Toward Technology-Sensitive Catching-Up Policies: Insights from Renewable Energy in China

Christian Binz, Jorrit Gosens, Teis Hansen and Ulrich Elmer Hansen

World Development, 2017, vol. 96, issue C, 418-437

Abstract: The voluminous literature on industrial catching-up in Southeast Asian countries has regularly argued that successful catching-up largely depended on a committed state, which orchestrated industry development with a relatively uniform set of policies, including R&D support, subsidies, trade restrictions, and local content requirements. In contrast, recent contributions from the technology lifecycle literature have argued that policies should be tailored to differing technological characteristics in industries for mass-produced standardized goods, complex engineered products, and—as we argue—complex product systems (CoPS). In this paper, we extend this argument by introducing a set of separate policy mixes for each industry type, which appears most capable of providing the key resources required for catching-up: knowledge, market access, financial investment and technology legitimacy. This framework is used to analyze catching-up patterns in China’s wind, solar PV, and biomass power plant industries, drawing mainly on policy documents and 106 interviews with key industry actors.

Keywords: catching up; technology characteristics; policy mix; renewable energy; China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (32)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:wdevel:v:96:y:2017:i:c:p:418-437

DOI: 10.1016/j.worlddev.2017.03.027

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