Where Are We in the Economics of Industrial Policies?

Research on industrial policy has taken off, leading to a better understanding of when such policies effectively harness economic development. This article reviews the recent literature on the economics of industrial policies. Until recently, empirical studies on industrial policies came largely in one of two types: detailed country/region studies and cross-industry or cross-country econometric studies. I point out that the country/region studies had the usual problem that it was difficult to trace the effects of success to specific industrial policies, while the econometric studies suffered from the problem of misspecification. I show that a new generation of work has been moving us beyond the largely ideological debates of the past to a more contextual, pragmatic understanding.