Economic complexity and the green economy

By Penny Mealy, Alexander Teytelboym. Research Policy, 2020

452 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Which countries are likely to have the productive capabilities to thrive in the green economy? How might countries reorient their existing industrial structures to be more competitive in an environmentally friendly world? To investigate these questions, this paper develops a novel methodology for measuring productive capabilities to the green economy. By constructing a new comprehensive dataset of traded green products and drawing on economic complexity methods, we rank countries in terms of their ability to export complex green products competitively. We show that higher ranked countries are more likely to have higher environmental patenting rates, lower CO2 emissions, and more stringent environmental policies even after controlling for per capita GDP. We then examine countries' potential to transition into green products in the future and find strong path dependence in the accumulation of green capabilities. Our results shed new light on green industrialisation and have a number of implications for green industrial policy.

Subfields: Business and International Management, Economics and Econometrics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/87b081930012a98555fb1eb62c76c28c525cb1ce

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Citations in the corpus

Do environmental provisions in trade agreements make exports from developing countries greener? (2020, background): “Mealy and Teytelboym (2019) find that countries with stricter environmental policies do indeed export a larger number and more sophisticated green goods.”
Innovation, growth and the transition to net-zero emissions (2021, background): “Mealy and Teytelboym (2020) apply these metrics to a data set of traded “green” products and show that these tend to have higher complexity than average.”
Economic Complexity and Environmental Performance: Evidence from a World Sample (2019, background): “Hence more complex countries offer better conditions for developing technological solutions that benefit the environment [99].”
Will COVID-19 fiscal recovery packages accelerate or retard progress on climate change? (2020, background): “Decisive state interventions are also required to stabilize the climate, by tipping energy and industrial systems towards newer, cleaner, and ultimately cheaper modes of production that become impossible to outcompete (Acemoglu et al., 2012; Grubb, 2014; Aghion et al., 2014; Farmer et al., 2019; Mea”