Advancing clean energy transition in MENA enterprises through awareness, feasibility, and perceived efficiency

This paper investigates the factors promoting clean energy adoption by firms in the Middle East and North African (MENA) region as well as the internal and external factors moderating these effects. We propose a conceptual approach based on firms' knowledge and perception of clean technological possibilities organized into awareness, feasibility, and perceived efficiency. The main intuition is that implementation is the outcome of a careful cost-benefit evaluation in which firms gather information (awareness), assess technical viability (feasibility), and form expectations about profitability and efficiency gains (perceived efficiency). We empirically investigate if and to what extent these factors contribute to clean energy adoption and examine whether and how firms' participation in global value chains, the presence of female managers, and the existence of supportive government policies moderate these effects. Our results show that awareness is the key driver of implementing clean energy measures. Its effect is amplified for firms that are managed by females and for those that are part of global value chains. Yet, the awareness of government policies seems to be ineffective. Our results are robust to changes of independent variables, sample and estimation method.