Environmental regulation and green productivity growth: Evidence from Italian manufacturing industries

Environmental policy is at the core of the current research debate and policy action. Few studies have discussed the impact of environmental regulation on productivity growth at industry level, and the empirical evidence on this issue is still controversial. Based on panel data on thirteen Italian manufacturing industries from 1995 to 2017, this study analyzes the effect of environmental policies on sectoral productivity by measuring the adjusted productivity growth using the Malmquist-Luenberger index. The main result of this analysis is that environmental regulation has no negative effect in most of the sample industries. A bootstrapping approach has been used to assess the robustness of estimated results.