Development and utilization of energy-related technologies, economic performance and the role of policy instruments

The present study investigates the effects of energy-related technologies on economic performance at firm level. We distinguish clearly between adoption and use of energy-related technologies (process innovation in the broad sense) and product innovation in energy-related fields. We take into consideration four energy-related policy instruments (and expected demand for energy-related new products and services). We investigate the possibility of indirect effects of policy on performance via adoption or innovation by interacting adoption and innovation variables with policy instrument dummies. We test our hypotheses not only for the pooled data but also separately for the three countries (Austria, Germany, Switzerland) that are taken into consideration in this study We find a positive direct effect of investment expenditures for energy-related technologies on labour productivity and a positive indirect effect of energy taxes via investment in energyrelated technologies. We find neither direct nor indirect effects of product innovation in energyrelated products on labour productivity. No differences among the three countries could be detected.