The Rise of Ev Protectionism: France's New Subsidies, with Implications for Korean Policy

The new green industry bill (known as la loi industrie verte) in France can be seen as the French version of the United States’ Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). The bill introduces new subsidies for electric vehicles (EVs), necessitating an analysis of the possible impact of these subsidies on Korean industries. The EV subsidies of the IRA are designed to relocate production and assembly of finished vehicles and key components parts back to the United States or the countries with which the US has free trade agreements (FTAs) in place. The EV subsidies introduced by the new bill in France, on the other hand, base subsidization on the carbon footprints of EV production and distribution. The new system of EV subsidies seeks to reduce the carbon footprint in six major areas of EV manufacturing: steel, aluminum, other materials, battery production, assembly, and transportation. This system effectively favors EVs produced in European countries, whose industries make more use of renewable energy and which are closer to France, at the cost of EV makers in China and elsewhere in Asia, as the long distances involved in transportation essentially preclude them from subsidization, and constitute non-tariff barriers (NTBs). Serving environmental and industrial objectives simultaneously, the new bill embodies an important paradigm shift in policymaking. From a trade perspective, this shift in the focus of protectionist policymaking from intermediate goods such as EV batteries to finished goods such as EVs threatens to see NTBs erected at every stage of the value chain in which these finished goods are produced. More barriers to trade under protectionist statutes like the IRA and France’s new green industry are likely to prompt the reintegration of markets and production bases after decades of geographical separation. Korean businesses will therefore be forced to change their business model, from an export-led approach that favored production in Korea to a model in which they increasingly produce goods in target markets. This has the potential to hollow out Korean industries. The manufacturing-driven Korean economy needs to adapt to new global reality radically different from the heyday of globalization, when major importing countries were neutral about foreign manufacturers.