From Innovation Intensity to Green Action: Cross-Economy Evidence on Energy Management and the Carbon-Monitoring Gap

This study examines whether economy-level innovation intensity is associated with environmental action and whether that association differs across green outcomes and levels of adoption. Using harmonized World Bank Enterprise Survey indicators for 89 economies observed in 2023–2024, the analysis relates the prevalence of highly innovation-active firms to energy-management adoption and CO2 monitoring. The empirical strategy combines HC3-robust OLS, beta regression, MM-robust estimation, bootstrap inference, continent controls, leave-one-economy-out diagnostics, quantile regression, alternative innovation measures, and formal cross-outcome coefficient tests. Innovation intensity is positively associated with energy-management adoption, although precision varies across specifications. Construct robustness is strongest for process innovation and a standardized additive innovation index; product innovation is also significant in the macro-control sample, whereas R&D alone is not. Quantile point estimates are largest at the 25th conditional quantile, but a joint 5000-replication bootstrap yields only suggestive global evidence of heterogeneity (p = 0.077), with no pairwise differences significant under sign-based bootstrap inference. The clearest result is the Carbon-Monitoring Gap: the innovation slope is significantly weaker for CO2 monitoring than for energy management in the full sample, after outcome-specific continent adjustment, with standardized outcomes, after influential-case exclusion, and in every leave-one-economy-out re-estimation. The findings indicate that aggregate innovation intensity is associated more strongly with operational green practices than with carbon measurement, while the significant management-outcome interaction suggests that this outcome heterogeneity is not unique to innovation.