In person icon Doing Industrial Policy in a Geo-Tech World: Challenges and Opportunities for Europe

Abstract

In recent years, industrial policy has made a comeback across the globe, with governments being increasingly willing to redirect economic activities towards strategically important technologies such as semiconductors, cloud computing, or batteries. This shift is also evident in the European Union (EU). The political economy literature generally attributes the return of industrial policy to the interplay of two forces. First, the neoliberal economic policy consensus that had prevailed for the last decades has been re-politicised, as influential actors across the political spectrum have called for more government intervention to address problems ranging from climate change to economic inequality to regional decline. Second, economic policymaking has become increasingly geopoliticized, as economic rationales have become increasingly enmeshed with geopolitical and geoeconomic ones. Thus far, the bulk of the (European) political economy debate has focused on the coalitional politics of these changes; or, alternatively, on the desirability of more active forms of state intervention. However, while this literature has made great inroads into understanding the drivers of, or making the case for, a new industrial policy, we know much less about how the new industrial policy actually works on the (post-neoliberal) ground: How the policy design of industrial policy measures impacts the fairness and effectiveness of state intervention? How (or if) public goals and private gains can be reconciled? And, more generally, how political, administrative, or ideological constraints shape the rollout of industrial policies? Understanding how (European) governments actually "do" industrial policy is a particularly pressing concern given that decades of neoliberal policy and economic austerity have, at least outside China, considerably weakened both states’ capacity for and experience with industrial policy. The papers in this panel address this gap drawing lessons for successfully managing the triple—green, digital, and geopolitical—transition, with a particular focus on developments in Europe.

Title	Details
What’s Net-Zero? Strategic Interactions and Coalitions in European Clean-Tech Policymaking	View Paper Details
A ‘Common’ Interest? Explaining Variation in EU Member States’ State Aid for Important Projects of Common European Interest	View Paper Details
Debt as Investment: Off-Balance Sheet Capacity and Implementation in the European Union	View Paper Details
Digital Industrial Policy at the Periphery: Diverging Preferences, Unequal Power	View Paper Details
What is Strategic? IPCEIs and the Emergence of European Strategic Intelligence	View Paper Details