Does green manufacturing technology innovation decrease energy intensity for sustainable development?

Abstract

Considering that the global manufacturing sector is partially to blame for climate change, and in light of the ongoing effort to achieve carbon neutrality, green manufacturing technology innovation seems to be the sure way to alleviate climate change and achieve sustainable development. By employing a cross-sectional autoregressive distributed lag (CS-ARDL) methodology to a panel dataset comprising 17 manufacturing sectors from 42 economies between 2000 and 2014, our study reveals the effect of green manufacturing technology innovation (GMTI) on energy intensity (EI). The findings show that: (1) GMTI decreased EI, and robustness tests indicate that the results are robust. (2) GMTI decreased EI in both the short- and long terms. Specifically, the long-term effect exceeds the short-term effect. (3) Heterogeneity analysis indicates that the effect of GMTI varies between regions. That is, GMTI decreased EI in developed economies in both the short and long term, while GMTI decreased EI only in the long term in developing economies. (4) Furthermore, the GMTI types showed that: (i) incremental GMTI had a more significant impact on EI in the short term compared to creative GMTI, whereas (ii) creative GMTI had more impact on EI in the long term than incremental GMTI. Consequently, relevant policy actions are proposed according to the results of our study to ensure that manufacturing sectors are progressing in the right direction to achieve sustainable economic development.