ABSTRACT:
Green technologies are at the very core of endeavours to combine economic and environmental targets to achieve sustainable growth. In this article, we aim to determine the impact of green technology development on total factor productivity of European regions. Our paper contributes to the literature on technological change and regional growth in various ways. i) Our paper is, to the best of our knowledge, the first to assess the specific role of green technologies for regional growth on a broad empirical base. ii) We advance methodologically on the pertinent literature by explicitly accounting for cross-sectional dependence in our empirical approach. iii) By providing a simple theoretical framework, we directly link our results to implications of environmental policies for capital accumulation and composition dynamics, contributing to the ongoing debate revolving around the strong version of the Porter hypothesis. Our results, based on a sample of 270 European NUTS-2 regions over 25 years, imply that general technology development is mostly associated with positive economic returns, but our data is not supportive of positive economic returns to green technologies.
The working paper can be read here: https://media.suub.uni-bremen.de/bitstream/elib/5006/4/Green%20Technologies%2c%20Environmental%20Policy%20and%20Regional%20Growth_Kerner%2c%20Klarl%2c%20Wendler_ierp.pdf
ABOUT THE SPEAKER:
Tobias Wendler has been working as a postdoc in the “Innovation and Structural Economics” group (Prof. Dr. Jutta Günther) at the University of Bremen since April 2020. In the working group, he heads the research area "Sustainability, Energy and Environmental Innovations", in the context of which the projects " H2B " and " HyTracks " are processed. His research interests lie in the areas of empirical environmental, innovation and institutional economics. His research primarily deals with the importance of innovations and institutions for sustainable economic development.
He is also involved in setting up the Bremen Research Center for Energy Systems ( BEST ), headed by Prof. Dr. Johanna Myrzik. In his dissertation, he examined the effects of environmental innovations on the reduction of greenhouse gases and the conservation of natural resources as well as the relevance of social and political framework conditions for the introduction of environmental innovations by companies.
Before that, he studied economics at the University of Bremen (B.Sc. 2015) and then completed an internship in a business consultancy. From October 2016 to March 2020 he worked as a research assistant (doctoral student) in the working group "Innovation and Structural Economics" (Prof. Dr. Jutta Günther).