A taxonomy of green innovators: Empirical evidence from South Korea

This paper presents a new taxonomy of green innovators. Using firm-level data from the Korea Innovation Survey, this paper investigates different types of eco-innovations, how these relate to each other, and what their main determinants are. The empirical methodology builds on a combination of factor, cluster, and multinomial logit analysis. The taxonomy identifies four groups of green innovators: (1) carbon dioxide reducing; (2) waste-reducing; (3) recycling innovators; (4) and pollution-reducing. Research and development (R&D) policies emerge as relevant factors for enhancing innovation in waste-reducing firms, whereas environmental taxes and regulations are found to be more important drivers of technological change for pollution-reducing firms. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, it points out the firm-specific characteristics and policy instruments that are more relevant for different types of green innovation. Second, it provides new firm-level evidence for South Korea, thus expanding the geographical scope of econometric research on green innovation, which has so far largely focused only on European countries.