Barriers to firms’ energy efficiency in transition countries

This study seeks to explore the firm’ barriers of energy efficiency in a set of 28 Transition economies exploiting the enterprise survey data collected by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) jointly with the European Investment Bank (EIB) and the World Bank Group (WBG). Based on the Ordinary Least Square (OLS) regression model and on the construction of three different indicators to evaluate the energy efficiency, we find that the barriers to the adoption of energy efficiency measures mainly lack financial resources and profitability. Findings obtained from the interactions are also worthy of note. In particular, we find that the absence of profitability starts being stronger for non-EU countries. Instead, there is no evidence of heterogenous effects for industry sectors.