Sectoral systems of environmental innovation: An application to the French automotive industry

This article seeks to show how a sectoral system approach may contribute to the analysis of the determinants of environmental innovations. By using Malerba's [F. Malerba: Sectoral systems of innovation and production, Res. Policy Vol. 102, 845-859, (2002)] concept of sectoral system of innovation and production, we develop a sectoral framework based on three building blocks: technological regimes, demand conditions and environmental and innovation policy. Within this framework, the sectoral patterns of environmental innovation result from the interplay between these three blocks. The conceptual framework is applied to the case of the French automotive industry, with a specific focus on the development of low emission vehicles. The analysis shows how technological regime and demand conditions lead to technological inertia, and so to a strong persistence of the dominant design. Finally, environmental and innovative policy are considered in an integrated way, so that we can study how they influence technological regime and demand conditions, and in the meantime how they are conditioned by these two blocks.     

‘Unproductive’ sectors and economic growth: a theoretical analysis

This paper examines the role of service, nonmarket and unproductive activity sectors in causing stagnation. The literature on this subject is critically discussed and it is argued that although these three sectors are not the same, the discussion of their roles raises similar theoretical issues regarding the nature of sectoral distinctions and macroeconomic structure. Three simple models are developed to illustrate how these ‘unproductive’ sectors may or may not cause stagnation. It is concluded that more attention should be given to sectoral distinctions and macroeconomic structures before these sectors are dismissed as being ‘unproductive’.     

社会—技术系统可持续转型阻力及治理研究——基于利基保护空间思路

可持续转型研究是一个发展迅速的新领域,旨在解释社会-技术系统转型如何发生以及如何治理，其理论影响日益显著。然而，当前实践表明，以能源、交通为代表的系统转型进程依然相当缓慢，因此厘清转型进程中的阻力具有重要意义。归纳分析系统转型的基本要求以及转型动态过程和机制，从产业结构、基础设施、知识基础、市场和消费需求结构、公共政策与政治力量及社会认知6个方面分析社会-技术系统中现行非持续体制，对新的可持续技术利基发展和转型进程构成阻力。在现行技术体制稳定情况下，加速转型进程必须扶持技术利基成长，从防护、培育、赋能3个方面建立和强化利基保护空间功能,突破体制路径依赖。最后，从“谁治理、治理什么、如何治理”3个问题切入，提出在利基保护空间动态发展过程中，政策制定者需要以治理思维推进其战略管理。     

An input–output model of water consumption: Analysing intersectoral water relationships in Andalusia

This paper presents an input–output model of sectoral water consumption, created by combining the extended Leontief input–output model with the model of energy use developed by Proops. The analysis is applied to Andalusia, a region situated in the South of Spain which is characterized by water shortage. We determine which economic sectors consume the greatest quantities of water, both directly and indirectly, and to what extent this natural resource may become a limiting factor in the growth of certain production sectors. The model allows us to distinguish between direct and indirect consumption, thus offering the possibility of designing an economic and environmental policy oriented towards water saving. Additionally, the model allows simulation of possible changes in water consumption caused by certain environmental measures, as well as their consequences on the regional economy.     

社会—技术系统可持续转型阻力及治理研究——基于利基保护空间思路

可持续转型研究是一个发展迅速的新领域,旨在解释社会-技术系统转型如何发生以及如何治理，其理论影响日益显著。然而，当前实践表明，以能源、交通为代表的系统转型进程依然相当缓慢，因此厘清转型进程中的阻力具有重要意义。归纳分析系统转型的基本要求以及转型动态过程和机制，从产业结构、基础设施、知识基础、市场和消费需求结构、公共政策与政治力量及社会认知6个方面分析社会-技术系统中现行非持续体制，对新的可持续技术利基发展和转型进程构成阻力。在现行技术体制稳定情况下，加速转型进程必须扶持技术利基成长，从防护、培育、赋能3个方面建立和强化利基保护空间功能,突破体制路径依赖。最后，从“谁治理、治理什么、如何治理”3个问题切入，提出在利基保护空间动态发展过程中，政策制定者需要以治理思维推进其战略管理。     

Regional divergence and club convergence in India

This paper examines regional divergence in income across different states in India, and estimates convergence clubs endogenously. The paper makes two useful contributions. First, the data is analyzed using a novel method due to Phillips and Sul (2007) leading to different conclusions in comparison to past studies, and secondly sectoral level data is employed which to our knowledge has not been employed in the literature before. Applying the novel approach to panel data relating to fifteen major states of India for the period 1968/69–2008/09, the results display significant divergence in per capita income across states at the aggregate and sectoral levels. There is also evidence of convergence clubs and variations in the number and composition of clubs across sectors. While three clubs are identified at the aggregate level, at the sectoral level we find three clubs in the industrial sector, two clubs are identified in both the agriculture and services sectors. The final part of the paper deals with the policy implications.     

