Ester Martínez-Ros (Universidad Carlos III)

Job types and eco-innovation technologies: how are they related?

Abstract. Job creation is certainly a key goal of governments all over the world. On the other hand, promoting the development and uptake of eco-innovations is at the core of the transition towards more sustainable societies. Both policy goals may be sinergistic or conflicting, depending on whether eco-innovations encourage or discourage employment creation. The aim of this paper is to analyse whether investment in environmental technologies leads to positive or negative effects and the influence of different types of eco-innovations on different job types (green and non-green). The literature on this topic is tiny, and most often based on cross section data, not allowing a dynamic analysis of the issue. In contrast, an unbalanced panel dataset of 4,244 companies for the period 2010-2020 with data from the Spanish Survey on Industry Expenditure on Environmental Protection is used in this paper and an econometric model correcting for endogeneity is estimated. The results show that, indeed, investments in environmental technologies lead to positive employment effects and that given types of environmental technologies (cleaner technologies) have more positive employment effects than others (end-of-pipe). Furthermore, the results show that both eco-innovation types (cleaner technologies and end-of pipe technologies) have a positive influence on some employment types (green jobs vs. non-green jobs). Therefore, both goals are synergistic to some extent, and imply that promoting clean technologies would contribute to both sustainable production systems and employment creation, whereas both clean technologies and end-of-pipe technologies would support green job creation.

Joint with Jose García-Quevedo and Pablo Del Río.