Adriaan van Zon studied economics at the University of Groningen from 1974 to 1981. In 1985, having completed his Ph.D. research involving the construction of a multi-sectoral model for the Netherlands, he moved to the Department of Economics of Maastricht University. Since 1988 he has been working at the UNU Maastricht Economic and Social Research Institute on Innovation and Technology (UNU-MERIT), where he has been involved in the construction of various macro-sectoral models to study the impact of technological change on employment and competitiveness, but also on CO2 emission reductions in a macro-sectoral framework.