Crowding Out or Knowledge Spillovers from the Wind Power Industry: The Effect on Related Energy Machinery

Abstract

There is a risk that if a government adopts a R&D spending policy directed towards wind power technology crowding out of other technologies might occur due to fiscal constraints and changes in relative prices. The purpose of this paper is to provide a backward-looking analysis of how the accumulation of wind energy patents and public R&D spending affected the domestic and neighboring country output of granted patents in the “related energy machinery field”. The econometric analysis, a Poisson fixed-effects estimator based on the Hausman, Hall and Griliches (1984) method, relies on a data set consisting of eight countries in Western Europe with the highest rates of patent production in the field of wind power between 1978 and 2008. The results show that an accumulation of a national wind power stock is a statistically significant negative determinant of a country’s related energy machinery patenting outcomes. However, no crowding out effects of public R&D spending were found.

Keywords: knowledge spillovers, wind power, R&D, patents, renewable energy, innovation

JEL Classification: E61, O32, Q2, Q58.