Abstract
The development of environmental technologies and its diffusion across countries are of key importance for international environmental policy. This paper considers technologies in the area of glass-melting furnaces and glass burners, which are major contributors of NO x emissions. Using patents as an indicator of innovations and patent citations as a proxy for knowledge flows, the inducement of new environmental and non-environmental technologies and their diffusion within and across countries, patent applicant types and patent firm types are analyzed in relation to NO x -related environmental policy. We find that most environmental patents originate from the USA and Germany and are filed by a broad range of firms. Most knowledge flows take place within countries. Regarding cross-country flows, most environmental knowledge diffuses from US patents, which is likely to be a result of early strict environmental legislation in some areas of the USA.
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Notes
A so-called mother patent is the original patent and is usually filed in the home country of the inventing firm. Exactly the same patent can be filed in another country up to 1 year after the registration of the mother patent. These identical patents filed in other countries are called family patents.
Interview with industry representative of Software & Technologie Glas GmbH Cottbus (29 September 2010).
In severe ozone nonattainment areas (nitrogen is precursor for ozone) like the San Joaquin Valley in California, permits for glass factories contain NO x limits that are stricter than elsewhere in the USA (State of New Jersey 1997). By 1991, several glass furnaces in California were already using the oxy-fuel technology that reduces NO x emissions by 85% and achieving NO x emission levels of 1.5–2.9 lb NO x per ton of glass. At that time, most other furnaces in the area had NO x emission permit values of 4.0–7.0 lb per ton of glass.
However, the ultimate decision on which citations to include rests with the patent examiner.
This approach is different from Popp (2006), who creates an artificial pool of potentially cited patents by considering only patents from the most cited US patent classification for each of the pollution technologies considered.
The results are broadly similar and not reported here.
There are no self-citations among patents of individuals.
It is not necessary here to control for “citation culture” as in the models 2a–d, since it is not reasonable to assume that citation behavior varies by the type of firm/applicant.
In this sample, a lot of individual inventors were identified as employees of important producers in the sample. However, a complete matching of inventors with firms could not be delivered due to a lack of historic track records of inventors.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Maximilian Sindram and interns at the ifo Institute for help in extracting and processing the patent data. Financial support from the German Ministry of Education and Research for the project “Creation, diffusion and impacts of sustainability innovations” (01UN0608) is greatly acknowledged.
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Goetzke, F., Rave, T. & Triebswetter, U. Diffusion of environmental technologies: a patent citation analysis of glass melting and glass burners. Environ Econ Policy Stud 14, 189–217 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10018-012-0028-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10018-012-0028-4