Impact of technological innovation on China's mining industry: Perspectives of energy and environmental performance

Scientific and technological innovation is crucial for energy conservation and emissions reduction. This article estimates the impact of technological innovation on the energy and environmental performance of China's mining industry. Most previous research on technological innovation has focused on the industry as a whole part, while the literature on sub-industries from different regions is limited due to the scarcity of information. The contributions of this study are the following. First, it collects provincial patents on China's mining industry through web crawling, which provides accurate empirical data for sub-industry studies. Second, this article thoroughly evaluates the heterogeneous impact of technological innovation caused by economic development. And, third, this article proposes policy recommendations based on empirical results, including strengthening technological innovation and environmental supervision. •The patents on China’s mining industry is collected from the incoPat patent database.•The non-radial directional distance function is adopted to calculate the energy efficiency.•The heterogeneous impact of technological innovation caused by economic development is further assessed.