绿色产品出口、国内附加值与贸易政策：来自中国的企业层面证据（英）

11240 Green Product Exports, Domestic ValueAdded and Trade Policies Firm-Level Evidence from China Daria TaglioniHiau Looi KeeEnze Xie Development EconomicsDevelopment Research GroupOctober 2025 Policy Research Working Paper11240 Abstract This paper examines the roles of tariff and non-tariff mea-sures in China’s meteoric rise as the world’s leading greenproduct supplier. Evidence from customs transaction datafrom 2000 to 2016 shows that processing firms propelledthe export surge, utilizing the expanding domestic mate-rial varieties due to trade liberalization benefiting theirupstream suppliers. The substitution of domestic materials for imported materials raised the domestic value-addedratio of the processing firms and the exports of green prod-ucts. A two-sector model rationalizes the empirical results.Trade policy liberalization, together with industrial policies,market scale, and synchronized global demand, contributedto China’s dominance. The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about developmentissues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry thenames of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely thoseof the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank andits affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent. Green Product Exports, Domestic Value Added and TradePolicies: Firm-Level Evidence from China* Hiau Looi Kee†World BankDaria Taglioni‡Enze Xie§Zhejiang UniversityWorldBank Keywords:Greenproducts,renewableenergy,solarandwind,tariffs,non-tariffmeasures(NTMs),domesticvalueaddedinexports(DVAR),globalvaluechains(GVCs),supplierlinkages,ChinaJELCode:F13,F14,F18,Q27,Q56 1Introduction Two decades ago the world witnessed an energy crisis, with crude oil price hiked from a historicnorm of $25/barrel in 2003 to nearly $110/barrel in 2012. This crisis ushered a new era for worldenergy consumption focusing on renewable or green energy, generated by solar or wind sources.¹ Thedemand for green products, mainly solar panels and wind turbines, around the world increased morethan seven times (see Figure 1), and remained high even after crude oil prices had dropped. As demand skyrocketed, China emerged as a dominant supplier. In 2003, China was supplying5% of world green products; in 2012, its share jumped to 40% (see Figure 2).² Today, China’s sharein all the manufacturing stages of solar panels (such as polysilicon, ingots, wafers, cells and modules)exceeds 80% (IEA 2022). What factors propelled the meteoric rise in Chinese green product exports? Scholars point to sev-eral explanations. Some highlight the comprehensive stack of policies introduced by China from themid-2000s onward to support renewable energy industries. These were anchored in the 2005 Renew-able Energy Law - that laid the groundwork to develop the renewable energy product sectors, acrossthe entire supply chain (Fang et al. 2025, Huang et al. 2012). Others discuss the role of processingtrade and FDI linkages (Du et al. 2014), which gave firms access to advanced inputs and know-how,the scale and learning effects of a vast domestic market (Binz et al. 2017, Liu and Goldstein 2013),and the timing of synchronized global demand created by high oil prices and renewable deploymentprograms in Europe, the United States, and Japan (Groba and Cao 2015, Hughes and Meckling 2017,Wang et al. 2010).Export success was reflected in the interaction of domestic policies, capabilitybuilding, and global demand conditions.³ This paper takes a closer look at the role played by trade policies in promoting the green productexports of China. We focus not just on the trade policies affecting green product exporting firms,but also on those targeting their suppliers. The paper evaluates both tariffs and non-tariff measures(NTMs).Based on China’s customs transaction level data from 2000 to 2016, the analysis showsthat liberalizing tariffs and NTMs helped upstream supplier firms to increase their import varieties, which led to the expansion of their output varieties. This subsequently allowed the downstream greenproduct exporters to source more domestic materials from these suppliers and led to higher domesticvalue added and exports. The nexus between green products trade and countries’ green transition due to climate changeconcerns is a new area of research, with still relatively few contributions. Existing papers study the de-terminants of green product export performance from the perspective of R&D and financial constraint(Li and Lu 2018, Sung and Song 2013), technology transfer and importing countries demand (Grobaand Cao 2015, Wang et al. 2017) and environm