The location of emerging industries has been hotly debated in the field of economic geography. While the concept of Windows of Locational Opportunity proposes that new industries emerge with relative freedom in space, the literature on Regional Branching has been underlining the importance of existing knowledge base. The concept of related variety provides us with a new way to handle this ongoing debate. By dividing technological knowledge base of a region into related and unrelated knowledge bases, this study empirically examines the impact of knowledge base on technological innovation of emerging industries by utilizing patent data of China’s fuel cell industry from 2000 to 2016. The empirical findings clearly confirm the stable and positive impact of related technological knowledge base on the emergence and development of emerging industries. However, the direction of the impact of unrelated technological knowledge base changes from negative to positive with the maturity of the industry. To an increasing extent, emerging industries tend to be less free in space and prefer to locate in developed regions with related and unrelated knowledge.
In the face of achieving the overall goal of emission peak and carbon neutrality, strengthening green technology transfer and environmental regulation is the key to narrowing the green technology gap and green development chasm between regions. This paper integrates green technology transfer, environmental regulation, and the green development chasm into one model, and analyzes the mechanism by which green technology transfer and environmental regulation impact the green development chasm. An empirical test was conducted by employing green technology transfer patent and panel data of the Yangtze River Delta from 2005–2019. The results are as follows: (1) Although the green development chasm still exists in the Yangtze River Delta, green technology transfer and environmental regulation have a positive impact on narrowing the regional green development chasm. Especially, the superposition of green technology transfer and environmental regulation can effectively make up for the lack of government and market regulation, and significantly promote the narrowing of the green development chasm. (2) Regional heterogeneity exists and developed regions can achieve the goal of narrowing the green development chasm by relying on green technology transfer or environmental regulation, while less developed regions must rely on the synergy of two dimensions. Thus, the coordination of green technology transfer and environmental regulation must be strengthened. Based on the above research, the main contributions of this paper are to analyze the theoretical mechanism of green technology transfer, environmental regulation, and regional green development chasm, to provide a theoretical and empirical basis for realizing the overall goal of regional green development, and suggestions for optimizing China’s current policies.
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