Innovation, environmental sustainability and economic development: DEA-Bootstrap and multilevel analysis to compare two regions

Abstract

[EN] Innovation and environmental sustainability are key elements in countries' development, essential to ensuring their continuing competitiveness in an increasingly globalized market. Similarly, at the regional level, these elements mark the difference between higher/lower growth; as such, the evaluation of innovation processes is very useful for orienting innovation policies towards those regions that need additional strategies to develop potential improvements. This study proposes the use, in a first stage, of DEA-Bootstrap and the Malmquist Index to analyse the innovation efficiency level in Spanish and Italian regions during the period 2004-2012. In the second stage, multilevel regression is used to analyse the relationship between efficiency, environmental sustainability and economic development. The results show great differences between the territories of the two countries analysed, confirming the need to establish differentiated policies that encourage the adoption of innovation practices in regions whose efficiency scores have shown a lack of rigour in the use of their resources, i.e. south Italian and Spanish regions. Furthermore, it has been shown that the stringency of environmental policies positively affects innovation efficiency, with a positive relationship found between development, innovation and environmental sustainability.