Join us for Manchester Institute of Innovation Research Seminar Series 20/21, webinar hosted by guest speaker, Claudia Ghisetti, Assistant Professor of Economics at the Catholic University in Milan.
To join this webinar, please sign up via Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/manchester-institute-of-innovation-research-seminar-claudia-ghisetti-tickets-137396048279
Do the two make a pair? Digital and green transition in European regions and their impact on greenhouse gas emissions
Stefano Bianchini (BETA – Université de Strasbourg), Giacomo Damioli (European Commission, Joint Research Centre) and Claudia Ghisetti (Department of Economic Policy, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milano)
Abstract
This work discusses the implications of the digital and green (twin) transition in terms of its environmental impacts, starting from the acknowledgment that the green and digital transition may lead to competing environmental returns. We present a newly constructed unique and original dataset on digital and green scientific (publications) and technological (patents) knowledge and greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions for the period 2007-2017 in the European Union (EU28), Norway and Switzerland at the metro-regions level. After reviewing the existing literature on the innovation – emissions nexus and having unbundled the digital sphere through a natural language processing approach on publication and patent corpus, we propose a preliminary empirical analysis aimed at assessing the environmental impact of a sub-set of digital technologies. Can the digital and green transition go hand-in-hand to reduce aggregate greenhouse gas emissions or, conversely, will they lead to competing trends? The paper concludes with a discussion on the main limitations of the analysis and proposes directions for future research.
Claudia GHISETTI is Assistant Professor of Economics at the Catholic University in Milan, where she teaches Microeconomics and Open innovation and Project financing. She has been previously working as a researcher for the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission and as post doctoral researcher at the University of Ferrara and Research Associate at the inter-university Research Center on Sustainability Environmental Economics and Dynamics Studies (SEEDS). She holds a PhD in European Law and Economics (University of Bologna) and she has been visiting researcher at GREDEG-CNRS, University of Nice-Sophia Antipolis and at the Center for European Economic Research (ZEW) in Mannheim. Her expertise lies in the fields of economics of innovation and environmental economics. She published her research in international journals such as Climate Policy, Ecological Economics, Research Policy, Industrial and Corporate Change, the Journal of Evolutionary Economics, Nature Communications, Technological Forecasting and Social Change, the Journal of Economic Surveys and the Journal of Cleaner Production. She conducted consulting activities for the European Commission, the OECD, the Italian Ministry of the Environment and Sea, the Italian Ministry of Economic Development and the Emilia-Romagna Regional administration.
