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A question of regulation or motivation? Environmental innovation activities in transition economies

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  • Katharina Friz

Abstract

Environmental innovation (EI) plays an important role in decoupling economic growth and environmental harm. This paper focuses on the environmental innovation behavior of companies in transition countries of Eastern Europe and Central Asia, which have been little studied so far. These countries share the Soviet legacy of environmental mismanagement, and have restructured their innovation systems relatively recently in the course of transition. The EBRD-EIB-WB Enterprise Survey (2018-2020) allows us to examine the determinants of environmental innovation in 29 transition countries. Although the theory places a greater emphasis on external sources of knowledge in EI, the results indicate that collaborative R&D is still quite weak in these countries. Moreover, environmental regulation increases the likelihood of adopting energy efficiency measures, while customers demanding environmental standards increase the likelihood across all innovation activities, indicating an increasing sustainability awareness among consumers.

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  • Katharina Friz, 2021. "A question of regulation or motivation? Environmental innovation activities in transition economies," Bremen Papers on Economics & Innovation 2107, University of Bremen, Faculty of Business Studies and Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:atv:wpaper:2107
    DOI: https://doi.org/10.26092/elib/1107
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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Environmental innovation; transition economies; firm-level data; logit model;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • O12 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Microeconomic Analyses of Economic Development
    • O31 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Innovation; Research and Development; Technological Change; Intellectual Property Rights - - - Innovation and Invention: Processes and Incentives
    • O32 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Innovation; Research and Development; Technological Change; Intellectual Property Rights - - - Management of Technological Innovation and R&D
    • O5 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economywide Country Studies
    • Q55 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Environmental Economics - - - Environmental Economics: Technological Innovation

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