Impact of China's renewable energy product exports on host countries' energy transition R&D: The role of population aging

IF 14.2 2区经济学 Q1 ECONOMICS Energy Economics Pub Date : 2025-04-01 Epub Date: 2025-02-17 DOI:10.1016/j.eneco.2025.108310

Junjie Zhang , Shiwei Yu , Yundie Hu , Xing Hu , Wenqing Zhang

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Abstract

The global challenges of population aging and energy transition (ET) are becoming increasingly intertwined. China's exports of renewable energy products (REPs) play a pivotal role in addressing the rising global demand for ET solutions. However, the combined effects of population aging and China's REP exports on host countries' research and development (R&D) investments in ET remain underexplored. This study employs an Auto-Regressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model to examine the dynamic impacts of aging and China's REP exports on R&D investments in renewable energy (RE), power, and storage technologies. Utilizing panel data from 33 countries between 2000 and 2023, the findings reveal that, in the short term, China's REP exports suppress host countries' ET R&D investments by substituting domestic R&D efforts.

In contrast, over the long term, these exports stimulate ET R&D by complementing domestic innovation activities. Furthermore, the interaction between population aging and China's REP exports exerts a negative influence on R&D investments over time, as aging populations drive higher RE consumption, leading countries to prioritize the import of REPs to meet immediate energy needs over domestic R&D initiatives. To incentivize ET R&D investments in the context of aging populations, governments are advised to implement more liberalized trade policies regarding China's REP exports.

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中国可再生能源产品出口对东道国能源转型研发的影响：人口老龄化的作用

人口老龄化与能源转型的全球性挑战日益交织在一起。中国的可再生能源产品（rep）出口在满足全球对ET解决方案不断增长的需求方面发挥着关键作用。然而，人口老龄化和中国REP出口对东道国ET研发投资的综合影响仍未得到充分探讨。本研究采用自回归分布滞后（ARDL）模型考察老龄化和中国可再生能源出口对可再生能源、电力和储能技术研发投资的动态影响。利用2000年至2023年间来自33个国家的面板数据，研究结果表明，在短期内，中国REP出口通过替代国内研发努力抑制了东道国的ET研发投资。相比之下，从长期来看，这些出口通过补充国内创新活动来刺激经济技术研发。此外，随着时间的推移，人口老龄化与中国可再生能源出口之间的相互作用对研发投资产生了负面影响，因为人口老龄化推动了更高的可再生能源消费，导致各国优先考虑进口可再生能源以满足当前的能源需求，而不是国内研发计划。为了在人口老龄化的背景下激励ET研发投资，建议政府对中国REP出口实施更开放的贸易政策。

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来源期刊

Energy Economics ECONOMICS-

CiteScore

18.60

自引率

12.50%

发文量

524

期刊介绍： Energy Economics is a field journal that focuses on energy economics and energy finance. It covers various themes including the exploitation, conversion, and use of energy, markets for energy commodities and derivatives, regulation and taxation, forecasting, environment and climate, international trade, development, and monetary policy. The journal welcomes contributions that utilize diverse methods such as experiments, surveys, econometrics, decomposition, simulation models, equilibrium models, optimization models, and analytical models. It publishes a combination of papers employing different methods to explore a wide range of topics. The journal's replication policy encourages the submission of replication studies, wherein researchers reproduce and extend the key results of original studies while explaining any differences. Energy Economics is indexed and abstracted in several databases including Environmental Abstracts, Fuel and Energy Abstracts, Social Sciences Citation Index, GEOBASE, Social & Behavioral Sciences, Journal of Economic Literature, INSPEC, and more.