Relatedness in eco-technological development in European regions

Martijn van den Berge () and Anet Weterings

No 1413, Papers in Evolutionary Economic Geography (PEEG) from Utrecht University, Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Group Economic Geography

Abstract: Within the smart specialisation programme, the European Commission urges regional policy-makers to assess their regional innovation potential and consider investing in the areas of eco-technologies taking into account the regions’ specific strengths and weaknesses. In evolutionary economic geography, several studies have shown that regional innovation is a path dependent process whereby new technologies develop out of the existing regional knowledge base. In this paper, we examine to what extent this is also the case for eco-innovation; if so, the existing technological structure of a region would be an important source of information for regional policymakers with respect to designing their eco-innovation policy agenda. Our results show that in EU-regions both the probability of developing eco-innovations and the number of patents in this field depends on the patents that have been developed in related fields in the region in prior years.

Keywords: relatedness; technology space; regional branching; eco-technologies; EU (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C23 Q55 R11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 35 pages
Date: 2014-06, Revised 2014-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cse, nep-eur, nep-geo, nep-ino and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (27)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:egu:wpaper:1413

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