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The US Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) has heralded the advent of a new era of industrial policy within and beyond the USA. As the net-zero economy transition unfolds and national economic security paradigms entrench, industrial policy is here to stay. Net-zero subsidies are employed as multipurpose policy tools to promote domestic manufacturing, de-risk from China, and boost the net-zero transition. This new scenario prompts a fresh look at old questions surrounding environmental subsidies and their justification, actionability, and countervailability. This article makes three contributions. First, it articulates a conceptual framework to assess questions surrounding the justification of net-zero subsidies. It advocates a direct focus on their environmental effectiveness, drawing a distinction between justifiable trade-distorting effects and unjustifiable protective or discriminatory application associated with the pursuit of reshoring or geopolitical goals. Second, it employs a careful analysis of different IRA tax credits to operationalize the article's framework and test its robustness. Third, it draws on legal and economic insights to shed some light on the environmental effects of different groups of net-zero subsidies. On these grounds, it advances a streamlined three-fold categorization and demarcates the boundaries within which different subsidies should be justifiable, non-actionable and non-countervailable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's African swine fever (ASF) outbreaks, which started in 2018, severely damaged the country's pig and sow herds and created serious pork supply shortages. This resulted in high domestic market prices and record amounts of imports in both 2019 and 2020, but also severely impacted its domestic consumers. It casts doubts on whether China's long-standing self-sufficiency strategy, including its recently communicated 95% self-sufficiency target, can be sustained. Recent data, however, suggest that China is experiencing a rapid recovery in pig production, leading to depressed domestic market prices. This study characterizes the recovery process and analyzes the underlying drivers, such as active responses to the ASF outbreaks, a multiple-prong government initiative towards supporting the pig producers, de facto relaxations of newly introduced environmental regulations, large increases in domestic investment, and a reorganization of the pig sector, featuring more scale operations. However, the rapid recovery has also resulted in decreasing prices, economic losses of producers, and dampened export opportunities for China's trade partners. This paper, therefore, also analyzes these unintended consequences and explores supply-side measures that may enable the long-run viability of the self-sufficiency goal in the presence of high dependency on imported feed. Through a model-based numerical simulation analysis, we find that supply-side measures, such as yield improvement, can substantially reduce reliance on import feed but can only increase domestic pork production marginally, while technical efficiency improvement in pork production has the largest potential in boosting domestic pork production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]