Green exports and the global product space: Prospects for EU industrial policy

We test if and where industrial policy to promote â??greenâ?? industry development can improve competitiveness in export markets. Proponents of â??green growthâ?? have argued that domestic promotion of â??greenâ?? energy will generate improved comparative advantage in export markets for high-technology goods such as wind turbines or solar cells. If this holds depends on if domestic market expansion can, on its own, support firm competitiveness abroad. We find evidence that industrial policy may work for wind turbines, but we find no evidence that it works for solar cells. Furthermore, domestic renewable energy promotion is more likely to translate into improved international competitiveness if a country already possesses skills, technologies, and industrial sectors closely related to the sector in question. By locating the wind turbine and solar cell sectors in the global product space of traded goods, we are able to show that, net of historical competitiveness and domestic market size, green industrial policy functions best when capitalising on pre-existing industrial capacities, rather than trying to create them. Finally, our finding that policy appears to work for wind turbines but not solar cells may reflect the greater tradeability of solar cells, which may mean that expansion of domestic demand leads to more imports rather than expanded domestic production. While this paper suggests conditions under which green industrial policy might prove effective in economic development, it makes no claims about whether this represents an efficient approach to either growth or emissions reduction. This evidence recommends caution in using economic growth and competitiveness arguments as the primary justification for investments in renewable energy.

The key issue for Luxembourg in the EP elections is not the national vote, but whether Juncker can win the contest for Commission President

Luxembourg traditionally holds national elections at the same time as European elections. As Martine Huberty writes, however, the 2014 vote will mark uncharted territory as the country was forced into holding snap elections in October last year. She argues that while the national vote is relatively difficult to predict at this stage, the key issue for the country is likely to be determined elsewhere, with Luxembourg’s former Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker also standing for Commission President

Despite Luxembourg heading for snap elections, long term political change seems unlikely.

Earlier this month, Luxembourg’s centre right Prime Minister Jean Claude Juncker ended a debate on the parliamentary inquiry on the dysfunctions of the Luxembourgish secret service by calling snap elections, after it became clear that he no longer had the support of his coalition partner, the social democratic party. Martine Huberty presents the background to this extraordinary event and argues that a deeply ingrained fear of uncertainty and change in the population will probably lead to Juncker becoming his own successor

Despite holding the largest number of seats in Luxembourg’s parliament, Jean-Claude Juncker and the CSV are on the verge of being pushed out of government

Luxembourg held snap elections on 20 October following the collapse of the previous government led by Jean-Claude Juncker and the Christian Social People’s Party (CSV). Martine Huberty assesses the results of the election and discusses the dramatic coalition negotiations which look set to leave the CSV frozen out of government, despite holding the largest share of seats in parliament. If an alternative coalition is formed between the Liberals, Social Democrats and Greens, it would mean the end of Juncker’s 18 year reign as Prime Minister, and constitute only the second time in Luxembourg’s post-war history that the CSV has not been in power

A scaleable approach to emissions-innovation record linkage

This paper reports an approach to linking data on European emitters to data on their innovation practices. We illustrate a straightforward approach to record linkage between the European Union Community Integrated Transaction Log (CITL) and the PATSTAT international patent database. We show how that record linkage can be maintained with relatively minimal human input

Green exports and the global product space: Prospects for EU industrial policy

We test if and where industrial policy to promote ‘green’ industry development can improve competitiveness in export markets. Proponents of ‘green growth’ have argued that domestic promotion of ‘green’ energy will generate improved comparative advantage in export markets for high-technology goods such as wind turbines or solar cells. If this holds depends on if domestic market expansion can, on its own, support firm competitiveness abroad. We find evidence that industrial policy may work for wind turbines, but we find no evidence that it works for solar cells. Furthermore, domestic renewable energy promotion is more likely to translate into improved international competitiveness if a country already possesses skills, technologies, and industrial sectors closely related to the sector in question. By locating the wind turbine and solar cell sectors in the global product space of traded goods, we are able to show that, net of historical competitiveness and domestic market size, green industrial policy functions best when capitalising on pre-existing industrial capacities, rather than trying to create them. Finally, our finding that policy appears to work for wind turbines but not solar cells may reflect the greater tradeability of solar cells, which may mean that expansion of domestic demand leads to more imports rather than expanded domestic production. While this paper suggests conditions under which green industrial policy might prove effective in economic development, it makes no claims about whether this represents an efficient approach to either growth or emissions reduction. This evidence recommends caution in using economic growth and competitiveness arguments as the primary justification for investments in renewable energy

A flexible, scaleable approach to the international patent 'name game'. Bruegel Working Paper 2014/10i, September 2014

The inventors in PATSTAT are often duplicates: the same person or company may be split into multiple entries in PATSTAT, each associated to different patents. In this paper, we address this problem with an algorithm that efficiently de-duplicates the data. It needs minimal manual input and works well even on consumer-grade computers. Comparisons between entries are not limited to their names, and thus this algorithm is an improvement over earlier ones that required extensive manual work or overly cautious clean-up of the names

A flexible, scaleable approach to the international patent 'name game'

This paper reports a new approach to disambiguation of large patent databases. Available international patent databases do not identify unique innovators. Record disambiguation poses a significant barrier to subsequent research. Present methods for overcoming this barrier couple ad-hoc rules for name harmonisation with labourintensive manual checking. We present instead a computational approach that requires minimal and easily automated data cleaning, learns appropriate record-matching criteria from minimal human coding, and dynamically addresses both computational and data-quality issues that have impeded progress. We show that these methods yield accurate results at rates comparable to outcomes from more resource-intensive hand coding