Industrial Policy

William Lazonick writes that recent United States industrial policy initiatives miss the centrality of corporate resource allocation for creating a robust economy, characterized by...

Taiwan has a history of implementing industrial policies to successfully encourage the development of internationally competitive high-tech firms. However, the new administration’s efforts to reorient industrial policy to achieve Taiwan’s commercial-cum-defense goal risks harming its economic resiliency.

The United Kingdom has struggled to implement long-term industrial policies in recent decades, writes Diane Coyle, a trend the new Labour Party promises to...

‘Buy national’ provisions serve as non-tariff barriers to trade and are often defended as tools for job creation and industrial policy. This column examines...

Bill Baer argues that the United States’ history with promoting national champions through industrial policy shows how protection and the diminution of competition often backfires on the favored companies and the state. He writes that industrial policy must complement competition policy.

Elizabeth Popp Berman writes that the history of the antimonopoly movement and industrial policy in the United States shows that antitrust and industrial policy, currently considered by many to be in conflict, can complement each other in pursuit of shared goals.

Recent negative news on the production of electric vehicles in the United States call into question the government’s industrial policy boosting Detroit’s efforts to go green. Susan Helper writes that not only have there been significant benefits from President Joe Biden’s industrial policies, but promoting the production and adoption of electric vehicles remains essential to achieving national decarbonization targets and increasing resilience, innovation, and national security

Max von Thun writes that Enrico Letta, Mario Draghi, and Emmanuel Macron are right in demanding a new economic vision for the European Union. However, they are wrong to advocate for corporate consolidation as part of the solution. The EU must pursue competition rather than consolidation if it is to create a robust political economy that can take back power from corporate behemoths, deliver growth and jobs to European citizens, and guarantee the future of the European project.

The Biden administration's ambitious place-based industrial policy aims to both revitalize struggling regions and bolster America's strategic economic sectors, but these two goals often conflict. Walter Frick writes that while policies that boost economic prospects in distressed areas may not immediately transform them into innovation hubs, they could unlock the potential of future generations and ultimately contribute to the nation's innovative capacity.

Critics of industrial policy claim that state interventions into the market lead to inefficient subsidies, protectionism, or the “picking of winners.” Kartik Akileswaran and Rohan Sandhu argue that when industrial policy is instead viewed as an iterative, dynamic process between the private and public sectors, and undergirded by the state's capacity to play this role,  it leads to a more sophisticated understanding of industrial policy’s manifold historical manifestations and benefits.