The role of international trade for the global build-up of innovation capabilities in the wind industry

Abstract

The global combat on climate change requires that developing countries not only get access to advanced technical equipment, but also rapidly build-up indigenous innovation capabilities for low-carbon technologies. The goal of this paper is to assess the role of international trade as a channel of knowledge diffusion in the wind industry from technologically advanced countries to their trading partners. Using patents as a measure of innovation in a cross-country time-series data analysis, we estimate the effects of the volume and the structure of sector-specific imports on domestic inventions in the wind-energy sector. The estimation results indicate that international trade has contributed to the development of globally distributed innovation capabilities in the wind industry, both through the transfer of technologies embodied in advanced technical equipment, but also through knowledge spillovers from the capabilities of foreign trading partners.

Keywords:

• wind-energy
• international trade
• innovation capability
• knowledge spillovers
• climate change

Acknowledgement

We would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding

This work was supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research [grant number 01LA1130B].

ORCID

Jan Peuckert http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9718-6566

Carsten Gandenberger http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5552-0949

Notes

1. More precisely, the PATSTAT 2014 database is used to extract information on granted applications between 1978 and 2012, while avoiding double counting when the same invention is filed in several countries. We reference to the priority date, because it is the closest to the date of invention.

2. Patents are only granted if the patent office approves that the request is directed to patentable subject matter, is novel, inventive and capable of industrial application.

3. We use the IPC category F03D (wind motors) to identify wind-energy-related patent applications. The same approach has been used by Johnstone, Haščič, and Popp (2010) and Dechezleprêtre and Glachant (2014).

4. Dechezleprêtre and Glachant (2014) use the discounted stock of citation-weighted patents as a measure of the wind-energy-related knowledge stock.

5. The indicator accounts for the fact that technologies represent the state-of-the-art for a limited time. It does not attempt, however, to account for different values of patents.

6. Online accessible via: http://wds.iea.org

7. Like Dechezleprêtre and Glachant (2014), we use the product code HS 850231 (wind power generating sets) to identify trade transactions of wind-energy-related goods and services.

8. Export statistics seem to be more reliable than the respective import statistics.

9. All predictor variables enter with a one-year time lag to rule out the possibility of reverse causation.

10. This information was extracted from the OECD.Stat database (http://stats.oecd.org/), using the priority date and the inventor's country of residence as reference.

11. Dechezleprêtre and Glachant (2014) use the generation of electricity from wind power as a proxy for the level of domestic demand-pull policies in the wind sector.

12. http://unfccc.int/kyoto_protocol/status_of_ratification/items/2613.php

13. http://data.worldbank.org/

14. The marginal effect is smaller, but of a similar magnitude as the effect of public R&D expenditures estimated by Dechezleprêtre and Glachant (2014).

15. This effect is about 10 times smaller than the estimations of Dechezleprêtre and Glachant (2014).

16. Johnstone, Haščič, and Popp (2010) estimate a similar impact of about 1.4 on wind-energy-related innovation after the signing of the Kyoto Protocol.