Turning Risks into Reward: Diversifying the Global Value Chains of Decarbonization Technologies

Reaching net-zero emissions by 2050 requires unprecedented scaling up in the global deployment of critical decarbonization technologies, such as solar photovoltaics, wind turbines, and electric vehicles. This challenge is currently rife with both risks and rewards: while securing an adequate supply of these technologies has become an urgent policy priority for many countries, their high-growth global value chains also offer lucrative benefits for those able to meet the burgeoning global demand. Although recent policy responses have sought to nearshore production to reduce risks and capitalize on rewards, this paper instead lays out an evidence-based strategy to help diversify the global value chains of decarbonization technologies across countries with latent production capabilities and resource endowments. To that end, it constructs a new dataset of traded products, components, and materials associated with decarbonization technologies; develops new indexes capturing countries’ current export strengths and future diversification potential in these global value chains; and highlights products with supply risks due to high market concentration levels and those with development rewards in terms of their potential for growth, knowledge spillovers, and technological upgrading. Taken together, the evidence supports the idea that there is plenty of opportunity to diversify these value chains across a larger number of countries to avoid the risks associated with reliance on only a few countries.