Lunchtime seminar- 'When Can Industrial Policy Work?'

You are cordially invited to attend a research seminar by Dr Angela Garcia Calvo, Henley Business School, in Room 108, HBS on Wednesday 23rd March, at 13.00. For those who cannot attend in person please follow the link in your calendar email invitations (join Microsoft Teams Meeting) to join the seminar.

If you have not received a Teams invitation by the 9th March please contact Ellie Biggs.

Abstract:

This paper combines insights from historical institutionalism and international business to present a framework to gauge the success or failure of industrial policies. The framework combines two broad set of first level conditions. The first is the presence of local firms with at least embryonic capacity to leverage public goods resulting from industrial policy to develop new competitive advantages. The second is the alignment between national institutional structures that govern skills and capital markets and industrial policy goals. We argue that industrial policy can succeed when one of the conditions is present and the other one can be produced through public intervention, if other factors such as policy design, scope, targeting, and resourcing are appropriate to fulfil their stated objectives. We argue that industrial policy will fail when both conditions are absent. Using a most different systems design, we assess the validity of our framework through a series of historical mini case-studies of industrial policy success and failure in the motor vehicles, nuclear energy, and telecommunications industries in post-war Europe. We then use the framework to discuss the potential outcomes of planned policies to bolster the European semiconductor industry.