Public energy RD&D and green entrepreneurship: Cross-country evidence on energy and green start-ups and venture financing

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Type of the article: Research ArticleAbstractThe transition toward low-carbon energy systems is increasingly viewed not only as an environmental necessity but also as a driver of innovation, competitiveness, and entrepreneurial development in modern economies. This study investigates how public energy research, development, and demonstration (RD&D) expenditures are associated with annual energy and green start-up counts, as well as with the availability of venture financing for clean-technology entrepreneurship across countries. The empirical analysis is based on a panel dataset covering 23 countries over the period 2000–2023 (470 country-year observations). It applies Poisson and negative binomial fixed-effects models, distributed lag specifications, fixed-effects OLS, and Gamma PML and PPML estimators. The results indicate that public RD&D spending does not have a statistically significant immediate effect on the number of green start-ups, as the Poisson FE estimates for renewable RD&D (0.034) and storage RD&D (0.011) remain insignificant. The venture-funding models show positive, though only weakly significant, coefficients for renewable-energy RD&D, with values of 1.41 for early-stage funding and 1.56 for later-stage funding, suggesting a possible association between public research activity and venture financing. Robustness checks indicate that low-carbon RD&D is positively associated with later-stage venture financing in selected model specifications, with a PPML coefficient of 1.77. The findings suggest that public RD&D is not a standalone driver of annual energy and green start-up counts and may be related to selected venture-financing outcomes, particularly in later-stage funding models, such as the scaling and commercialization of green innovation.AcknowledgmentThis article was prepared based on the results of the project 101127491-EnergyS4UA-ERASMUS-JMO2023-HEI-TCH-RSCH. Views and opinions expressed are, however, those of the authors only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or European Education and Culture Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

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