Moving the goalposts: The changing objectives of industrial policy

By Zsóka Kóczán, Victoria Marino and Alexander Plekhanov

This paper relies on a novel dataset of more than 31,000 industrial policies in 150 economies over the period 2009-2022 to codify and examine the stated objectives of these policies and their characteristics. We find that industrial policies increasingly pursue multiple objectives, often ones that may be hard to reconcile. In a two-way fixed effects framework, we show that industrial policies with environmental objectives are more common in Western economies while secure supply objectives are more common in economies geopolitically aligned with China. The majority of industrial policies have features that may make them “addictive”: they discriminate against foreigners, are firm-specific and lack “sunset clauses”. Such addictive policies are more common in economies in rival geopolitical blocs and those with better administrative capacity, suggesting that political economy tends to dominate government effectiveness when it comes to the design of industrial policies.