The American industrial Policy debate: any lessons for the UK?

In this paper an assessment of the industrial policy debate that went on in the US roughly between 1980 and 1985 is conducted, very much in the context of its lessons for the UK. The argument is that this debate can help re-focus wider issues of industrial policy with a pertinence to other countries than the US. In particular it opens up the rather more political constraints and conditions that surround the establishment of any robust industrial policy. The paper assesses the course of the US debate, the way that debate has fragmented in a policy context into issues of renewed international competitiveness for the US economy, into tax reform,a nd into state initiated policy. Finally this debate is used to try and provide an analytical framework in which the articulation of industrial policy to other policy areas can be more profitably discussed.