John Minnich

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268 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 6 Aug

John Minnich’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Unhedged · The Economics Show: China wanted western tech. Now, the tables have turned. · 6 Aug 2026 podcast

And I think the first of these is that it has a very large market, which, as in the Chinese case, can be a really important source of bargaining power vis-a-vis foreign enterprises.

The second, and this is something that China didn't enjoy in the early 2000s, is that Europe already has a lot of firms with very high absorptive capacity.

This idea that you've got firms that already invest very heavily in R&D and therefore should be very well positioned to take on new knowledge and implement it relatively quickly.

That was something that China had to develop the hard way over the course of the last two or three decades.

Europe's major challenge, and I think this is a real lesson from the Chinese case, is that

The market alone is not sufficient to generate market power.

You can have a large internal market, but a fragmented regulatory environment, and it's going to be very, very difficult for you to leverage that market

as a source of bargaining power vis-a-vis prospective foreign investors.

So again, what we saw in China was that although you had a large and rapidly growing market, certainly in the 1990s in China, because the central state was highly fragmented, it wasn't in a position to really effectively utilize that market to push forward technology transfers in a significant way.

I think Europe faces a similar challenge, which is to say if it wants to effectively implement these policies effectively,

It's going to have to find a way to centralize that regulatory authority over FDI to prevent foreign firms from forum shopping, either across different countries or across different sectors, and to provide that focal point for these negotiations with the Chinese.

Exactly.

That's the risk for Europe.

I think in the US case, the picture is more complicated precisely because unlike Europe and China, the US and China are engaged in what we could describe as a strategic competition.

And so I think from the US's perspective, there are

legitimate security concerns that we need to be cognizant of.

That said, I think that it is possible to find circumscribed domains where there is learning that can take place from the Chinese in the U.S.

context.

There are real benefits that could be gained from these kinds of policies.

But because of these, on the one hand, legitimate security concerns associated with things like connected vehicles, data security, so on and so forth, along with the political environment layered on top of that, I'm not particularly optimistic that in the U.S.

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