Updated thoughts on industrial policy

Photo by HundenvonPenang via Wikimedia.orgI’ve long been an industrial policy enthusiast. My favorite popular nonfiction book is Joe Studwell’s How Asia Works, a synthesis of decades of research about the economic miracles in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. I wrote a whole series of posts examining the successes and failures of various developing countries through the lens of Studwell’s ideas:There are a bunch of other good books and papers about industrial policy that I’d recommend if you’re interested in the topic. These include Alice Amsden’s Asia’s Next Giant (about South Korea), Robert Wade’s Governing the Market (about Taiwan), “The New Economics of Industrial Policy” by Juhász et al. (2023), and the papers of the Industrial Policy Research Group.Around the same time I discovered the industrial policy literature, the consensus was shifting within the big economic development agencies (the World Bank and the IMF). Whereas in previous decades, these organizations generally…