Accessibility navigation


When does industrial policy fail and when can it succeed? Case studies from Europe

Garcia Calvo, A. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8163-1637 and Hancké, B. (2025) When does industrial policy fail and when can it succeed? Case studies from Europe. Socio-Economic Review. mwaf045. ISSN 1475-1461 (In Press)

[thumbnail of Final published article.pdf] Text - Published Version
· Restricted to Repository staff only
· The Copyright of this document has not been checked yet. This may affect its availability.

772kB

It is advisable to refer to the publisher's version if you intend to cite from this work. See Guidance on citing.

To link to this item DOI: 10.1093/ser/mwaf045

Abstract/Summary

When does industrial policy succeed and fail in advanced economies? Most approaches to these questions concentrate on policy design and state power. Instead, we draw attention to the historical legacies, industrial structures, and institutional arrangements that shape industrial policy outcomes. We use insights from historical institutionalism and international business to develop a relational argument based on two first-order conditions: a critical mass of firms with sufficient capabilities to leverage the resources resulting from industrial policy, and the alignment between industrial policy goals and national institutional systems. Industrial policy could succeed, given the important second-order conditions that many have examined, when one of these conditions is present and public intervention produces the other. But industrial policy is certain to fail when both conditions are absent. Using a most different systems design, we assess our framework through short case-studies of industrial policy success and failure in Europe in the past 6 decades.

Item Type:Article
Refereed:Yes
Divisions:Henley Business School > International Business and Strategy
ID Code:123736
Publisher:Oxford University Press

University Staff: Request a correction | Centaur Editors: Update this record

Page navigation