Positive prospects for California's green businesses, study finds
By Kathleen Maclay, Media Relations | 22 January 2010
BERKELEY — California's green businesses are more focused on local markets and more likely to stay in the Golden State than are their non-green counterparts, according to a University of California, Berkeley, study released Thursday (Jan. 21). And when compared with traditional businesses, green ones are more likely to expand.
"Innovating the Green Economy," a report by researchers at UC Berkeley’s Center for Community Innovation (CCI), was unveiled at yesterday’s conference on green economy innovation. (A policy brief from the report, titled "Green, Local, and Growing," is posted on the CCI website; the complete report will be available on the website next Wednesday.) Sponsored by the U.S. Economic Development Administration, the study comes at a time of heightened economic anxiety and of renewed pledges by elected leaders in Washington, D.C., and Sacramento to focus their efforts on job creation — especially green jobs.
The researchers found that in California, the green economy accounts for just one percent of jobs in the state, but is growing about 50 percent faster than the rest of the economy overall.
And while the green economy’s innovation appears concentrated regionally in areas such as the East Bay, Silicon Valley, San Diego and the Central San Joaquin Valley – there’s evidence of wide ripple effects in terms of jobs as green businesses concentrate on new products and services and as many traditional firms develop new green processes within their operations.
"This suggests that the entire state stands to benefit from the growth of the green economy," reads the introduction to the report that William Kittredge, director of the Economic Development Administration’s Performance and National Programs Division, described yesterday as "groundbreaking."