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By 2020 Europe has to increase its energy efficiency and share of renewables in 20%. However, even accomplishing these challenging objectives Europe will be effectively wasting energy as we demonstrate in this paper. In our way towards a fully renewable scenario, we need at least to stop wasting energy in order to guarantee the energy supply needed for growth and comfort. We waste energy when we employ more primary energy than the final energy we ultimately use and this excess cannot be reutilized. In this paper we propose the WE (wasted energy) as a novel metric to measure the performance of energy systems and set up appropriate targets. The WE incorporates information about energy efficiency and renewable sources. Unlike European legislation, the WE considers them in an integrated way. This approach will help Member States to exploit their intrinsic capabilities and design their optimum strategy to reach their objectives. Using the information in Eurostat, we calculate the WE of Member States in EU-28 and their evolution. We also analyze illustrative examples to highlight strategies to reduce the WE, study the connection between economic development and WE, and provide a tool to diagnose the potential of improvement of an energy system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Non-R&D innovation activities account for a significant portion of innovation efforts carried out across very heterogeneous economies in Europe. However, to incorporate them into economic models is not always straightforward. Moreover, relying only on R&D data does not capture well innovation in the services sector. To counter these problems, this paper builds an augmented macro-theoretical growth model where, besides R&D, non-R&D innovation activities play a key role as main drivers of TFP. The model is estimated for a sample of EU-26 countries over the period 2004–2008, showing that the distinction between R&D and non-R&D innovation activities is significant for a number of different issues. First, we find both R&D and non-R&D to be statistically significant and economic important in technological catch-up. Second, there is a differential sizable impact of R&D and non-R&D; the impact of R&D on TFP growth is found to be twice as big as that of non-R&D. And third, the two types of innovation cannot strictly been seen as complementary, at least for the case of countries with high R&D intensities or high non-R&D intensities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]