Environmental Innovations and Green Skills in the Nordic Countries

In this chapter, we argue that policy-making aiming to achieve environmentally sustainable transitions of the economy is in need of a solid empirical evidence base. Conventional measurement concepts used for example by the EU based on sector-classifications deliver highly biased pictures. We propose measurement concepts based on the use of green skills and human capital, validate key assumptions of our concept and apply the concept to the four Nordic countries Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. Our results show that indeed various versions of indicators based on green skills help predicting whether firms introduce environmental innovations, and this finding is robust across the four countries. Upon applying our measurement concept at the regional level, we find that the different Nordic countries show rather distinct patterns in their geographical distributions of these green skills, which may have implications for firms’ capabilities to introduce environmental innovations.