innovation and employment from data taken from the Spanish Technological Innovation Panel (PITEC) for period 2007–2011. The increasing relevance of environmental issues for the Spanish economy, its unemployment problem and the uniqueness in its innovation structure make it a proper and interesting context to investigate green innovation dynamics. The authors find a positive relationship between green innovation and employment, and the relationship is stronger for firms in the so-called ‘dirty’ industries. In addition, they show that the relationship is positive for firms that introduce green innovation voluntarily, as compared to firms that introduce green innovation merely to comply with regulations. A positive and significant relationship is also found between employment and firms that report an increase in the degree of importance paid to green innovation.
The Economics and Environmental Policy Research Network (EEPRN) was created through a partnership between Sustainable Prosperity and the Canadian Federal Department of the Environment and Climate Change to help administer a research and policy ne
This report, Intelligent Assets: Unlocking the circular economy potential, finds that pairing circular economy principles with the information generated by intelligent devices creates a fertile ground for innovation that could enable this decoupling, and lead to broad social benefits.
Laboratory studies suggest that improved cooking stoves can reduce indoor air pollution, improve health, and decrease greenhouse gas emissions in developing countries. The authors provide evidence, from a large-scale randomized trial in India, on the benefits of a common, laboratory-validated stove with a four-year follow-up. While smoke inhalation initially falls, this effect disappears by year two. They find no changes across health outcomes or greenhouse gas emissions. Households used the stoves irregularly and inappropriately, failed to maintain them, and usage declined over time. This study underscores the need to test environmental technologies in real-world settings where behavior may undermine potential impacts.
The policy summary for this paper is available here.
This report Farm Management Practices to Foster Green Growth looks at farm management practices with green growth potential, from farmer-led innovations (such as those directly linked to soil and water, Integrated Pest Management, organic farming) to science-led technologies (such as biotechnology and precision agriculture).
The 2015 EU Energy Union Package proposes integrating renewables into the market, just as the UK has moved away from Premium Feed-in Tariffs (FiTs) for renewable electricity supply (RES-E) to something closer to the standard FiT, which, when auctioned, demonstrated a 3% real fall in the weighted average cost of capital (WACC). The UK, which has experimented with nearly all forms of RES-E support, offers the evidence base for designing the Energy Union’s RES-E support. Innovation needs a further redesign to deliver adequate funding, best done through country contributions to an EU-wide innovation competition.