No green growth without innovation

Publishing date: 23 November 2009
Authors: Philippe Aghion David Hémous Reinhilde Veugelers

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This Policy Brief, co-written by Senior Non-Resident Fellow Philippe Aghion, Senior Resident Fellow Reinhilde Veugelers and David Hemous of Harvard University, attempts to change the terms of the debate surrounding climate change policy. The authors argue that policymakers should do more to encourage innovation and investment in green research and development rather than focusing solely on the setting of a carbon price. Using a model developed by Aghion in a previous paper, they argue that a carbon price would have to be about 15 times higher in the first five years and 12 times higher in the next five years if innovation is not properly subsidized by governments. The authors also provide several policy recommendations for incentivising this type of green growth in the private sector.

About the authors

Philippe Aghion

Philippe Aghion, a Non-resident Senior Fellow from September 2006 to 2016, was coordinating Bruegel's research project on higher education.

He is the Robert C. Waggoner Professor of Economics at Harvard University, where he started teaching Economics in 2000. Previously, he held positions at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Nuffield College (Oxford), and University College London.

Philippe's research spans a broad array of fields including corporate finance, industrial organisation, political economy and macroeconomics. He is managing editor of the journal The Economics of Transition, which he launched in 1992.
David Hémous

David Hémous is an Associate Professor at the University of Zurich
Reinhilde Veugelers

Reinhilde Veugelers is a Senior Fellow at Bruegel. She specialises in industrial organisation, innovation and science.

Recently, she has covered novelty in technology development; international technology transfers through multinational enterprises; global innovation value chains; young innovative companies; innovation for climate change; industry-science links and their impact on firms’ innovative productivity; evaluation of research and innovation policy; explaining scientific productivity; researchers’ international mobility and novel scientific research.

She speaks English, Dutch and French.

Reinhilde is also a Professor at KU Leuven at the Department of Management, Strategy and Innovation and a Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. She is a CEPR Research Fellow and a member of the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Sciences, the Academia Europeana, the Board of Reviewing Editors of the journal Science and a co-PI on the Science of Science Funding Initiative at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). From 2004-2008, she was on academic leave as advisor at the European Commission (Bureau of European Policy Analysis). She served on the European Research Council's (ERC) Scientific Council from 2012-2018 and on the Real-time earthquake risk reduction for a resilient Europe (RISE) Expert Group, advising the commissioner for Research. She holds a PhD in Economics from KU Leuven.

Websites:
https://feb.kuleuven.be/reinhilde.veugelers
https://bruegel.org/author/reinhilde-veugelers/