The eco-innovation mode in China and its impact on carbon emissions:From the exploration/exploitation perspective

The exploration/exploitation perspective is a well-known concept in the strategic management field;however,it has seldom been used to explore and analyze strategy at a national level.This study utilizes this perspective to analyze China's eco-innovation mode in response to climate change.By categorizing eco-innovation into radical and incremental eco-innovation,we examine the relationship between these concepts using Y02 patents as a proxy and panel data from 30 Chinese provinces from 2004 to 2015.The results show that eco-innovation as a whole as well as both radical and incremental innovations are drivers for reducing carbon emissions.Furthermore,contradictory to most previous empirical results related to the complementarity hypothesis,we find a complementary relationship between radical and incremental eco-innovation.These results collectively represent China's unique eco-innovation mode,confirming the assumed diversity of eco-innovation models in different contexts.The results also show the significant positive effects of economic development,urbanization level,industrial structure,and China's opening up on carbon emissions,indicating that economic and social development have not yet been completely dissociated from carbon emissions in China.

Low-carbon technology innovation responding to climate change from the perspective of spatial spillover effects

China's technological efforts to tackle climate change have lasted for many years. It is necessary to test the effect of these efforts with quantitative method. To be exact, whether and how China's low-carbon technology innovation responds to climate change should be tested. Based on the2004-2015 panel data of 30 provinces in China, we use the method of ESDA analyzing the spatial correlation of China's low-carbon innovation technology. Furthermore, we use the spatial Durbin model empirically analyzing the spatial spillover effects. The results obtained are as follows: first,supply and demand of Chinese low-carbon innovation has some deviation in the spatial distribution. The low-carbon technology innovation as the supply factor shows the characteristics of expanding from the east to the west. Innovation in eastern China has always been the most active, but innovative activities in the middle and western China are gradually decreased.However, carbon emissions have the characteristics of moving westward, implying the change of technology demand different from technology supply. Second, China's low-carbon innovation actively responds to the trend of climate change, indicating China's technological efforts have paid off. However, the spatial spillover effects are not significant, showing that the efforts in each region of China still work for himself. Third, environmental regulation and market pull are important factors for low-carbon technology innovation. Among them, both supporting policy and inhibitory policy have significant impact on the local low-carbon technology innovation, but no significant spatial spillover effects. It shows that environmental policies in different regions are competitive and lack of demonstration effects. Economic growth and export as market pull have higher level of effect on low-carbon technology innovation for both local and adjacent areas.Some policy implications are proposed based on these results finally.