Does Green Public Procurement Trigger Environmental Innovations?

Abstract

Green public procurement has gained high political priority and is argued to be an effective demand-side policy to trigger environmental innovations. However, the empirical evidence on its innovation impact is limited. We construct a novel firm-level dataset to investigate the effect of winning public procurement tenders with additional environmental award criteria on firms’ introduction of environmental innovations. Employing cross-sectional difference-in-differences methods, we find that winning public procurement awards with environmental selection criteria increases a firm's probability of introducing more environmentally friendly products on average by 20 percentage points. We show that this effect is driven by small and medium-sized firms and is not statistically significant for larger firms. Furthremore, there is no statistically significant effect on the introduction of more environmentally friendly processes.