As compared to the West, China's lack of fossil fuel energy resources, in particular oil and gas resources, but not so coal reserves (ChinaPower Project, 2025; Forbes, 2025; IEA, 2024; Yale Environment 360, 2021), seem to have led to an acceleration of renewable energy innovation. Yet in order to speed up the energy transition, investment into new technology, and credit flows are needed. We show that green credit policy significantly promotes corporate green patent trading performance, mainly manifested in the expansion of the number of green patent sales and purchases. However, its impact is heterogeneous among heavily polluting and green enterprises. From a mechanism perspective, the impact on heavily polluting enterprises may mainly come from external credit financing constraints, while internal innovation information disclosure may be the main mechanism for the impact on green enterprises. In addition, this green credit policy has a heterogeneous impact on the green patent trading performance of enterprises in regions with different levels of technology trading market development and different degrees of intellectual property protection. This paper finds that green patent trading activities driven by green credit policies can further achieve economic and environmental benefits. The empirical assessment of the role of green credit in promoting green patent transactions and thereby driving energy transition is an important policy implication of this paper.
Yang et al. (2026) studied this question.