Comparative Green Advantage: Growth Regimes and Public Investment in Renewable Energy R&D

Abstract

Many consider research and development (R&D) a crucial pillar of decarbonization, yet few have investigated what actually drives investment. What drives public investment in renewable energy R&D in wealthy democracies? Using OECD data, this research note tests a number of hypotheses from the literature and finds that public investment in renewable energy R&D is most closely associated with growth regimes and their related characteristics. Furthermore, the ‘most invested’ are dynamic services export‐led growth regimes who are deindustrializing and moving towards knowledge‐based sectors like information and communications technology and finance. In short, economies investing the most in renewable energy R&D have the least structurally carbon‐intensive growth regime. As international economic integration locks many countries into specific path‐dependent roles, these findings suggest that there is a comparative advantage to the green transition. It concludes with a discussion of the asymmetric green capacities between core and periphery countries in the European Union.

Green macrofinancial regimes

“…Most theories of comparative capitalism have revolved around this problem, from the French regulation school (Aglietta, 1979) and the social studies of accumulation (Kotz, McDonough, and Reich, 1994), to varieties of capitalism (Hall and Soskice, 2001) and growth model/growth regime theory (Baccaro and Pontusson, 2016;Hassel and Palier, 2020). Climate policy scholars, while rightly highlighting the "environmental silences" in this literature, have also argued that the insights from this field should be "repurposed" (Green, 2023, 330, 338) for the study of the political economy of decarbonisation (Baer, Campiglio, and Deyris, 2021;Copley, 2023;Cahen-Fourot, 2020;Nahm, 2022;Driscoll, 2023). Such repurposing will, however, require serious engagement with the pivotal role of macrofinancial institutions in determining which regimes offer a path to a just green transition, which do not, and why.…”

Strategy Generation for Risk Minimization of Renewable Energy Technology Investments in Hospitals with SF TOP-DEMATEL Methodology

“…According to Bhattarai et al (2022), development and application of technology can be affected by direct policy investment. Driscoll (2023) found that investments in renewable energy R&D are most closely related to growth regimes and their associated characteristics. Green finance is also considered while evaluating the role of technology on renewable energy investments.…”