Wie aus geoökonomischer Restriktion Innovation entsteht: Lehren aus dem USA-China-Konflikt

Geoeconomic restrictions are increasingly used to constrain rivals‘ access to markets, technologies and critical inputs. Yet restrictions also change the incentives of the targeted economy: they can create markets for substitutes, raise the return to innovation, mobilise industrial policy and redirect talent toward strategic bottlenecks. This article develops the idea of defensive innovation and examines Bao et al. (2025), who show that exposure to the U.S.-China technology conflict shifted Chinese labour demand and university admissions toward R&D-intensive and STEM fields. The policy lesson is not that restrictions necessarily fail, but that their long-run effectiveness cannot be inferred from short-run disruption alone.