{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,4,21]],"date-time":"2026-04-21T22:46:23Z","timestamp":1776811583316,"version":"3.51.2"},"reference-count":46,"publisher":"MDPI AG","issue":"10","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2018,10,10]],"date-time":"2018-10-10T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1539129600000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["Entropy"],"abstract":"<jats:p>The present study provides an analysis of empirical regularities in the development of green technology. We use patent data to examine inventions that can be traced to the environment-related catalogue (ENV-Tech) covering technologies in environmental management, water-related adaptation and climate change mitigation. Furthermore, we employ the Economic Fitness-Complexity (EFC) approach to assess their development and geographical distribution across countries between 1970 and 2010. This allows us to identify three typologies of countries: leaders, laggards and catch-up. While, as expected, there is a direct relationship between GDP per capita and invention capacity, we also document the remarkable growth of East Asia countries that started from the periphery and rapidly established themselves as key actors. This geographical pattern coincides with higher integration across domains so that, while the relative development of individual areas may have peaked, there is now demand for greater interoperability across green technologies.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/e20100776","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2018,10,10]],"date-time":"2018-10-10T11:53:13Z","timestamp":1539172393000},"page":"776","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/mdpi_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":45,"title":["Green Technology Fitness"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"20","author":[{"given":"Angelica","family":"Sbardella","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Economics and Finance, University of Rome Tor Vergata, 00133 Rome, Italy"},{"name":"Institute for Complex Systems, National Research Council, 00185 Rome, Italy"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-3821-0014","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Fran\u00e7ois","family":"Perruchas","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"INGENIO (CSIC-Universitat Politecnica de Valencia), 46022 Valencia, Spain"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-7829-7340","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Lorenzo","family":"Napolitano","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Institute for Complex Systems, National Research Council, 00185 Rome, Italy"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-8332-9826","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Nicol\u00f2","family":"Barbieri","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Economics and Management, University of Ferrara, 44121 Ferrara, Italy"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-7829-2838","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Davide","family":"Consoli","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"INGENIO (CSIC-Universitat Politecnica de Valencia), 46022 Valencia, Spain"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]}],"member":"1968","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2018,10,10]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref_1","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Ram\u00f3n L\u00f3pez, M., and Toman, M. 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EPO Worldwide Patent Statistical Database Data Catalog, Spring."},{"key":"ref_27","unstructured":"For instance, at the lowest level of this hierarchy codes are very specific and refer to narrow technological fields, e.g., IPC full-digit C03C 1\/02\u2014\u201cPre-treated ingredients generally applicable to manufacture of glasses, glazes or vitreous enamels\u201d. At the highest level, i.e., 1-digit, codes refer to general, broad technological domains, e.g., IPC 1-digit C\u2014\u201cChemistry, Metallurgy\u201d."},{"key":"ref_28","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"33","DOI":"10.1016\/j.jeem.2012.12.008","article-title":"Innovation and diffusion of clean\/green technology: Can patent commons help?","volume":"66","author":"Hall","year":"2013","journal-title":"J. Environ. Econ. Manag."},{"key":"ref_29","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"99","DOI":"10.1111\/j.1467-9957.1965.tb00050.x","article-title":"Trade liberalisation and \u201crevealed\u201d comparative advantage","volume":"33","author":"Balassa","year":"1965","journal-title":"Manch. Sch."},{"key":"ref_30","unstructured":"We do not expect the binarization strategy to have crucial effects on the results, especially if the matrices are sparse to begin with."},{"key":"ref_31","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"1893","DOI":"10.1140\/epjst\/e2015-50118-1","article-title":"On the convergence of the Fitness-Complexity Algorithm","volume":"225","author":"Pugliese","year":"2016","journal-title":"Eur. Phys. J. Spec. Top."},{"key":"ref_32","unstructured":"This entails focusing on 36 technological categories rather than 94."