Understanding cross-national trends in high-tech renewable power equipment exports to the United States

We track US imports of advanced technology wind and solar power-generation equipment from a panel of countries during 1989-2010, and examine the determining factors including country size, sector-specific US FDI outflow, and domestic wind and solar power generation. Differentiating between the core high-tech and the balance of system equipment, we find US imports of both categories have grown at significantly higher rate from the relatively poorer countries, and particularly China and India. Larger countries are found to be exporting significantly more, and US FDI is found to play a significant positive role in the exports of high-tech equipment for the poor countries. For the core wind and solar high-tech equipment, we find domestic renewable power generation of the exporting countries also played a significant positive role. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.