John Minnich

speaker

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.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

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

to secure really quite substantive technology transfers from these firms.

And it's hard to say exactly how decisive these technology transfers were.

A lot does depend, again, on the absorptive capacity of Chinese firms.

But I think it's very clear that in a counterfactual world without these technology transfers, China's progress would have almost certainly been much slower.

In fact, very similar dynamics.

So one of the things that I explore in the paper is sort of the evolution of these central regulatory institutions from the 1990s through the 2000s.

and in particular, the rise of this organization, the NDRC, which was formed in 2003 and by 2004 and 2005 has gained this centralized FDI regulatory authority.

So it is the one actor that is really bargaining with most foreign firms in most sectors, especially in energy, around the conditions of market access and investment.

What the NDRC does is it implements a local content requirement.

At first, it's a 50% local content requirement.

By 2005, they expand that to a 70% local content requirement across the entire country.

And again, the point is because, in fact, there wasn't a body of suppliers that firms like Gamesa or Vestas, the leading wind turbine makers globally, could draw on in China, their response to these policies wasn't.

was to invest heavily in expanding their training capacity in China.

They sent hundreds of engineers fanned all across the country to actually build up that supplier base without which they wouldn't have been able to meet this local content requirement.

Between 2004 and 2005, China goes from having something like

One percent of global installed wind power capacity to something like 20 or 30 percent.

And at the same time, we also see that over that same period, the share of foreign firms in supplying that wind power capacity declines from about 90 percent to about 10 percent.

So in the span of maybe half a decade, we see this absolutely tremendous growth in Chinese firms' capacity to manufacture large-scale wind turbines.

And a lot of that capacity growth derives from these original local content requirements.

I think a big part of the reason that industrial policy is now back on the agenda in all of these countries is because we can observe that although these policies have not necessarily been particularly efficient in the Chinese context, they've been very, very effective in many cases.

Showing 101–120 of 268 · page 6 of 14