Collection
Special Issue: New industrial policies in a new world order
Industrial policy remains a term prone to trigger strong reactions. Many economists in Europe and especially the US have long viewed such policies with strong suspicion, while practitioners have been less circumspect. In recent years, a succession of economic challenges and crises – from the pandemic to climate change to geopolitical tensions - increased the pressure on policy makers to deploy more directive economic policies. And the rise of emerging economies, especially China, that feel less bound by the past policy consensus and have the willingness to pursue robust industrial policies has increasingly changed the calculus for others on whether to abide with the traditional policy approaches. In 2020, a special issue of this journal analyzed the ”Rebirth of Industrial Policy under Responsible Globalization” (Aiginger and Rodrik 2020). (Special Issue on Industrial Policy under Responsible Globalization )
Five years later, the world and therefore the need and goals for industrial policy have evolved further. This new special issue aims to take stock of how these recent changes have affected the debate and practice of industrial policy in different parts of the world. It finds industrial policy to be not only “reborn”, but also “reloaded". There is a large willingness of policy makers to engage in industrial policies, with unprecedented funding made available. The papers in this special provide more details on the way that these policies are shaping up and changing the global economic policy landscape. They also highlight that these “reloaded industrial policies” are well advised to take account of the many learnings that the experiences and debates of the past offer if they want to avoid ending in disappointment.
Editors
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Karl Aiginger
Professor at University of Business and Economics Vienna, Austria, and Europaplattform, Austria
karl.aiginger@europaplattform.at
Director of the Policy Crossover Center Vienna. Honorary professor at the University of Linz. Founding editor in chief of the Journal of Industry, Competition and Trade. 2005 to 2016 director of the Austrian Institute of Economic Research (WIFO). 2012 to 2016 coordinator of the research project "New Dynamics for Europe: Reaping the Benefits of Socio-ecological Transition". Owned temporary commitments at Stanford University, MIT, UCLA, and at the University of Changsha, China. -
Christian Ketels
Harvard Business School, USA
cketels@hbs.edu
Global expert on economic competitiveness and strategy. Served as faculty member and Principal Associate at Prof. Michael Porter’s Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness at Harvard Business School for more than twenty years. Director and Co-Chair of the Innovation Fund Denmark. Chairs the Advisory Board of the TCI Network and the Scientific Advisory Board of Orkestra, the Basque Institute for Competitiveness. Senior Advisor of the House of Governance at the Stockholm School of Economics. Member of the Senior Economic Advisory Board of PIF, Saudi Arabia’s Sovereign Wealth Fund.
