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The digital and green transitions are crucial to the competitiveness of Europe and China. To strengthen their innovation efforts in this direction, it is essential to develop a technology ecosystem that promotes transdisciplinary research and combines digital and green knowledge. This chapter explores how the knowledge base in ‘twin’ digital and green technologies is developing in the European Union, the United Kingdom and China in comparison with other major players on the global technology scene such as the United States, Japan and South Korea. It investigates the Chinese policy programmes adopted to strengthen the knowledge base in this key area and analyses green digital patents. We conclude that Europe has an advantage over China in most of the twin transition technological areas investigated, but Europe has a few leading edges in the wider global landscape. The chapter emphasises the need for both competition and collaboration between the EU and China in driving the global sustainability goals with these technologies, which calls for ambitious public policies and collaborative efforts to address the challenges in greening digital technologies.

The green transformation has profound implications for the global economy and, hence, for the prospects for latecomer development. In this paper we review the insights derived from case studies of developing countries’ green technology experience. We conduct a systematic literature review covering seven key technologies. This allows us to examine whether the green economy offers new opportunities for latecomer development and their ability to seize these opportunities. To understand how developing countries’ capacities to exploit these opportunities differ across cases, we focus on sectoral systems and, particularly, on (a) preconditions allowing exploitation of these opportunities, and (b) strategic responses of public and private actors in this respect. We identify four different scenarios: (1) effective opportunity exploitation; (2) missed opportunities; (3) active approach; and (4) distant opportunities. We conclude by assessing the options for policy to support developing countries in their efforts to encourage green development strategies, focusing on both the provision and augmentation of opportunities and construction of the requisite sectoral production and innovation systems.

This paper is based on a review of the literature that brings together GVCs, green and digital transformations. Or to be more precise, the analysis is based on three main components: (a) the greening of GVCs and environmental upgrading; (b) the digital transformation of manufacturing GVCs and (c) an initial exploration of the green and digital joint transformations in GVCs. The aim is to provide a framework bringing together environmental upgrading and digital technologies in manufacturing GVCs. We find that the greening of the global value chains in manufacturing industries unfold in analytically separable steps: a) new patterns of demand preferences and consumer behaviours, b) new green strategies by lead firms and global buyers and c) enforcement of environmental standards and associated patterns of upgrading and downgrading across global supply bases. Digitalization in manufacturing GVCs have differentiated effects across the Global South. The importation and adoption of advanced digital technologies is still limited to a small number of countries (the so-called emerging economies) and their production at any scale is limited to an even smaller set of advanced economies plus China. Across most of the Global South, adoption rates of smart manufacturing and service technologies as well new technologies for data processing and analysis are very low and many firms still face challenges with adopting much older manufacturing and service technologies. Still very little is known about the extent to which key enabling digital technologies support the process of environmental upgrading in the Global South firms that are inserted into GVCs. This is because these techno-institutional waves are still concentrated geographically and the full extent of the ramifications across the Global South remains to be seen. This also means that synergy-creation is challenging. The small pool of literature identified for this study suggests that potentials are mainly limited to certain d

Technologies to mitigate climate change may diffuse from lead markets to the rest of the world through several mechanisms and make important contributions to the global green transformation. In this paper, we explore the role played by multinational enterprises (MNEs) in transferring knowledge and innovative capabilities in green technologies to their global subsidiaries. We posit that the degree of green knowledge transfer and innovative capability development in subsidiaries depend on: (i) the host country characteristics, (ii) the specific technology in question, and (iii) the mode of entry. The empirical analysis combines data on foreign direct investments with patent analysis. The results suggest that being a subsidiary of a green MNE has a positive impact on the number and quality of green patents produced locally. This green innovative advantage vis-à-vis domestic companies is larger in less developed countries and in those that are less reliant on oil rents, in particular if they already possess higher levels of relevant domestic innovative capacity. Furthermore, firm and sectoral characteristics also matter. The analysis suggests that green FDIs are more effective when technologies are characterized by low tradability and tacit knowledge. Finally, cross-border acquisitions are more efficient at strengthening green innovative capabilities than subsidiaries established with greenfield investments.