Economic Performance in Green Energy Transition Towards the New Normal Framework: Drivers and Blockers of Green Energy Productivity

In the context of SDG 7 and SDG 13 of the 2030 sustainable development agenda, a new performance indicator started to gain momentum in scientific research: the renewable energy productivity. Understanding the drivers and the challenges of green energy productivity could help add on to the classical focus of renewable energy research on infrastructure, technical and economic feasibility, environmental and social impacts, by considering more the performance indicators in this field. Only very few studies explored the influencing factors of the renewable energy productivity. Thus, this research aims to reveal the impact of social, economic, energy, and environmental variables on the green energy productivity. The methodological approach involves bibliometric analyses of the literature on green energy productivity (GEP), and panel data regression models involving 16 independent variables. The main findings indicate positive effects of green taxes, female participation in the workforce, and highly educated people on GEP, pointing out the importance of green taxation, education, and gender equality in sustainable development. On the other side, negative relationships of green energy productivity with economic growth, traditional energy variables, and air pollution were found for the European Union’s member states over 2007 and 2023. The results suggest that the analyzed European countries based their economic growth on traditional resources, with less importance provided to the renewable resources and green technologies, as the share of renewable resources of GDP was also negatively correlated. While private financial resources increases the green energy productivity, questions about research and development investments, urbanization, and diversity index are still debatable.