Capability or Endowment? A Capability-Aligned Assessment of Economic Winners and Losers from the Climate Transition Across the OECD

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Chinese explanation / 中文解读

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Original abstract

Which economies are the net economic winners of the climate transition? The intuitive answer—clean, low-emission, resource-rich economies—conflates a natural endowment with a productive capability. Economic-complexity research measures countries’ capability to produce complex green goods, while a separate literature quantifies the macroeconomic cost of climate change; the two have not been integrated. We provide that integration, operationalising a four-condition test for a net winner and collapsing it onto two axes—capability alignment and cost coverage—for the 38 members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), computed from trade, patent, bibliometric, emissions and vulnerability data. On these indicators, the resource-endowment ranking is largely reordered: a robust core of established green-goods exporters (Sweden, Denmark, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Austria, Italy, Switzerland and Finland) holds the winner positions—a reordering robust to a GDP-based export term and to orthogonalising the axes—while several clean resource economies are, on current indicators, cost-bearers. Scored indicatively on the same axes, China, the dominant green-goods exporter, appears capability-rich but cost-heavy. We separate genuine opportunity capture from merely low costs, show a services reading can rehabilitate goods-thin economies, and stress-test the map with economic-fitness, nestedness and rank-conversion checks. Positions are structural and relative; the policy reading is capability-building, not endowment.

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