“Digitalisation” and “Greening” as components of technology upgrading and sustainable economic performance

This paper explores the pace and direction of technological development using a technology upgrade conceptual and measurement framework. This approach is applied to a sample of 164 economies worldwide between 2002 and 2019. Within this framework, the paper focuses on digitalisation and greening as its two significant structural features. We explore their relationship with different components of technology upgrading and the relationship between technology upgrading and indicators of macroeconomic productivity. Our results show that the growth of R&D capabilities does not translate into aggregate productivity growth. However, there are “latecomer advantages” to basic digitalisation for lower middle- and low-income economies and “latecomer liabilities” in the greening of upper-middle-income economies. In addition, levels of digitalisation and greening do not correlate, suggesting these two transformation processes are not yet integrated into ‘ICT-assisted greening’. When we control for income levels, the impact of technology upgrading on productivity is isolated to specific components and significant only for some income groups. The absence of significant simultaneous effects on productivity points to large transformation failures. We conclude that the role of science and technology systems in spurring sustainable development would require a broad scope for S&T policies, their coordination, and integration with non-innovation policies.

BRUNO Randolph Luca;  MATUSIAK Monika;  OSAULENKO Kirill;  RADOSEVIC Slavo; 

2023-04-05

MDPI

JRC133102

2071-1050 (online),   

https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/15/3/1838,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC133102,   

10.3390/su15031838 (online),