Tracing China's unseen rare earth exports that sustain global consumption

Abstract

Rare earth (RE) materials are critical to modern technologies, yet current research has largely overlooked the indirect exports of RE embedded in intermediate and final products. Leveraging the detailed inventories of China's RE flows and downstream usage constructed herein, this study addresses that gap by systematically tracing and decomposing China's indirect RE exports from 1990 to 2020 through the integration of environmentally extended multi-regional input-output (EEMRIO) analysis along with global value chain (GVC) and structural path analysis (SPA) methods. We find that over one-third of China's RE exports were indirectly embedded in traded goods with other regions during this period. This substantial outflow of embedded REs underscores China's important—yet often underrecognized—role in sustaining the global RE supply chain. These findings further reveal the complexity of RE trade and emphasize the need for comprehensive tracking of metal flows.