Technological innovations for environmental protection: role of intellectual property rights in the carbon mitigation efforts. Evidence from western and southern Europe

The role of technological innovation in lowering the pollution is motivated by the rise of global emissions. Technological innovation for carbon dioxide mitigation mainly focuses on the role of patents ignoring trademarks. This study tests the role of eco-patents and trademarks for carbon dioxide alleviation using data from 2000 to 2018. This study introduces a new interaction term by combining trademarks and eco-patents and examining the role of environmental policy, energy consumption, environmental taxes, urbanization, and economic growth on the environment. The panel effect is tested using the Nonlinear ARDL and OLS methods, whereas country-specific results are estimated using the Granger causality approach. The outcomes reveal that trademarks and eco-patents decrease carbon dioxide emission; however, energy consumption, urbanization and economic growth are the main polluters in both regions. Environmental policies and taxes have a significant impact on the western region's mitigation efforts, while insignificant evidence is found for the southern region. Unidirectional and bidirectional causal relationships are observed among the variables; still, the outcomes are country-specific. The study also provides policy implications based on the results.

Automated summary

This study focuses on the role of eco-patents and trademarks in reducing carbon dioxide emissions, finding that they have a positive impact on mitigation efforts, but energy consumption, urbanization, and economic growth are the main polluters. Environmental policies and taxes have different impacts on emission reduction efforts in different regions, and there are causal relationships among variables in different countries.