},{"key":"ref_33","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"141","DOI":"10.1137\/1109020","article-title":"On estimating regression","volume":"9","author":"Nadaraya","year":"1964","journal-title":"Theory Probab. Appl."},{"key":"ref_34","unstructured":"The HDI is a composite statistics developed within the United Nations Development Program to account for the intersection of three dimensions of a country well-being: health (proxied by life expectancy), education (mean years of schooling), and per capita income."},{"key":"ref_35","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Pugliese, E., Chiarotti, G.L., Zaccaria, A., and Pietronero, L. (2017). Complex economies have a lateral escape from the poverty trap. PLoS ONE, 12.","DOI":"10.1371\/journal.pone.0168540"},{"key":"ref_36","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"364","DOI":"10.1016\/j.enpol.2009.09.027","article-title":"Decomposition analysis and mitigation strategies of CO2 emissions from energy consumption in South Korea","volume":"38","author":"Oh","year":"2010","journal-title":"Energy Policy"},{"key":"ref_37","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"1059","DOI":"10.1016\/j.energy.2012.06.007","article-title":"Uncovering China\u2019s greenhouse gas emission from regional and sectoral perspectives","volume":"45","author":"Liu","year":"2012","journal-title":"Energy"},{"key":"ref_38","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"489","DOI":"10.1007\/s10640-006-9040-0","article-title":"Economic incentives and residential waste management in Taiwan: An empirical investigation","volume":"37","author":"Yang","year":"2007","journal-title":"Environ. Resour. Econ."},{"key":"ref_39","first-page":"69","article-title":"Investment in humans, technological diffusion, and economic growth","volume":"56","author":"Nelson","year":"1966","journal-title":"Am. Econ. Rev."},{"key":"ref_40","unstructured":"This is the sum of the complexities of the products exported by each country [17]. The economic fitness measure based on export data from the UN-COMTRADE database (available online at http:\/\/comtrade.un.org (accessed in January 2017)) is available for the period 1995\u20132015 at https:\/\/datacatalog.worldbank.org\/dataset\/economic-fitness (accessed in January 2017). However, in the present paper we employ the most recent version of the export fitness database, provided to us by the PIL group of the Institute of Complex Systems-CNR in Rome."},{"key":"ref_41","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Barbieri, N., Marzucchi, A., and Rizzo, U. (2018, May 30). Knowledge Sources and Impacts on Subsequent Inventions: Do Green Technologies Differ from Non-Green Ones?. Available online: https:\/\/papers.ssrn.com\/sol3\/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3164197.","DOI":"10.2139\/ssrn.3164197"},{"key":"ref_42","unstructured":"GeoNames is a geographical database available under a Creative Commons attribution license, which contains over 10 million geographical names corresponding to over 9 million unique features whereof 2.8 million populated places and 5.5 million alternate names. A feature can be physical (e.g., mountain, lake), political (e.g., country, territory), a human settlement (e.g., city, village) etc. GeoNames is available online at http:\/\/www.geonames.org for further information (accessed on 12 May 2017)."},{"key":"ref_43","unstructured":"For more details, check the repository available at https:\/\/github.com\/cortext\/Patstat."},{"key":"ref_44","unstructured":"For example, we can find in the same patent family two inventors with different IDs, the first one with a complete address, the second one with a missing one: \u201cGehri, Martin Christian Adrian\u201d and \u201cGEHRI, MARTIN, CHRISTIAN, ADRIAN\u201d. As the Levenshtein distance between the two names is less than 3 when both strings are converted to upper case, we assume it is the same person and we use the complete address to fill the missing one."},{"key":"ref_45","unstructured":"We say that an entity (country or technology class) is active in a given time period if the sum of the application (or family) shares that refer to it is positive."},{"key":"ref_46","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Cristelli, M., Tacchella, A., and Pietronero, L. (2015). The heterogeneous dynamics of economic complexity. PLoS ONE, 10.","DOI":"10.1371\/journal.pone.0117174"}],"container-title":["Entropy"],"original-title":[],"language":"en","link":[{"URL":"https:\/\/www.mdpi.com\/1099-4300\/20\/10\/776\/pdf","content-type":"unspecified","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"similarity-checking"}],"deposited":{"date-parts":[[2025,10,11]],"date-time":"2025-10-11T15:24:49Z","timestamp":1760196289000},"score":1,"resource":{"primary":{"URL":"https:\/\/www.mdpi.com\/1099-4300\/20\/10\/776"}},"subtitle":[],"short-title":[],"issued":{"date-parts":[[2018,10,10]]},"references-count":46,"journal-issue":{"issue":"10","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2018,10]]}},"alternative-id":["e20100776"],"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/e20100776","relation":{},"ISSN":["1099-4300"],"issn-type":[{"value":"1099-4300","type":"electronic"}],"subject":[],"published":{"date-parts":[[2018,10,10]]}}}