The article
The introduction and adoption of green technologies are considered the most cost effective way to reduce environmental pressure without compromising economic competitiveness. The scientific literature has emphasized the crucial role played by diffusion pathways of green technologies along the supply value chain, but empirical quantitative findings on the effectiveness of green technologies in improving environmental performance are scarce. The objective of this paper is to highlight the role of inter-sectoral linkages in shaping the influence played by eco-innovations on sectoral environmental performance. Empirical findings show that both the direct and indirect effects of ecoinnovations help reduce environmental stress and that the strength of these impacts varies across the value chain depending on the technology adopted and the type of pollutant under scrutiny. The main implications we can deduce are that, first both corporate and policy governance strategies should specifically address the goal of maximizing environmental gains that can be achieved through the development and adoption of clean technologies along the supply chain, and second both strategies should be coordinated in order to minimize the costs for reducing environmental pressures.
Costantini, V., Crespi, F., Marin, G., & Paglialunga, E. (2017). Eco-innovation, sustainable supply chains and environmental performance in European industries. Journal of cleaner production, 155, 141-154. https://www.econstor.eu/handle/10419/174528
The researcher
Valeria Costantini
Professor Economic Policy, Roma Tre University, Italy
The interview
Valeria thank you very much for accepting this invitation to a coffee break with me and how are you doing?
Thank you very much Lorena for inviting me and I’m quite well after a long trip but I’m very happy to be here in Stavanger.
We’re very happy to have you as well, and this time I want to talk with you about the paper you wrote, in which you analyzed the influence of eco innovations on environmental performance, could you please tell me what the paper was about?
The paper was about the influence of introducing green technologies into production processes, so at the manufacturing level and how this introduction of green technologies might help to improve the environmental quality of the production process.
I understand that one of the key notions of your paper is precisely that eco innovations, could you please provide us with a definition of this notion?
Eco innovation is a very wide notion that includes several steps into the
production process and you can include in the equation definition, for example, the development of new technologies that are able to reduce the quantity of energy necessary to make something, or also you can include managerial processes, for example the energy manager is considered as an eco
innovation because it reduces the energy required by labor force to make the
work that job.
Thank you for that and based on this notion, which ones will you
say are the main findings of your paper?
We discovered two main findings, the first one is that the development and diffusion of eco innovations, and in our paper we consider equation only the invention of new technologies is good for improving the environmental performance of the manufacturing sector, so those sectors adopting more and greener technologies, other sectors are more environmental friendly than the others and the second findings is that the more the sector is integrated into the global market, the higher the capacity to adopt into the production process green technologies that were developed in other countries and in other sectors so that the knowledge creation and diffusion into a global market is a process for reducing environmental impacts of the production processes.
Thank you for that I find this topic very interesting and quite actual, so thank you, I would like to know also it was the main motivation like company personal manner for you to write this paper?
The very first motivation was the fact that the literature in our in our academic community tried to understand the impact of public policies in fostering new technologies in the green sector but there was no contributions in quantitative terms, so with data trying to understand to which extent the introduction of green technologies is also favorable for reducing environmental pollution and this is why we started to investigate on this topic and it was like a joke because given that there was no literature on that we started to ask ok but if no one made that until now maybe it is not possible to the letter and on the contrary we obtain quite interesting results so we are happy for that.
Great we are happy to to have the paper, so finally I would like to ask you about the policy implications of your paper?
The policy implications are quite relevant given the efforts that the European Union is providing to obtain a sustainable growth path at the country at the country level and maybe if I would like to speak with the policymaker the European Commission I will say that it is important to monitor the real impact of selected policies on the environmental performance of sectors and countries and to somehow exploit the potential spillovers arising from investing in selected technologies and in selected countries because it is possible to obtain the same results in terms of reduction of pollution with the less money. That is indeed very very important
I’m sure they will listen to you, thank you very much for that and it was really a real pleasure for me to have you here and I hope to wish that I hope to see you soon again okay.
Thank you very much.
Thank you for watching if you’re interested in more details about this
academic publication you can find here the link below and see you next time bye, bye.