Technology Oriented Struggle Against Climate Change in Transportation Sector: An Empirical Investigation

Abstract

The transportation sector is one of the most important sectors in which greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) are the highest, thus causing the global warming problem to rise. One of the most effective and international solutions to this problem is considered to be a technology-oriented struggle, and the development of green technologies is encouraged by global authorities. The study aims to investigate the success of the technology-oriented struggle against global warming in the transport sector. In analyses, data on transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions, the number of patents (transport-related climate change mitigation technologies), trade openness, and GDP per capita of 12 OECD countries years between 1999-2017 were used. To identify the long-run and short-run relationship among variables, the Cross-Sectional Autoregressive Distributed Lags Estimator (CSARDL) and also the Mean Group (MG), Augmented Mean Group (AMG), and Common Correlated Effects Mean Group Estimators (CCE) were applied. According to the estimators' findings, no evidence was found that the number of patents and trade openness affected greenhouse gas emissions, but it was determined that GDP positively affected greenhouse gas emissions. As a result, it can be said that the technology-oriented struggle against climate change in the transportation sector alone isn't sufficient to reduce transportation-related GHG emissions.