Selective industrial policy and ‘sustainable’ structural change. Discussing the political economy of sectoral priorities in the US

Marco R. Di Tommaso, Mattia Tassinari, Elisa Barbieri and Marco Marozzi

Structural Change and Economic Dynamics, 2020, vol. 54, issue C, 309-323

Abstract: With the 2008 economic crisis–and again with the outbreak of the coronavirus emergency in 2020–industrial policy has explicitly reappeared in the political agenda of many countries and regions. A common feature has been the demand and the adoption of selective policies aimed at promoting specific targets of the economy, such as particular industries, technologies, companies, or territories. Nevertheless, the theoretical framework adopted to legitimize and implement public action in this field has not evolved much in the last two decades: it appears weak, too vague, and often anachronistic, increasing the risk of substantial ‘government failures’. By focusing on the US manufacturing system, this paper contributes to the political economy stream of the industrial policy literature by proposing new methods to make government intervention more effective, efficient, and oriented towards a sustainable structural change, as defined in the paper.

Keywords: industrial policy; sustainable structural change; manufacturing targeting; policymaking; composite indicator; United States (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0954349X19305284
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:streco:v:54:y:2020:i:c:p:309-323

DOI: 10.1016/j.strueco.2020.05.005

Access Statistics for this article

Structural Change and Economic Dynamics is currently edited by F. Duchin, H. Hagemann, M. Landesmann, R. Scazzieri, A. Steenge and B. Verspagen

More articles in Structural Change and Economic Dynamics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().