IS CORPORATE R&D INVESTMENT IN HIGH‐TECH SECTORS MORE EFFECTIVE?

This paper discusses the link between R&D and productivity across the European industrial and service sectors. The empirical analysis is based on both the European sectoral OECD data and on a unique micro‐longitudinal database consisting of 532 top European R&D investors. The main conclusions are as follows. First, the R&D stock has a significant positive impact on labor productivity; this general result is largely consistent with previous literature in terms of the sign, the significance, and the magnitude of the estimated coefficients. More interestingly, both at sectoral and firm levels the R&D coefficient increases monotonically (both in significance and magnitude) when we move from the low‐tech to the medium‐ and high‐tech sectors. This outcome means that corporate R&D investment is more effective in the high‐tech sectors and this may need to be taken into account when designing policy instruments (subsidies, fiscal incentives, etc.) in support of private R&D. However, R&D investment is not the sole source of productivity gains; technological change embodied in gross investment is of comparable importance on aggregate and is the main determinant of productivity increase in the low‐tech sectors. Hence, an economic policy aiming to increase productivity in the low‐tech sectors should support overall capital formation.     

Allocation of pollution abatement under learning by doing

This paper examines how learning by doing affects the allocation of pollution abatement between heterogeneous technologies over time. The optimal policy balances current abatement costs against reductions in future costs and infant technologies may be preferred to mature technologies despite greater initial costs. We characterize when a technological winner might emerge and we identify conditions under which optimal abatement is shared across all technologies. Pigouvian taxes can implement the first-best, but may need to be differentiated across technologies. When technical change is induced, an important role of environmental policies is to put abatement on the right technological trajectories.     

Learning and stakeholder participation in transition processes towards sustainability: Methodological considerations

Global environmental change problems due to their unstructured characteristics, being marked by great uncertainties and a big number of stakeholders, prove to be too difficult to solve in a traditional way alone. They call for a more proactive approach. One of them advocates systems change driven by technological innovations accompanied by institutional and sociocultural transformations. Transition management is a new policy strategy based on this philosophy. It has recently emerged in the Netherlands and has been adopted by the Dutch government as a relevant framework for shaping its policy towards sustainability. The transition management writings emphasise the importance of ‘learning’ in the process of induced change towards sustainability. Although this can indeed be quite a significant means for inducing change, the literature on transition management is not explicit enough about the methodological organisation of the learning process. Since transition management has become an important approach in the Netherlands, we consider it relevant to deploy some learning insights and experience gained in the Dutch Climate OptiOns for the Long-term (COOL) project to analyse and improve the process of transition management. In particular, we look into the first two steps of transition management, i.e., organising a transition arena and making visions.     

Cities mediating technological transitions: understanding visions,intermediation and consequences

Approaches to technological transitions and their management have generated considerable interest in academic and policy circles in recent years. The development of this body of work may be seen as a response to the complexities, uncertainties and problems which confront many western societies, in organising ‘sustainably’ various aspects of energy, agricultural, water, transport and health systems of production and consumption; problems which are seen as systemic and entwined or embedded in a series of social, economic, political, cultural and technological relationships. For all the light that transitions approaches shine on such processes they say little explicitly about the role of places. In this paper we address this through looking at the way in which London is currently beginning to shape a systemic transition in its energy infrastructure. We outline and discuss key aspects of the roles of strategic intermediary organisations, which have been strategically set up to intervene between technological possibilities and the territorial context of London. We draw on the case of London to highlight an emblematic example of a city's attempt to systemically re-shape its energy infrastructure and the lessons to be drawn from this. We also outline the particularity of London in this respect, the limitations of the transferability of experiences in London and highlight directions for future research in this area.     

