Subsidies and Trade Wars: Solar PV Innovation in Europe and the Impact of the "China Shock"

Government subsidies have been vital in scaling up cleaner technologies and reducing costs. However, technology support is often attached to additional objectives beyond climate change mitigation, which has led to trade conflicts such as the EU-China solar trade war in 2012. This paper studies the effects of Chinese import competition on innovation in solar cell technology using firm-level patent counts alongside country-level trade and production data in 15 European countries.

Pia Andres is a PhD Candidate in Environmental Economics at the London School of Economics. Her research considers how industrial policy can advance the technological shift to a low carbon production system while accounting for other objectives, such as local growth and job creation. She is particularly interested in points of tension between green industrial policy, protectionist tendencies and trade liberalisation efforts, and their implications for the low carbon transition.

Pia holds an undergraduate MA (Social Sciences) in Economics from the University of Glasgow, and an MSc in Environmental Economics and Climate Change from the London School of Economics. She has also worked at the Office for National Statistics, the Bank of England, and as a consultant at Vivid Economics.