There is growing evidence that place-based industrial policies lead to positive economic effects. This column analyses the “Million-Rouble Plants” programme of the 1950s when the Soviet Union helped China build state-of-the-art industrial facilities. By tracking the locations that benefitted, it finds positive economic spillovers in the short and medium run. Although the Million-Rouble Plants themselves…
Modern life runs on semiconductors — cars, phones, wind turbines, medical devices, and every military system now depends on chips that Europe, for the most part, does not make itself. The most advanced logic chips, the ones powering AI systems and cutting-edge computing, are produced almost entirely by a handful of facilities in Taiwan, with […]
Europe invented much of the technology that now defines modern manufacturing, from precision engineering to industrial chemistry to semiconductor design. Yet increasingly, the actual production has drifted elsewhere — to the United States, drawn by subsidies and cheap energy, and to Asia, drawn by lower costs and, in many sectors, faster-moving supply chains. A continent […]
If the gas crisis taught Europe the danger of depending on a single hostile supplier, the next vulnerability is quieter but arguably deeper: raw materials and critical minerals. Lithium, cobalt, rare earth elements, and dozens of other inputs used in batteries, wind turbines, electric motors, and semiconductors flow through supply chains overwhelmingly controlled or processed […]
The EU can exploit its system to say no to China—now, and long into the future
The next industrial revolution will be built with microbes as much as machines. China understands this. Europe still has the science to compete but must act quickly before industrial leadership slips away again