Economic Growth and Scientific Knowledge as Determinants of Innovation Uptake in a Situation of Uncertainty About Environmental or Health Risk
Abstract
With growing concern for potential negative impacts to health or the environment of new types of consumer goods reaching the market, a major challenge for both policy makers and producers is to understand conditions of uptake of innovation in a situation of uncertainty concerning risk related to these products. Our contribution studies the effects of economic growth and of the production of new scientific knowledge on risk, on innovation uptake. It focuses on the case of polycarbonate, an intermediate good that requires the use of bisphenol A (BPA), a suspected endocrine disruptor. Polycarbonate is a widely used material found in automotive but also in baby-bottles and other plastics. Using Japanese time-series data, the autoregressive distributed lag approach is applied to estimate the relationship between aggregate material use, economic growth and new scientific knowledge about risk related to this material. Polycarbonate sales are used as a dependent variable. First, the hypothesis of an environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) is tested. Then, the quarterly quantity of the global number of scientific articles dealing with potential risk of BPA is included in the model. Results support the EKC theory in so far as the model presents an inverted-U-shaped link between economic growth and polycarbonate use. There is also an inverted-U-shape curve of the relationship between the number of scientific publications and polycarbonate sales. In other words, the paper also shows that, in a first phase, the production of scientific knowledge about risk related to bisphenol A may have no negative impact on innovation uptake.
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