Environmental Productivity and Convergence of European Manufacturing Industries. Are they Under Pressure?

European industries are under pressure regarding their environmental performance and productivity growth. The current energy crisis offsets governments efforts to achieve carbon neutrality while removing significant degrees of freedom in terms of firm's competitiveness. This paper studies environmental productivity and its components at a European industrial level using a dataset of 13 industries of the manufacturing sector from 27 European countries over the 1995-2014 period. Our results point out that industrial environmental productivity has deteriorated across Europe with best practice change being the main contributor. In addition, referring to the technological leaders in Europe, the findings point out that low tend to follow the middle-high technology industries. Finally, the non-convergence hypothesis and the creation of discrete clubs for the productivity index case and its components are supported