When renewable energy technology products exports meet geopolitical risks: Can environmental policies sweeten the bitter pill of the trade?

IF 13.6 2区经济学 Q1 ECONOMICS

Energy Economics Pub Date : 2025-04-14 DOI:10.1016/j.eneco.2025.108498

Yanmin Shao , Junlong Li

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引用次数: 0

Abstract

Amid escalating global geopolitical risks (GPR) and intensifying energy transition competition, strategic rivalry in the energy sector has shifted from traditional resource contention to dominance over renewable energy technologies. While renewable energy technology products (RETP) are recognized as critical to global green transformation, the inhibitory effects of GPR on their international trade remain underexplored. This study addresses this gap by analyzing observations from 42 economies (1998–2020) using a gravity model. Our findings reveal a significant negative impact of GPR on RETP exports. Crucially, we identify conflicting fiscal policies: Environmental taxes exacerbate this negative effect by increasing compliance costs, whereas environmental expenditures mitigate it by reducing external costs. These results highlight the dual role of state intervention in energy technology wars, providing timely insights for policymakers navigating intertwined GPR and energy transition risks. Grounded in resource dependence theory, we propose a theoretical framework that leverages government intervention to help businesses reduce reliance on GPR. This framework repositions environmental policies as geopolitical hedging tools for RETP trade.

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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.