Mission-Oriented Policies and Technological Sovereignty: The Case of Climate Mitigation Technologies

Serenella Caravella, Valeria Costantini and Francesco Crespi
Additional contact information
Serenella Caravella: Department of Economics, Roma Tre University, 00145 Rome, Italy

Energies, 2021, vol. 14, issue 20, 1-16

Abstract: The rapid decarbonization of the global economy represents the main challenge for the next decades to combat climate change. The European Union (EU) is leading the negotiation process under the Paris Agreement and recently approved an ambitious unilateral mitigation strategy known as the European Green Deal (EGD). In this paper, we present a novel approach based on the analysis of patent data related to climate change and mitigation technologies (CCMTs) with the aim of describing the evolutionary pattern of the EU in green technology. Based on our analysis, two of our main results deserve attention. First, at the global level, the pace of generation of new green technologies as measured by patent data is slowing down in recent years. This trend, if not inverted, casts some doubts on the economic sustainability of the ambitious environmental targets set by the EC. Second, the current EU technological positioning with respect to green areas appears to be problematic in terms of technological sovereignty, with serious risks of potential technological dependences from other countries. Given the radical technological shift required for the implementation of a full decarbonization pattern, the EU must realize a mission-oriented technology policy with additional and directed investments to ensure technological independence, together with a low-carbon and energy secure economy.

Keywords: clean energy technologies; European Green Deal; fit for 55; patent family; rarity index; revealed technological advantages; technological sovereignty (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/14/20/6854/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/14/20/6854/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jeners:v:14:y:2021:i:20:p:6854-:d:660133

Access Statistics for this article

Energies is currently edited by Ms. Agatha Cao

More articles in Energies from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().