From Catch-Up to Transcend: The Development of Emerging Countries’ Green Economy

As domestic concerns on clean economic growth arise, promoting green economy has become an urgent issue for emerging countries that are facing serious environment problems in industrialization. Through international imitation, emerging countries have the opportunity to adopt clean techniques of developed countries. Because of different industrial structures, it is unachievable to learn the green technology across all fields. Previous studies consider that innovations could create green production models to improve the production capacity that reduces energy input and waste discharge. However, while evaluating emerging countries’ economic growth, the environment indicators were often neglected. Empirical investigation of the role of innovation in green economy’s growth is still rare. The first objective of this study is to adopt an integrated framework to investigate emerging countries’ green economy by considering environmental factors. Secondly, environmentally sensitive productivity growth index was employed to decompose the productivity progress of green economy into catch-up effect, innovation effect, and technical leadership to examine the role of innovation. Thirdly, implications were provided for the policy makers in relation to green growth. Thirty-nine emerging countries were chosen as samples, which were divided into America, Asia, and Europe according to their locations. We found that America is still an imitator in developing green economy. In contrast, Asia starts to transition to innovation, which has become another critical promoter for green growth. Europe was found to lead on the technology frontier because of proper industrial planning and technology accumulation. The progress to innovation and technical leadership could ensure a stable green growth in the future. This research could be a route to open up the possibility of extending current study of green economy.