The Institutional Impact of the International Procurement Instrument on China’s Medical Device Industry from the Perspective of the EU’s Open Strategic Autonomy

With the transformation of global trade governance and geoeconomic patterns, the European Union (EU) has introduced the International Procurement Tool (IPI) to solve the problem of asymmetric public procurement market access between the EU and third countries. This tool gradually transforms public procurement into a key geoeconomic policy tool. Although existing research focuses on the legal attributes and institutional design of IPI, the systematic analysis of its impact on specific industries and companies is still limited. Taking China’s medical device industry as a case study, this study builds an analytical framework that links macro policies with company behavior. Through policy text analysis and exploratory case studies, it identifies key institutional mechanisms for IPI, including price score adjustments, bidding exclusion measures and restrictions on content of non-EU origin, and analyzes these restrictions on companies. The study found that IPI creates structural obstacles to market entry and limits the supply chain, and its impact varies with the size, technical strength and supply chain configuration of the company. From the perspective of geoeconomic governance, this article reveals the institutional mechanism of transforming macro-trade policies into micro-corporate behavior, and provides a new analytical perspective for understanding the industrial impact of EU trade policy tools.