Economic Measurement of the Environmental Benefits of Information and Communication Technologies: Experiences for Germany

This paper develops three scenarios for the future environmental benefits of information and communication technologies to assess the future potential of twin transition.We estimate market and cost values for (i) technology diffusion, (ii) economic and environmental cost savings, and (iii) monetary values of green IT and the IT-related potentials of home office in Germany.The analysis addresses a research gap as the few existing papers on the topic focus on the development of qualitative scenarios and do not try to assess market values for twin transition effects.We employ quantitative models which are based on reasonable assumptions on possible future paths.Our results show that there is a substantial potential for future economic benefits of twin transition, which -however -can only be exploited under favorable framework conditions.