Reducing dependence on China in key industrial sectors and supply chains will require huge additional investment over the coming decades. An analysis by the consultancy EY-Parthenon says the United States, the eurozone and the United Kingdom may have to invest an additional $23.6 trillion by 2050 to meet that goal. The report says the United States will spend the most in building alternatives to the manufacturing, technology, research, software infrastructure and supply chains currently linked to China, needing about $13.7 trillion. The eurozone will need $9.1 trillion and the UK about $800 billion.
According to the report, the three regions will together need an extra average of about $940 billion a year over the next 25 years — on top of ongoing investment in energy, defence, technology and infrastructure. For the United States alone, about $550 billion a year in extra investment may be needed; by comparison, the country’s big technology companies invested about $600 billion in building data centres in 2025, while the additional spending the European Union needs is close to double the bloc’s current annual budget.
Mats Persson, an EY-Parthenon official and former UK government adviser, said localising supply chains would not be easy, as it risked imposing extra costs on taxpayers and consumers, and that partially reducing reliance on China was a more realistic path than fully decoupling. The analysis also said money alone would not solve the problem, as China still dominates the supply of many critical raw materials used in advanced manufacturing, electric vehicles, batteries and renewable-energy technology. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), by 2035 China will supply more than 60 percent of the world’s refined lithium and cobalt and about 80 percent of battery-grade graphite and rare earths.
The scale of that dependence became clear last year, when Beijing imposed controls on exports of key rare-earth minerals in response to US tariff threats, raising fears of production disruption in the US and European car industries. EY-Parthenon estimates that factory-level costs for many China-made goods are 20 to 100 percent lower than in other countries, so cutting reliance on China could raise production costs and feed through to consumer prices — with prices in Europe’s key industrial sectors potentially rising by 1 to 2.5 percent. Alicia Garcia-Herrero, chief Asia-Pacific economist at the French financial institution Natixis, said that even with large investment, Western countries could not move away from China quickly, because China still controlled many critical industrial inputs, from rare-earth processing to pharmaceutical raw materials.
বাংলায় মূল প্রতিবেদন পড়ুন · Read the original Bengali report