Foreign Import Competition and Green Innovation: The Impact of Chinese Trade Exposure on Technical Change in Europe

Paolo Bonnet and Alessandro Olper

The World Economy, 2025, vol. 48, issue 6, 1418-1441

Abstract: This paper examines the impact of Chinese import competition on innovation. By using detailed patent information on the manufacturing industries of thirteen European countries and trade data from 1995 to 2015, we estimate and compare the effect of rising Chinese imports on the growth rates of industry‐wide patent stocks in generic and green inventions. The results reveal that Chinese import competition had no overall impact on total innovation at the industry level. However, the trade shock accelerated green innovation, particularly in lagging industries. We argue that an escape‐competition effect of European firms to crowd out and differentiate from Chinese competitors could motivate the empirical evidence. Our findings account for the endogeneity of trade exposure and are robust to confounding sectoral patenting trends.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/twec.13698

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:worlde:v:48:y:2025:i:6:p:1418-1441

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0378-5920

Access Statistics for this article

The World Economy is currently edited by David Greenaway

More articles in The World Economy from Wiley Blackwell
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().