ICT and environmental innovations in a complementary fashion. Is the joint adoption by firms economically visible?

Davide Antonioli and Grazia Cecere

No 1514, SEEDS Working Papers from SEEDS, Sustainability Environmental Economics and Dynamics Studies

Abstract: We analyse how the joint adoption of ICT practices and environmental innovation affect the labour productivity of firms. We study complementarity in innovation adoption, with respect to the specific research hypotheses that the higher thediffusion and radicalness of ICT and EI, the higher might firm\rquote s productivitybe. As ICT are considered to be able to reduce the environmental footprint of different economics activities. We exploit original survey data which cover manufacturing firms for a dense SME area in the North-East of Italy (Emilia-Romagna region). We originally merge innovation survey data over 2006-2008 with firm\rquote s balance sheets over 2010-2011 to achieve this aim.The empirical evidence shows that for Emilia-Romagna manufacturing firms there are still wide margins for improving ICT-EIs integration in order to exploit their potential benefits on firm economic performance. However, the awareness of specific synergies seems to mainly characterizethe heavy polluting firms, subject to ETS schemes, while for the remaining firms prevalently emerge some substitutabilityrelations between ICT and EI. The latter firms are strategically less capable of exploiting the potential synergies between ICT and EI.

Keywords: ICT; environmental innovation; adoption; SME; polluting sectors; Porter hypothesis; complementarity; labor productivity. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D22 L23 L25 L60 M15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 29 pages
Date: 2014-06, Revised 2014-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-cse, nep-eff, nep-ene, nep-env, nep-eur, nep-ict and nep-ino
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sustainability-seeds.org/papers/RePec/srt/wpaper/1514.pdf First version, 2014 (application/pdf)
http://www.sustainability-seeds.org/papers/RePec/srt/wpaper/1514.pdf Revised version, 2014 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:srt:wpaper:1514

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SEEDS Working Papers from SEEDS, Sustainability Environmental Economics and Dynamics Studies
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Alessandro Palma ().