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The special issue addresses the role of sustainability-oriented innovation and inventions as a relevant factor in the transition of our economies towards a greener, low carbon, and circular economy. It focuses on the EU, an area which has set stringent waste and climate change policies over the past decades. Though sustainable innovation and green knowledge issues have been developed over the past two decades since seminal papers appeared, some compelling research avenues still exist at the frontier. This issue attempts to close some knowledge gaps through different channels that broaden the perspective on eco-innovations towards a green knowledge type of setting, where technology, human capital, social capital are all relevant.

CNRS 3, HCERES B; International audience; Information communication technology (ICT) and environmental innovation (EI) are relevant waves of the ongoing technological revolution. We study the complementarity in innovation adoption to test the research hypothesis that the higher the diffusion and intensity of usage of ICT and EI, the higher a firm's productivity performance might be. However, it is not certain that the use of different innovations stemming from different innovation paths generates higher productivity. To test our hypothesis, we use original survey data concerning manufacturing firms in Northeast Italy including detailed information on both ICT and EI. Empirical evidence shows that there are still wide margins to improve the integration between EI and ICT in order to exploit their potential benefits on productivity. The awareness of specific synergies seems to mainly characterise the heavy polluting firms that are subject to more stringent environmental constraints, while some trade-offs tend to emerge for the remaining firms.

We empirically test the decoupling of waste dynamics with regard to economic growth and the effectiveness of environmental and specific waste-related policies, by exploiting an integrated data set for the EU15 over 1995–2007. We find that absolute delinking for waste generation is far from being achieved in the European Union (EU) despite the fairly stringent and longstanding policy commitment, which was and is still probably too biased towards waste management and waste disposal targets, rather than towards waste prevention per se. On the other hand, policy action as well as country structural factors seems to have an impact on landfill diversion. Country heterogeneity fairly matters: the seemingly unrelated regression analyses that we adopt, including models that tackle policy endogeneity, show that EU average figures often hide high variance in decoupling performances. EU countries can be consistently grouped according to their waste sustainability performances. The results provide food for thought for...

The paper aims to provide an original contribution to evaluating several kinds of relations between four areas of innovation activities – training, technology, organization, ICT (information and communication technologies) – and industrial relations and firm’s economic performance. Quantitative evidence for a SME‐based local production system is provided by exploiting two datasets: the first is derived from a direct survey carried out in 2005 collecting data on innovations, labour flexibility and industrial relations; the second is represented by a panel of official balance sheets data for the period 1998–2004. The analysis is divided in two consequential parts. We first examine the drivers of different innovation strategies and subsequently we exploit innovation indicators as potential drivers of firm’s productivity. The results show that training activities and organizational changes have strong links with many industrial relations indicators, thus emerging as industrial relations driven innovations. On...

Technological innovation is a key factor for achieving better environmental performances. Its role is even more relevant in local productions system, where innovation density, knowledge spillovers and externalities are concentrated in a circumscribed territory. The paper exploits new data for a sample of manufacturing firms in Northern Italy. New evidence is provided by testing a set of hypotheses, concerning primarily the role of environmental‐devoted R&D, networking activities, quality/nature of industrial relations. The role played by environmental policy pressure, structural firm features and past firm performances is also investigated to account for more exogenous forces. We show that structural characteristics of the firm appear to matter less than R&D, induced policy costs and innovative‐oriented industrial relations. Environmental auditing schemes also show some relevant correlation to innovation adoptions. R&D efforts appear to be associated to networking activities, which substitute for size‐rel...

The article provides empirical evidence on the de-linking of waste generation from economic growth. The data used refer to the European countries. An investigation carried out into packaging and municipal waste indicators shows that any de-coupling which has eventually taken place has been of a relative nature. Estimated waste elasticities with respect to income highlight that a hypothetical turning point, that would eventually characterize a Kuznets curve for waste, is far from being reached. Europe thus appears to be lagging behind in the effort to invert the relationship between waste and income/consumption indicators. The lack of policy targets in reference to waste prevention at source, in addition to recovery/recycling goals, may be considered as a primary policy-related reason behind the absence of a stronger de-linking process for waste in Europe. The applied panel investigation, though informative since it refers to a homogenous regional area, reveals the need for further work, exploring de-linki...

Innovation is a key factor in firms achieving better environmental performance, to the extent that it helps to increase the materials/energy efficiency of production processes and reduces the emissions/effluents associated with outputs. The study has two main aims. First, by testing a set of hypotheses, to provide new evidence on the influence of a wide array of innovation drivers. Second, to examine the hypothesis of a complementary relationship regarding the adoption of different environmental innovations and a set of associated innovation drivers. The investigation shows that the more general structural characteristics of the firm appear to matter less than eco auditing, R&D and policy related costs. As far as adoption of different eco innovations is concerned, the analysis shows that firms that innovate tend to pursue different environmental innovations simultaneously. At the level of innovation drivers, it appears that the complementarity, though predominant across the various pairings of dr...

The global management of whale species, which are here defined as an economic mixed good, is addressed by means of economic theory of bargaining and institution making. Analysis is focused on: (1) why and how it is important to take account of both (consumptive) use and non-use values when we cope with international environmental agreements (IEAs) on whales and global mixed goods; (2) the role and nature of institutions dealing with such global issues; and (3) the role of bargaining between conflicting interests as a focal feature of the institution-making process. Co-operative and non-co-operative solutions are discussed, together with instruments aimed at achieving co-operation. The study has both positive and normative implications, as far as international conventions on whales are concerned. Such institutions should internalize both ecological and economic issues. Developing the results of previous work, which argues that whale management should take into account the total value of the species in orde...