The Paradox of Protectionist Industrial Policy: How weaponizing supply spurs technological innovation in importing countries

This study analyzes the paradoxical mechanism by which one country’s protectionist industrial policy unintentionally redirects the path of technological innovation in its trading partners, often to the supplying country’s own disadvantage. Historical episodes, including the OPEC oil shock, the Soviet Union’s threats to natural gas supplies to the West, China’s rare earth embargo against Japan, and US semiconductor export controls against China, share a common pattern. First, the supplying country restricts exports of the resources and technologies it holds, or manipulates their prices, inflicting a supply shock on the importing country. The relative price of the resource then surges, dramatically raising the incentives of firms and researchers in the importing country to develop substitute and workaround technologies. Private R&D combines with the government’s directed industrial policy (R&D subsidies, public procurement, and regulatory reform) to bring substitute technologies quickly to market. Over the long run, the importing country’s dependence on the resource declines, and the supplying country’s bargaining power and market position erode. This study argues that a supply restriction strategy raises short-term bargaining power but can carry a self-defeating quality, eating away the supplier’s own market base. For the importing country, by contrast, a supply shock can become the occasion for a technological leap, and here the government’s directed industrial policies, R&D subsidies among them, act as complements that accelerate private innovation.