The Impact of Green Innovation on Employment Growth in Europe

The paper makes two contributions. First, it provides a survey of the literature on the link between eco-innovation and employment. It looks especially at the measurement, data and indicators used for eco-innovation used by these papers. Second, the paper provides new estimates on the link between changes in sales due to product and process innovations and a general technological advance and changes of employment. Here, the paper distinguish between "normal" product innovation and product innovation with specific eco-friendly features. In addition, process innovations are also differentiated by eco-friendly process innovation and "normal" process innovation. Finally, in order to consider the full effect of innovations on employment the paper also take into account that sales due to innovations might cannibalised sales from old products. Depending of the degree of cannibalisation the employment impact of innovation might be quite different. The results will provide evidence for all countries for which microdata from community innovation surveys are available at the safe centre of Eurostat. Hence, the paper provides evidence for the innovation-ecoinnovation-growth link for Cyprus, Germany, France, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania, Romania, and Slovakia. We also private estimates for groups of countries like new member states vs. old member states.

Licht, Georg and Bettina Peters (2013), The Impact of Green Innovation on Employment Growth in Europe, WWWforEurope Working Papers, Mannheim