What China's green patent boom actually invents
Green innovation is one of the largest topics in the finance and economics journals, much of it counting the green patents of Chinese firms. Only 10 of 641 recent papers on it carry a patent-quality, citation or novelty keyword. Is the boom in green patents a boom in green technology?
What prompted this
Since October 2025, 641 papers carry a green-innovation or green-patent keyword (271 in finance journals, 215 in economics, 134 in management). Only 10 of them carry a patent-quality, citation, breakthrough, novelty or strategic-patenting keyword. "Green patents" alone appears on 49 papers.
Questions
- How many green patents of Chinese listed firms are utility models rather than inventions, and how many are granted, cited or renewed?
- Do subsidies and policies that reward patent counts raise counts more than quality?
- Do the headline findings of the green-innovation literature hold when only granted, cited inventions count?
Data that could help
Patent records with type, grant status, citations and renewals (CNIPA, PATSTAT), green technology classes (the Y02 tags), and firm data (CSMAR).
Next step
For one year of green patents filed by Chinese listed firms, report the share of invention patents, the grant rate and citations, and compare them with green patents filed elsewhere.