Varieties of National Protectionism: Essays on Firm Entry, Adaptive Regulation, and Technology Differences During Global Shocks.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This dissertation explores different varieties of national protectionism. With a focus on European Member-States and their different crisis-related policies to address the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Here, I explore different ways European nations implemented to ensure access to critical supplies and protect their social and economic welfare. I employ a mixed-methods approach in the works presented in this dissertation. On the one hand, I have performed 116 interviews in the European markets of mechanical ventilators and COVID-19 vaccines to national and international policymakers and regulators, incumbent firms and adjacent industry related institutions, as well as new entrants. On the other hand, I build econometric models to estimate the impact of US isolationary measures in EU supply chains of affected products. I start Chapter 1 by performing a comparative analysis between Portugal and Spain in how each country was able to adapt the European establish regulation and boost domestic firm entry in the mechanical ventilator market. In this first Chapter, I find that Spanish regulatory measures were more effective, resulting in 12 times more new products receiving regulatory approval to enter its domestic market. Although neither country is known for their mechanical ventilator production, instrumental in informing the Spanish regulatory and industrial responses was their internal knowledge base due to domestic experts and existing capabilities in ventilator production. I conclude this chapter by proposing new theory for how nations might identify important core competencies to enhance their dynamic (regulatory) capabilities in areas likely to be critical to their social welfare. In the second Chapter, I explore the potential roles of central versus decentralized institutions in dynamic adaptation (here, of regulation of new market entrants) to address sudden spikes in demand for technologically complex, safety-critical products. I conduct a comparative case study of European Member-States' adaptation of new market entrants regulation in mechanical ventilators versus vaccines. I leverage insights from 77 semi-structured interviews with experts from industry, healthcare workers, regulators, non-profit organizations, and research centers across four European Countries (Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, and Germany) and European central institutions. Our results allow us to unpack the symbiotic role of central and local (country-specific) institutions in rapidly adapting and implementing regulation to support new entrants, thereby helping the domestic industry ramp up its production to address product shortages during a global pandemic. Specifically, our results suggest that centralized adaptations to market entry established regulations supported a level playing field for all European firms while decentralized (country-specific) market surveillance supported each Member-state's competent authorities to adjust their policies to the respective internal context. I conclude by proposing new theory on how nations' use of centralized versus decentralized institutions should depend on the speed of response, the technological complexity of the product, and the distributions of expertise and activity. In the third chapter, I look at the reaction of European buyers to a policy implemented by the United States to ensure critical products from its domestic industry. I explore whether there were lasting impacts on EU medical products' supply chains from one particular US protectionist policy: priority-rated contracts during the COVID pandemic. I show these heterogeneous impacts on EU supply chains by monitoring the share of imports by suppliers' country-of-origin using European official trade data. I employ a Difference-in-Differences approach to estimate the impact of such contracts on EU trade patterns. I find that once terminated, the US share of total EU imports decreases, on average, by 17.8% for affected products, shifting largely to China. In commodity-like products, where price competition dominates buyer decision-making, these effects seem to be negative and lasting. However, that same trend was not observed for Mechanical ventilators: once the policy is lifted, the EU increases its reliance on the US, on average, by 19%. For these technologically complex differentiated products competition revolves not only around cost, but also quality and performance. Due to the unique conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic, we are able to observe such distinct market dynamics, but these heterogeneous buyers' reactions to trade shocks might also be pertinent in other contexts, particularly for export-dependent economies.