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

IF 13.6 2区经济学 Q1 ECONOMICS Energy Economics Pub 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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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.