Drivers of the development of global climate-change-mitigation technology: a patent-based decomposition analysis

The development of the climate-change-mitigation technology has received widespread attention from both academic and policy studies. Nevertheless, very few studies have explained how and why economies contribute differently to global development. This paper decomposed the development of the global climate-change-mitigation technology, proxied by patent-based indicators, from 1996 to 2015 into several predefined factors. The results show that the worldwide surge of climate-change-mitigation-technology patents from 1996 to 2011 is driven by increased concentration on green invention, improved research intensity, and enlarged economic scale, while the falling of patent counts from 2011 to 2015 is predominantly due to less concentration on green invention. Among different climate-change-mitigation technologies, the type-specific development is attributed to different dominant factors, and the resulting priority change can reflect the shift of both global research and development (R&D) resource and market demand. Regarding regional contributions, the resulting economy-specific contributions to each driving factor can be used to design the policies to promote the development of the global climate-change-mitigation technology.