Drivers of Trade in Clean Energy Technologies: Evidence from a Gravity Modeling Approach

Abstract

With the necessity of a transition toward the production and usage of green energy comes the need for clean energy technologies (CET). We develop a gravity model to analyze the determinants of trade flows for individual technical components of CET. For 58 component–technology combinations and 64 countries, a two-stage panel regression approach is applied. It yields estimators for bilateral regressors as well as regressors determining importer and exporter fixed effects, thus indicating which variables influence push and pull factors of trade in CET. Our analysis reveals that GDP and infrastructure determine a country’s competitiveness in terms of its ability to export components of CET to foreign markets, as well as the attractiveness of the country’s domestic market, which describes its ability to acquire goods from other countries. We also find that prices have a positive impact on export activities while the impact of energy intensity is negative. Economies with a higher share of research and development-intensive industry also tend to perform better in world trade of CET.

Received: 1 September 2025 | Revised: 9 April 2026 | Accepted: 15 June 2026

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest to this work.

Data Availability Statement

The data that support the findings of this study in Figures 1 and 3 are openly available from CEPII at https://www.cepii.fr/CEPII/en/bdd_modele/bdd_modele_item.asp?id=37.

The data that support the findings of this study mentioned in Table 1 are openly available from CEPII at http://www.cepii.fr/CEPII/en/bdd_modele/bdd_modele_item.asp?id=37 and at https://www.cepii.fr/CEPII/en/bdd_modele/bdd_modele_item.asp?id=6.

The data that support the findings of this study mentioned in Table 2 are openly available from World Bank Group at https://databank.worldbank.org/source/logistics-performance-index-(lpi), from OECD at https://stats.oecd.org/ and at https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=STAN, from IEA at https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/data-product/world-energy-balances and at https://www.iea.org/articles/weather-for-energy-tracker, from CEPII at https://www.cepii.fr/CEPII/en/bdd_modele/bdd_modele_item.asp?id=8, from FAO at https://www.fao.org/faostat/en/ and from IRENA at https://pxweb.irena.org/pxweb/en/IRENASTAT/.

The list of components by technology in Appendix B is based on the classification on economic statistics by the United Nations Statistics Division at https://unstats.un.org/unsd/classifications/Econ.

Author Contribution Statement

Maximilian Banning: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software, Validation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Data Curation, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing, Visualization. Lisa Becker: Methodology, Validation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Data Curation, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing.