Global Transitioning Towards a Green Economy: Analyzing the Evolution of the Green Product Space of the Two Largest World Economies

摘要

Research on transitioning towards a green economy seeks to enable countries to expand their green production basket more competitively than other nations. Current research argues that countries are capable of producing new green products if these new green products share similar capability requirements (e.g. technology, capital, skills, etc.) with green products that the country already produces and exports with a high Real Comparative Advantage (RCA). Recently, the Green Product Space (GPS) framework was developed based on the hypothesis that countries diversify their green production baskets following the path-dependent process, meaning that a country's green production basket development should be based on its current accumulation of green capabilities. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive analysis to identify patterns of green growth between 2007 and 2017. The results of our analysis indicate that countries which successfully advanced and diversified their green production basket not only followed the path-dependent process, but also follow the non-path dependent process we term "high-energy jumps".