Does intellectual property protection improve energy efficiency? Evidence from the impact of intellectual property income on energy intensity

This work aims to explore the impact of intellectual property income (a guarantee for promoting technological advance) on energy efficiency (indicating the technological advance) considering the mediation role of trade openness. To this end, this article uses the available data of 50 countries from 2000 to 2019 to study the influence of intellectual property income and trade openness. The Fully Modified Ordinary Least Square and Dynamic Ordinary Least Square methods are applied in this article to study the long-term relationship between different variables. The empirical results show that there is a mediation effect between intellectual property income and energy intensity. In other words, intellectual property income can not only directly affect energy intensity, but also indirectly affect energy intensity through trade openness. Fully considering the impact of regional heterogeneity, the countries are divided into high-income (HI) countries and middle-income (MI) countries. The results indicate there are noticeable regional differences in the impact of intellectual property income on energy intensity via the mediation effect of trade openness. The improvement of intellectual property income and trade openness benefits the HI countries most, but not for MI countries. Targeted policy implications are proposed to enable a reduction in energy intensity for countries at different income levels.