Industrial Policy & Trade Monitor· 2666 actions· ✨ 90 recent

On 26 December 2025, Japan's Cabinet approved the FY2026 (Reiwa 8) national budget, which the Global Trade Alert database logs as including a "Project to Promote the Strengthening of Autonomous Resource Circulation Systems" financial-grant line administered by METI, effective with the fiscal year on 1 April 2026. The line is the continuation of METI's "Decarbonisation Growth-Type Economic Structure Transition Promotion Subsidy (Autonomous Resource Circulation System Strengthening Promotion Project)" (脱炭素成長型経済 構造移行推進対策費補助金（自律型資源循環システム強靱化促進事業）), which funds private-sector investment in recycled-material manufacturing and recovery equipment for rare metals/rare earths, automotive and small-electronics lithium-ion batteries, plastics, and textiles. Japanese budget-press reporting puts the FY2026 allocation at JPY 7.3 billion (73億円), up from JPY 3.0 billion (30億円) in FY2025 -- roughly a 2.4x year-on-year increase. METI opened the call for the executing body (執行団体) on 18 February 2026, with the General Incorporated Association for Low-Carbon Investment Promotion (GIO) again acting as the designated administrator, as it did for the FY2025 round.

The Asian Development Bank signed a USD 50 million (approximately CNY 353.63 million) green loan with Shouguang Luli Wood Inc, a subsidiary of China's Luli Group and one of the country's largest oriented strand board (OSB) producers, to finance construction of a new OSB factory, associated facilities, and a captive biomass power plant in Jiangxi Province, plus working capital. Global Trade Alert logs the transaction as a "red" (certainly harmful) state-linked lending-support intervention on the standard grounds that below-market multilateral development-bank financing to a named commercial producer competing internationally is a potential trade- and competition-distorting subsidy. ADB frames the project around circular-economy forestry: the OSB furnish is sourced from wood waste, branches, and smallholder-grown fast-rotation timber (~10% bamboo) rather than old-growth timber, with production waste fuelling the on-site biomass plant.

NRW.BANK, the state-owned promotional bank of North Rhine-Westphalia, and the NRW Ministry of Economic Affairs launched "Invest Zukunft" ("Invest in the Future"), a state loan scheme open to all companies operating in North Rhine-Westphalia regardless of size, with applications opening 19 May 2025. The scheme finances investment in digitalisation of business processes, electromobility and low-emission technologies, circular-economy and sustainable production, renewable-energy transition, and AI applications, via loans of up to EUR 10 million per project at interest rates up to 2 percentage points below market and redemption discounts of 5-20% for SMEs depending on investment and company size. The measure was notified to the European Commission and logged by Global Trade Alert as a state loan intervention effective 26 May 2025.