Industrial strategies for tackling the challenges of the twenty-first century: trends in objectives, rationales and design in policy and academia

This report documents global shifts in of industrial policy objectives and the rationales behind public intervention to address them. Drawing from a selected sample of policy documents from international organizations and countries with literature on innovation and technical change, this report presents a classification of objectives and rationales. This classification is used to code systematically the academic literature on industrial policy to analyse changes in objectives and rationales in publications on countries of different income groups. The findings show increased attention to social challenges with respect to economic objectives, especially in lower-income countries, while in high-income countries the shift is towards strategic objectives. There has, however, been limited change in rationales. There is also greater coherence between objectives and rationales for policy intervention in the discussion on specific instruments. Based on this evidence, it is suggested that more careful analysis of the rationales for public intervention is needed within existing frameworks and strategic thinking on industrial policies with a view to designing industrial strategies that are time consistent and systematically take into account the synergies and tensions between objectives.