The CP is key to green tech and diversification.

Climate change continues to threaten the health of the planet and its inhabitants. The development and implementation of a wide variety of new technologies which aim to mitigate climate change and its associated causes will be essential for reducing the damage. Green technology will therefore play a central role in this fight. Understanding which sort of innovation currently constitutes the base of such technologies and understanding how they differ is crucial for determining which factors influence their development. Previous literature has suggested that migration and the presence of foreign inventors is responsible for augmenting shares of crucial types of technology and the development of new and more complex ones. According to the previous literature green technologies are often more novel and more complex as they combine a greater variety of existing knowledge. Therefore, understanding these challenges in the context of GT is particularly important.

The foregoing analysis demonstrates that in the context of U.S. MSAs, there are certain characteristics which are associated with the development of green technologies. It has been clearly shown that the shares of skilled and highly skilled foreign workers and the share of foreign inventors is among these factors. In nearly all cases, the share of foreign inventors is associated with increased counts of GT patents in posterior periods. Additionally, there is evidence that this effect is specific to certain types of GT and may even promote further diversification into more forms of GT.