The Efficiency of Active Labor Market Policies: A Comparative Analysis of Tunisia and OECD Countries’

ABSTRACT

On the third anniversary of the Egyptian revolution and against the backdrop of lingering political instability and deteriorating economic conditions, we diagnose the constraints to sectoral growth in Egypt using the 2011 Egyptian revolution as a natural experiment. We combine quantile regressions to study sector outliers with a difference in difference methodology to capture sectoral behavior before and after revolution. We find that the revolution's effect has been adverse, on average, but heterogeneous across sectors. We identify and characterize sectors most and least impacted. Results reveal that Egypt's fastest growing sectors before Revolution have been the most vulnerable after Revolution. This evidence is supported by our diagnosis approach that shows that faster growing sectors are constrained by continuous increases in prices that threaten export competitiveness (as they erode the benefits accrued to nominal depreciation of currency). Such sectors also benefited from higher monetary growth and fewer constraints on credit availability that have mitigated somewhat the speed of deterioration in the aftermath of the revolution. Our results, which hold under several robustness checks, inform policy priorities as to how to revive investors’ confidence, boost competitiveness, and design priorities in industrial policy to ease structural impediments and align sectoral growth with macro priorities.     

The implications of heterogeneous resource intensities on technical change and growth

Abstract We analyze the long‐term dynamics of an economy in which sectors are heterogeneous with respect to the intensity of natural resource use. It is shown that heterogeneity induces technical change to be biased towards resource‐intensive sectors. Along the balanced growth path, the sectoral structure of the economy is constant as the higher resource dependency in resource‐intensive sectors is compensated by enhanced research activities. Resource taxes have no impact on dynamics except when the tax rate varies over time. Research subsidies and the sectoral provision of productivity‐enhancing public goods raise growth and provide an effective tool for structural policy.     

Economic transition,dualism and informality in India: Nature and patterns of household-level transitions

We examine the Indian economy during a peak period of high growth between 2005 and 2012 to analyse the nature and patterns of household-level transitions across different sectors, characterised by varying degrees of formality/informality and various production structures and labour processes. We find that even within this brief period, there has been a huge volume of household-level transitions across sectors. However, the overall economic structure, and its segmentations, has continued to be reproduced, along with a regeneration of ‘traditional’ non-capitalist informal spaces. To ascertain the nature of household-level transitions in terms of economic well-being, we employ a counterfactual analysis. We find that majority of transitions in the economy have been ‘unfavourable’ in nature, with large proportion of households undergoing sectoral transitions that are not optimal for them, given their socio-economic characteristics. Furthermore, the likelihood of ‘favourable’ versus ‘unfavourable’ sectoral transition, on average, significantly varies with household characteristics, some of which, like social caste, are structurally given and cannot be optimally chosen by households. Drawing upon this analysis, we reflect on the competing strands of literature that seek to explain the persistence of informality. Our analysis highlights the complexity of India's contemporary development trajectory, whereby the pre-existing economic structure is reproduced, paradoxically, through a continuous reshuffling and reconstitution of economic spaces, accompanied by significant volume of ‘unfavourable’ household-level sectoral transitions.     

Sociotechnical regimes,technological innovation and corporate sustainability: from principles to action

Increased environmental and social responsibility awareness, while producing unique opportunities for sustainability-oriented innovations, has generated important challenges for companies. The path to sustainability requires corporate strategies that guarantee profitability, managing simultaneously environmental and social responsibilities. An attempt is made to provide an understanding of sustainable development thinking in business, discussing how the combination of the transition management, adaptive planning and sociotechnical approaches can contribute towards an effective implementation of sustainability-oriented innovations in business context. The article proposes a conceptual model, which incorporates this contribution, developed through a four-year action-research project carried out within a large Brazilian energy company – Petrobras. The authors argue that the adoption of the proposed model by other large firms operating in different societal sectors might trigger organisational changes related to current corporate practices of technological innovation management.     

