Excerpt
Excerpt
July 8, 2025, Paper: "Trade and industrial policies designed to support domestic industries can unintentionally kindle technological progress abroad. This column examines the case of rare earth elements – a group of metals essential to producing batteries, lasers, and other high-tech components. These elements are not only critical to manufacturing at the knowledge frontier; they also have a low elasticity of substitution, inelastic supply, and high production and processing concentration. When China introduced export restrictions on rare earth elements in 2010, a global surge in innovation and exports in downstream sectors outside China swiftly followed."