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RWI-Mitteilungen Quarterly: Zeitschrift für Wirtschaftsforschung

2004

Manuel Frondel, Jens Horbach, Klaus Rennings, Till Requate

Environmental Policy Tools and Firm-Level Management Practices: Empirical Evidence for Germany

Since the early 1990s, environmental management systems (EMS) have become a vital voluntary supplement to mandatory environmental policies based on regulation and legislation. EMS may be perceived as an organizational environmental innovation that is designed to promote environmental performance. This paper provides a descriptive summary of the major results of a recent OECD-survey on management practices and environmental policy tools, such as EMS, that may spur firms’ environmental innovation activities. Our large-scale survey provides us with a valuable cross-sectional database that may serve as a basis for profound econometric analysis. This paper’s mere task, however, is to provide a descriptive summary of the survey results, indicating that the most important reasons why firms contemplate introducing EMS are – according to firms’ responses – to improve the corporate image and the efforts to achieve regulatory compliance.

Frondel, M., J. Horbach, K. Rennings und T. Requate (2004), Environmental Policy Tools and Firm-Level Management Practices: Empirical Evidence for Germany. RWI-Mitteilungen Quarterly: Zeitschrift für Wirtschaftsforschung, 54/55, 2, 87-111