WHAT DRIVES ENERGY-EFFICIENCY AND ENVIRONMENTAL INVESTMENTS IN SLOVENIAN MANUFACTURING INDUSTRIES?

摘要

Our paper adds to the existing knowledge in several ways. Similarly to the literature review of theoretical taxonomiesof drivers and barriers of EE investments and empirical findings we are going to provide also a literature review ontheoretical findings on why firms adopt environmental friendly investments. In addition, findings from empiricalstudies on drivers and barriers of environmental friendly investments will be reviewed. The findings from our studyprovide a solid ground for the comparisons of drivers for the two types of investments. We can see that largeexporting firms with higher energy costs and favourable expectations about future conditions are more likely to carryout both, energy efficient and environmental investments. Other investment activity also plays a significant roleindicating the presence of investment complementarity, although not all investments carried out have the samerelevance for energy-efficient and environmental investments. Only in the case of investments in expansion ofexisting capacities a substitution effect with energy-efficient investments can be confirmed. It is found that theeconomic crisis had a negative impact on environmental investments, while energy-efficient investments do not seemto have been much affected by the crisis. Surprisingly, the stringency of environmental regulation and environmentalcommitment are not found to influence the two investment decisions. The former effect may already be captured bythe sectoral dummies, while the later may be explained by the fact that majority of environmental investments hadalready been carried out in the past which resulted in obtaining ISO 14001 certificate. Consequently policyrecommendations on how to stimulate one or the other or both types of investments could be drawn from ouranalysis.