Martin Wenke (p), Thomas Hajduk

Heder De Oliveira

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Eleanor Doyle (p), Mauricio Perez-Alaniz

Martin Wenke

This paper explores and applies Sustainable Competitiveness as a synthetic yet comprehensive metric of Sustainable Development. Such metrics are needed to aid the transition to more inclusive and sustainable economic growth. Greater integration of the pillars of sustainable development is emphasised in both academic and policy spaces in the search for development of smart and green economies that simultaneously target economic growth, environmental sustainability and societal development. However, researchers and policymakers seldom operationalise the concepts on an integrated basis, with the social aspect the least theorized or explored. The paper first operationalises sustainable competitiveness as an index-based approach. It also empirically applies the Arellano Bond dynamic panel data estimator method to a dataset constructed for a sample of 94 countries for the period 2005-2015. The paper presents the empirical results, identifying key competitiveness pillars contributing to sustainable competitiveness, concluding that sustainable competitiveness, as a concept and as an approach, can be used in the current research literature to bridge the current divide. This in turn can help better inform policies for achieving sustainable development goals.

Gertjan Dordmond, Heder de Oliveira (p), Ivair Silva, Julia Stwart

Martin Wenke

Rising temperatures and sea levels as well as the depletion of natural resource stocks place sustainable development more than ever at the center of our political and economic policies. Yet how does one ‘go green’? Transforming current economic structures into a ‘green’ economy is a complicated process. The type of jobs that are present in an economy largely determine the structure of that economy. It is therefore no surprise that the creation of green jobs is a key component of the ‘going green’ process. But what determines how many green jobs are present in a region? Using occupational data for 27 Brazilian states between 2003 and 2013 this paper examines whether the economic complexity of a state explains why one state has a greener occupational space than another. After constructing a green jobs index we show that economic complexity does indeed have positive explanatory power when it comes to the green jobs index. We also show that transitioning through this occupational space is a slow and difficult process. Despite this we see positive signs that the significant regional differences in greenness that we observe are declining. States which were initially not very green became relatively a lot greener than states which were initially already relatively green, which indicates convergence.