The geography of environmental innovation: a rural/urban comparison

• Published in: The Annals of regional science Vol. 71; no. 1; pp. 27 - 59
• Main Authors: Galliano, Danielle, Nadel, Simon, Triboulet, Pierre
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Berlin/Heidelberg Springer Berlin Heidelberg 01.08.2023; Springer Nature B.V; Springer Verlag
• Subjects: Clean technology; Companies; Economics; Economics and Finance; Environmental Economics; Externality; Geography; Humanities and Social Sciences; Innovations; Landscape/Regional and Urban Planning; Microeconomics; Regional/Spatial Science; Special Issue Paper; Specialization; Q55; R3; O33; L60; Eco-innovation; French industry; related variety; rural; spatial externalities
• ISSN: 0570-1864; 1432-0592
• DOI: 10.1007/s00168-022-01149-3

This paper aims to contribute to enlarge a geography of eco-innovation. The objective is to study what kind of spatial externalities (specialization, related and unrelated variety) has the most positive impact on eco-innovation, according to firm’s location (rural, peri-urban, urban). We empirically test this framework using a hurdle negative binomial model on firm-level data drawn from the French Community Innovation Survey (CIS). The results show that spatial externalities have different effects depending on the firm’s engagement and breadth of eco-innovation as well as on its location. Marshallian specialization has a positive effect both on engagement and breadth of eco-innovations unlike unrelated variety, which negatively impacts breadth of eco-innovation. With regard to the firm’s location, related variety is particularly correlated with the eco-innovation breadth of rural firms, whereas specialization is positively correlated with the breadth of eco-innovations of peri-urban firms. As for urban firms, spatial externalities seem to have less impact on their eco-innovation related behavior.