Understanding Technological Input and Low-Carbon Innovation from Multiple Perspectives: Focusing on Sustainable Building Energy in China

Low-carbon technological innovation has been attached importance to realize cleaner future in buildings, transportations and industries. As a major carbon emitter country, it is important to evaluate China’s indigenous low-carbon technological innovation capacity. By analyzing the impact of economic and technological input indicators on the growth of low-carbon technology innovation, this paper conducts general regression and quantile regression analysis through the statistics of enterprise investment and patent statistics of low-carbon technology innovation in cities from 1990 to 2019. The empirical results show that when the economic and technological input increases, it has a positive impact on low-carbon technological innovation. Secondly, when the scale of low-carbon technological innovation in a region is still at a low level, the impact of technological input brings a strong marginal effect, but with the growth of the scale of low-carbon technological innovation, the marginal effect gradually decreases. In order to further observe the micro-level specific technology development, by taking China’s subdivided patents related to building energy efficiency (BEE) as an example, the dynamic changes of low-carbon innovation are explained and demonstrated with the green productivity factors. In case of Yangtze River Delta, the Moran Index increased from 0.031048 to 0.055296 from 2005 to 2020, and the influencing factors in each time period gradually increase, which reflects that the interpretation of BEE low-carbon innovation becomes more and more complex over time. Future research needs more combination of macro and micro to achieve more effective judgment and decision-making.