Spatiotemporal patterns and determinants of renewable energy innovation: Evidence from a province-level analysis in China

Dependent variable

Patents can reflect the innovative performance of an economy in a manner that is attractive to researchers from an output perspective. Despite their shortcomings, patent counts are still the best available source of data on innovation that is readily available and comparable across countries and China’s provinces (Johnstone et al., 2010; Geng and Ji, 2016; Cheng and Yao, 2021). Referring to the technology classification of Cheng and Yao (2021), we define renewable energy innovation (REI) as the number of patent grants for six renewable energy technologies, namely,…