From productive catch-up to technological parity: Dating the sequential catch-up of Chinese photovoltaics, 2000-2023

Du rattrapage productif à la parité technologique: datation d'un catch-up séquentiel chinois dans le photovoltaïque, 2000–2023

Emmanuel Labarbe ()
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Emmanuel Labarbe: D2iA - Dynamiques, Interactions, Interculturalité Asiatiques - ULR - La Rochelle Université - UBM - Université Bordeaux Montaigne

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Abstract: European photovoltaic re-shoring policies rest on the assumption that EU dependence on China is industrial rather than technological. We reassess China's technological trajectory in photovoltaics over 2000-2023 using 370,462 INPADOC patent families extracted from Google Patents Public Data (CPC scope Y02E10/5*). Each family is represented as a share vector in a 378-dimension technical space, aggregated at country-year and firm-year levels. Three measures are computed: cosine between technology profiles (Jaffe approach), the patent quality indicators of Kelly et al. (2021) transformed into annual ranks, and endogenous breakpoint detection via PELT. Results reveal a two-phase sequential chronology. A first statistical break in 2006 marks the convergence of the Chinese technology profile toward the basket of historical leaders (Japan, United States, Germany, Korea), with mean cosine rising from 0.42 to 0.74 over the period. A shift in the quality hierarchy follows between 2010 and 2014: China's mean Q-index rank improves from 3.25 to 1.20 across five countries, while Germany moves in the opposite direction. The 4-to-8-year lag between the two transitions is consistent with an imitation-then-innovation process and does not match the predictions of competing scenarios. A third result nuances this picture: aggregate convergence is carried by the long tail of the Chinese ecosystem (universities, start-ups, peripheral actors), not by leader firms, which oscillate around stable positions in the technology space without net directional drift. Within the international subcorpus, the long tail also dominates the eight Chinese industrial leaders on the Kelly Q-index (median 1.005 vs 0.518, p < 0.001), confirming that distributed innovation operates on quality as well as on positional dynamics. These findings indicate that European dependence on Chinese photovoltaics is now technological as well as industrial, which challenges the founding premise of current re-shoring policies.

Keywords: Photovoltaics technological catch-up patent analytics structural break detection industrial policy China; Photovoltaics; technological catch-up; patent analytics; structural break detection; industrial policy; China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-05-14
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