Relationships between energy technology patents and CO2 emissions in China: An empirical study

This paper explores dynamic relationships between energy technology patents and CO2 emissions in China during 1985-2009. Based on vector autoregression (VAR), cointegration and vector error correction model (VECM) are adopted to uncover relationships in both long-run and short-run; also dynamic interactions are identified to establish these relationships between variables through impulse response functions and variance decomposition methods. Results show that: (1) the increase of energy technology patents does not reduce CO2 emissions in both long-run and short-run; (2) in the long-run, the increase of energy technology patents helps to reduce CO2 emissions intensity; while it does not for the short term. The present empirical study clearly indicates that Chinese government should attach more importance to investigating and improving energy technology patent system and formulating related energy technology policies for CO2 emissions reduction.