Assessing the Employment Impact of Renewable Energy Deployment: Evidence from Italy

Since the late 1990s, a significant acceleration in the decarbonization process of the society on a global scale has occurred. In addition to mitigating the increasingly alarming problem of climate change, the diffusion of renewable energies can help counteract the economic slowdown by promoting growth and creating new jobs, as policy makers, supported by the scientific literature on the subject, have been arguing for some time now. However, conflicting results regarding the employment benefits of renewable energy sources (RES) suggest further investigation in an attempt to answer a crucial socio-economic question: is there enough empirical evidence to claim that renewable energy production creates real job opportunities? This paper aims to contribute to the ex-post literature on the employment-renewable nexus by exploring the causal relationship between RES deployment and job creation in Italy at the regional level over the period 2000-2019. To this end an econometric approach based on a standard panel data analysis is implemented. The observed positive relationship between renewable energy production and employment that emerged from the exploratory analysis is only partially confirmed by empirical findings. In fact, panel estimates reveal that in Italy the expansion of renewable energy production (REP) positively affects employment only when high levels of REP are achieved.