Environmental productivity growth, regulation and types of pollutants: Evidence from European firms

Abstract

European manufacturing firms have to cope with the new regulations that advocate a greener and more sustainable future with less emissions and at the same time enhance or at least maintain their productivity levels. A unique dataset is constructed by combining information on different firms' pollutants with their financial information during the 2011-2017 period. A non-radial directional distance function analysis is adopted with desirable and undesirable outputs to estimate environmental productivity growth and its components, which addresses the problem of heterogeneity. A regulatory impact indicator that provides information about the loss of outputs resulting from new policies is also computed. Finally, the impact of environmental regulations on productivity growth is explored using a panel vector autoregressive method. Our findings showcase different average values of productivity for each pollutant group. Moreover, results indicate that increasing the index of regulations by 1%, increases environmental productivity by 0.24% and 0.44% for heavy metals and greenhouse gases groups, respectively. Finally, results support the "weak" Porter Hypothesis, which attests that welldesigned environmental regulations can exert a positive effect on environmental innovation.

Keywords: Environmental; Environmental regulations; Metafrontier Malmquist–Luenberger index; Pollutant; Productivity.