The new politics of EU industrial policy: from the regulatory state to a transformational state

Donato Di Carlo, Kathleen R. McNamara and Manuela Moschella

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: Across advanced economies, states are reasserting a more directive role in shaping markets. One prominent expression of this shift is the resurgence of industrial policy as a form of interventionist economic governance. This introduction develops atripartite framework to analyze contemporary industrial policy in terms of goals, instruments, and authority structures—asking for what ends states intervene, through what means, and by and for whom. Applying this lens to Europe and the European Union (EU), the special issue shows how a polity long seen as the archetype of the regulatory state is increasingly departing from this model through a renewed embrace of industrial policy. We identify four ideal‐typical phases of EU industrial policy since the postwar era and argue that, since the 2020s, the EU has entered a distinct Transformational Phase. This phase is marked by the geopoliticization of interventionist goals, hybrid fiscal, geoeconomic and regulatory instruments, and a vertical and hori-zontal decentering of European market interventionism. Together, the introduction and contributions to the special issue offer a conceptual and empirical lens on industrial policy as a defining feature of twenty‐first‐century activist economic governance.

Keywords: economic governance; state capitalism; European Union; industrial policy; political economy; market interventionism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J01 R14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 16 pages
Date: 2026-05-19
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eec
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in Governance, 19, May, 2026, 39(3). ISSN: 0952-1895

Downloads: (external link)
https://researchonline.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/138096/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:138096

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().