Green Technology Fitness.

Angelica Sbardella,François Perruchas,Lorenzo Napolitano,Nicolò Barbieri,Davide Consoli

doi:10.3390/e20100776

Abstract

The present study provides an analysis of empirical regularities in the development of green technology. We use patent data to examine inventions that can be traced to the environment-related catalogue (ENV-Tech) covering technologies in environmental management, water-related adaptation and climate change mitigation. Furthermore, we employ the Economic Fitness-Complexity (EFC) approach to assess their development and geographical distribution across countries between 1970 and 2010. This allows us to identify three typologies of countries: leaders, laggards and catch-up. While, as expected, there is a direct relationship between GDP per capita and invention capacity, we also document the remarkable growth of East Asia countries that started from the periphery and rapidly established themselves as key actors. This geographical pattern coincides with higher integration across domains so that, while the relative development of individual areas may have peaked, there is now demand for greater interoperability across green technologies.

Highlights

There is broad consensus among academics and policy makers that accelerating the development of new low-carbon technologies and promoting their global application are crucial steps, albeit not the only ones, towards containing and preventing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions
While we remain agnostic about the pathways through which countries develop and apply capabilities to environmental issues, we provide insights into the extent to which each country contributes to the global network of technological capabilities, as well as into the extent to which the technologies grow and develop as a result of distributed inventive efforts
We provide a synthetic sketch focus on how countries’ innovation capacity evolves over time using colour coding to distinguish three groups depending on the initial ranking: leaders, followers, and laggards

Summary

Introduction

There is broad consensus among academics and policy makers that accelerating the development of new low-carbon technologies and promoting their global application are crucial steps, albeit not the only ones, towards containing and preventing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Besides the traditional negative externalities due to non-appropriability and non-exclusivity of knowledge, green technologies engender positive externalities in the form of improvements to the quality of the environment. These features highlight the importance of institutional conditions for promoting or thwarting sustainable economic growth. Because information exchange entails costs that increase with the diversity of the attendant knowledge base, higher coherence between activities is expected to facilitate the likelihood of innovation [5,6,7]

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Results

Conclusion