Environmental and innovation policies for the evolution of green technologies : a survey and a test

The aim of this paper is to provide an updated survey of the ‘‘state of the art’’ in environmental policies, with a particular focus on those policies fostering the generation, diffusion and exploitation of technologies improving environmental performances, i.e. eco-innovations. In particular, we provide a critical appraisal of the existing policy schemes, by emphasizing how the demarcation between environmental and technology policies gets more and more blurred. The case for a systemic approach to the implementation of policy measures is finally discussed. Econometric evidence about the importance of environmental policies is also provided in the ‘‘Appendix’’.