Invention and Transfer of Climate Change–Mitigation Technologies: A Global Analysis

By Antoine Dechezleprêtre, M. Glachant, I. Haščič, N. Johnstone, Yann Ménière. Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, 2011

437 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This article uses the European Patent Office Worldwide Patent Statistical Database to examine the geographic distribution and global diffusion of inventions in thirteen climate-mitigation technologies since 1978. The data suggest that until 1990 innovation was driven mostly by energy prices. Since then, environmental policies, and, more recently, climate policies, have accelerated the pace of innovation. The data also indicate that innovation is highly concentrated in three countries—Japan, Germany, and the United States—which together account for 60 percent of total inventions. Surprisingly, the contribution of emerging economies is far from negligible as China and Brazil together account for about 10 percent of total inventions. However, inventions from emerging economies are less likely to find markets beyond their borders, suggesting that inventions from emerging economies have less value. More generally, international transfers occur mostly between developed countries (73 percent of all exported inventions). Exports from developed countries to emerging economies are still limited (22 percent) but are growing rapidly, especially to China.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3f3aa2fd791e8be45d7a6b87e57522f8ccc770f2

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Citations in the corpus

Environmental Policy and Directed Technological Change: Evidence from the European Carbon Market (2012, background): “There was a surge in patenting for these technologies in the early 1980s, often attributed to the second oil price shock in the late 1970s (Dechezleprêtre et al., 2011).”
The Role of Technological Change in Green Growth (2012, methodology): “Dechezleprêtre et al. (2011) find that technology transfer is more likely if the country is more open to trade.”
International Technology Transfer, Climate Change, and the Clean Development Mechanism (2011, background): “(2)The other article in this symposium, Dechezleprêtre et al. (2011), analyzes the geographic distribution and global diffusion of inventions related to thirteen climate-mitigation technologies.”
Explaining the Diffusion of Renewable Energy Technology in Developing Countries (2013, background): “The research and development in RET is primarily done in industrialized countries (Dechezleprêtre et al. 2011; Popp et al. 2011).”
Induced innovation in clean energy technologies from foreign environmental policy stringency? (2019, background): “This approach rests on the strong assumption that environmental technologies are indeed actively traded across borders and that their innovative development is globally dispersed (Dechezleprêtre et al., 2008; Dechezleprêtre et al., 2011).”