Mapping the Green Product-Space in Mexico: From Capabilities to Green Opportunities

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to examine the current and potential capability to promote the green economy in Mexico, simultaneously detecting new opportunities for diversification and “green” productive sophistication so that Mexican entities can move toward environmentally friendly ecological products. For this, we adopted a novel methodology to measure the productive capabilities of the green economy in Mexico, thereby discovering the green product space at a subnational scale. Economic complexity methods were used to estimate the Green Complexity Index (GCI) and the Green Complexity Potential (GCP) for 32 Mexican regions considering a time series from 2004 to 2018 and a set of data on international trade in ecological products. The main findings are reflected in a grid of the Green Adjacent Possible (GAP) and a heatmap that shows the “grasslands” (current green products by state). The results are likely to influence industrial policy and state innovation agendas. A limitation of this work is that it is based only on data from the formal, industrial, and regulated economy. The originality lies in the fact that there were no previous studies in the context analyzed, and the fecundity of the research reflects the need to expand the study with a focus on green business models.

The trickle down from environmental innovation to productive complexity

“…With respect to the Economic Complexity literature that focuses on various aspects of the green economy, this work introduces different elements of novelty. In fact, previous works analyse green technologies and industrial production separately, either without exploring the connections between green patents and exported products or by analysing it ex-post 19,36,38,39,41 . Moreover, extant research 22,[37][38][39]41 proposes a number of versions of the green product or technology space, however without considering any dynamic element, as well as without using any validation strategy of network links and thus possibly considering spurious associations, that fail to account for the ubiquity of products/technologies and the diversification of countries, as we are instead able to do in this contribution.…”

“…EFC is part of the burgeoning literature on EC and is a multidisciplinary approach to economic big data where the informational content of different types of empirical networks is maximized by using ad hoc algorithms which optimize the signal-to-noise ratio. EFC has proved highly successful in forecasting 30 and explaining 33 economic growth, and has been adopted by both the World Bank 34 and the European Commission 35 .Recently, some promising attempts to draw insights from the EC literature to analyse environmental issues have been put forth, with focus on environmental products [36][37][38][39] , technologies [18][19][20][40][41][42][43] and jobs 44 , setting the basis for a study of the productive or technological capabilities that are relevant to the green economy. Bearing in mind the benefits and the shortcomings of using patent data for studying technological innovation and especially their limited coverage in developing economies [45][46][47] , our empirical contribution builds on the Green Technology Fitness measure and green technology space proposed by Sbardella et al 19,43 , Napolitano et al 40 and Barbieri et al 20 .…”

“…Recently, some promising attempts to draw insights from the EC literature to analyse environmental issues have been put forth, with focus on environmental products [36][37][38][39] , technologies [18][19][20][40][41][42][43] and jobs 44 , setting the basis for a study of the productive or technological capabilities that are relevant to the green economy. Bearing in mind the benefits and the shortcomings of using patent data for studying technological innovation and especially their limited coverage in developing economies [45][46][47] , our empirical contribution builds on the Green Technology Fitness measure and green technology space proposed by Sbardella et al 19,43 , Napolitano et al 40 and Barbieri et al 20 .…”

What drives the creation of green jobs, products and technologies in cities and regions? Insights from recent research on green industrial transitions

“…They then develop a ‘Green Complexity Index’ (which compares countries in terms of their ability to export more complex green products), and a ‘Green Complexity Potential’ (which identifies the extent to which countries are likely to diversify into new green complex products based on their existing capabilities). This approach has also been extended to the local and regional scale – for example, in Mexico, Pérez-Hernández et al (2021) draw on data from 2004 to 1028 to identify regions that are becoming more complex today, and those that have the potential to produce more complex green products in the future, and in which particular sectors. There is scope for making such mapping of future green economic complexity potential available to many more localities and regions.…”

Sustainable development goals for the coastal territories of the Baltic Sea Region

“…When determining the key industries, the development of which can contribute to the sustainable development of a territory, it is also advisable to focus on the strategic areas identified by the economic complexity analysis [47][48][49][50]. In the BSR, such an analysis was carried out, for example, for the Kaliningrad region for the period 2015-2017 [51].…”