Industrial Policy Revisited

In the past decade, there has been a global resurgence in attention to industrial policy (IP), a resurgence that cuts across political ideologies and geographic regions. IPs are inherently political, intimately connected to the roles of the state in the economy and of states within an international economic system. This review demonstrates that while overt IPs have waxed and waned in their political acceptability in the aftermath of World War II, IPs have always remained part of the policy tool kit. In using IP, policymakers have had to navigate three common governance domains: building coalitions to support productive investments, building the state's capacity to collaborate with and discipline the private sector, and creating political incentives for credible commitments to firms. Nonetheless, the political dynamics in each of these domains have shifted over time. Historically, IPs focused on export-based catch-up strategies, requiring the mobilization of coalitions around manufacturing investment and export discipline. Today's IPs often target frontier technologies and aim to address perceived vulnerabilities in global supply chains and new geopolitical competition, demanding greater experimentation with more uncertain economic outcomes and higher risks of failure. We trace the evolution of the literature on IP through four phases: state-led developmental policies, the changing coalitions and institutions in a globally fragmented production system, neoliberalism, and the more recent renewed focus on transformative IP.