Environmental innovation and socio-economic sustainability : evidence from European regions

There is a growing awareness that GDP and other traditional economic statistics suffer from not getting the full picture of how society is doing. Hence, we would like to shift attention from purely economic indicators to indicators that measure the actual quality of life. Moreover, research in innovation studies suggests that the concept of responsibility in science and technology is not only a technical matter but primarily a social and environmental one. Innovation and specifically environmental innovations are receiving increasing attention from scholars, practitioners and policy makers as key drivers in the development of a more sustainable and responsible economy. Research works on the performance of environmental innovations focused on the relationship between green investments and economic or environmental performance, not considering the impact on the social dimension. In our work, we focus on European regions and we study the specific effect of environmental innovation, through the mean of environment-related technologies, on the socio-economic sustainability of European regions. A cross-sectional study of European regions over the period 2000-2014 was organized using data from the OECD Regional Well-Being, OECD RegPat, Cambridge Econometrics and Eurostat databases. Significant policy implications will be discussed in the paper.