Environmental rationalities and the development state in East Asia: Prospects for a sustainability transition

This paper reviews what is known about recent trends in environmental governance among the newly industrializing countries of East Asia and the implications of these developments for a sustainability transition within the region. The conceptual starting point for the review is research that examines sustainability transitions within the framework of a multi-level perspective on system innovation. One of the challenges presented by this framework is that of understanding how existing political economies and governance structures promote stability or change in socio-technical regimes. By socio-technical regimes we mean the predominant organizational, social and technological configurations through which societal needs are constituted and met. In the case of the rapidly industrializing and urbanizing economies of East Asia, the trajectory of socio-technical regimes will have profound consequences for local, regional and global environments. Our review of trends in environmental governance as they relate to socio-technical regimes within the region traces a pattern of initial efforts to strengthen environmental regulatory regimes very much along the lines of the policy models of OECD economies. The degree to which these initial efforts have taken root varies from country to country in the region. What is beginning to emerge in several countries within the region, however, are a variety of policy and institutional innovations that hold promise for opening up spaces for change in socio-technical regimes, and for creating opportunities for new pathways of industrialization and urbanization to take hold that are less pollution, materials and energy-intensive.     

Why is TFP growth sectorally concentrated?

Research shows that total factor productivity (TFP) growth is weak in European countries. This is inter alia attributed to the fact that substantial TFP growth is limited to a few industries. Because TFP growth is typically understood as technological progress, it is concluded that technology diffusion between sectors in Europe is hampered. We use EU KLEMS data sets to decompose sectoral TFP for nine European countries by means of a Malmquist approach in order to identify potential sources besides technical progress. Applying Harberger diagrams, we describe the sectoral distribution of TFP growth, efficiency gains and losses, economies of scale and technological progress. The analysis reveals that technological progress is quite evenly distributed across sectors in most European countries. The wide scattering of TFP growth is explained by deviating efficiency developments and the unused economies of scale. We conclude that the technology transfer between sectors in most European countries seems to work. Therefore, Europe in general does not need a new technology policy, but a further integration of the markets and a reduction of national market entry barriers. This requires further unification of pan-European standards in fields like trade and crafts codes or consumer protection policies.     

International production chains and the pollution offshoring hypothesis: An empirical investigation

Most analyses of the impact of heterogeneous environmental policy stringency on the location of industrial firms have considered the relocation of entire activities – the well-known pollution haven hypothesis. Yet international enterprises may decide to only offshore a subset of their production chain – the so-called pollution offshoring hypothesis (POH). We introduce a simple empirical approach to test the POH combining a comprehensive industrial mergers and acquisitions dataset, a measure of sectoral linkages based on input-output tables and an index score of environmental policy stringency. Our results confirm the impact of relative environmental policy stringency on firms’ decisions to engage in cross-country M&As. Our findings also indicate that environmental taxation have a stronger impact on international investment decisions than standards-based policies. Further, we find that transactions involving a target firm operating in a sector upstream of the acquirer are more sensitive to environmental policy stringency, especially when that sector is highly pollution-intensive. This empirical evidence is consistent with the pollution offshoring hypothesis.     

Pathways from discovery to commercialisation: using web sources to track small and medium-sized enterprise strategies in emerging nanotechnologies

This paper presents results from a pilot study of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) based on a web-scraping and content analysis of current and archived nanotechnology enterprise websites. We use this approach to explore nanotechnology SMEs transitions from discovery to commercialisation and understand how transitions vary by SME characteristics, technology and market sectors. Our findings suggest that although the idealised linear innovation model is present, important instances of divergence exist. Cluster analysis uncovered sectoral differences but even more distinctions based on the age, funding source, and research intensity.     

Developing transition pathways for a low carbon electricity system in the UK

This paper describes the approach to developing transition pathways for a low carbon electricity system in the UK, being pursued in a major new inter-disciplinary research project. The project aims (a) to learn from past transitions to help explore future transitions and what might enable or avoid them; (b) to design and evaluate transition pathways towards alternative socio-technical energy systems and infrastructures for a low carbon future; and (c) to understand and, where appropriate, model the changing roles, influences and opportunities of large and small ‘actors’ in the dynamics of transitions. The paper describes the approach, which builds on the work of Dutch researchers on transitions and transition management using a multi-level framework of niches, socio-technical regime and landscape, as well as on other parts of the innovation systems literature. It also describes its application to several outline transition pathways to a low carbon energy system in the UK. The pathways embrace both the evolution of the physical and institutional infrastructure changes and the roles of both large actors, e.g. multinational energy supply and distribution companies, national governments, major investors, and small actors, e.g. households, innovators and entrepreneurs.