Industrial Policies, the Creation of a Learning Society, and Economic Development1
Industrial Policies, the Creation of a Learning Society, and Economic Development1 B. Greenwald and J. E. Stiglitz Industrial policies—meaning policies by which governments attempt to shape the sectoral allocation of the economy-- are back in fashion, and rightly so. The major insight of welfare economics of the past fifty years is that markets by themselves in general do not result in (constrained) Pareto efficient outcomes. (Greenwald-Stiglitz, 1986). Industrial policies seek to shape the sectoral structure of the economy. This is partly because the sectoral structure that emerges from market forces, on their own, may not be that which maximizes social welfare. By now, there is a rich catalogue of market failures, circumstances in which the markets may, say, produce too little of some commodity or another, and in which industrial policies, appropriately designed, may improve matters. There can be, for instance, important coordination failures—which government action can help resolve. But there are two further reasons for the recent interest in industrial policy: First, it has finally become recognized that market forces don’t exist in a vacuum. Development economics routinely emphasizes as central to growth the study of institutions All the rules and regulations, the legal frameworks and how they are enforced, affect the structure of the economy, so unwittingly, government is always engaged in industrial policy. When the U.S. Congress passed provisions of the bankruptcy code that gave derivatives first priority in the event of bankruptcy, but which said that student debt could not be discharged, even in bankruptcy, it was providing encouragement to the financial sector.
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