Environmental Innovations and Green Skills in the Nordic Countries

Abstract

In this chapter, we argue that policy-making aiming to achieve environmentally sustainable transitions of the economy are in need of a solid empirical evidence base. Conventional measurement concepts used for example by the EU based on sector-classifications deliver highly biased pictures. We propose measurement concepts based on the use of green skills and human capital, validate key assumptions of our concept and apply the concept to the four Nordic countries Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. Our results show that indeed various versions of indicators based on green skills help predicting whether firms introduce environmental innovations, and this finding is robust across the four countries. Upon applying our measurement concept at the regional level, we find that the different Nordic countries show rather distinct patterns in their geographical distributions of these green skills, which may have implications for firms' capabilities to introduce environmental innovations.

Exploring research on ecotechnology through artificial intelligence and bibliometric maps

“…The results also tell us about the low priority of ECT in developed countries, indicating that the global policies aimed at this end are still not achieving the expected results. Only Nordic countries showed a solid and highly visible research output, in alignment with national policies that promote using renewable energies to change their energetic matrices [ 96 ]. As can be corroborated by Fig.…”