External publications

Industrial policy trends in Germany

Altenburg, Tilman
External Publications (2024)

Project Documents (LC/TS.2024/101), Santiago: Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC)

Span. Ausg. u.d.T.:
Tendencias de la política industrial en Alemania

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The discussion about industrial policy has recently undergone radical changes. Until the turn of the century, industrial policy had been under severe criticism from orthodox economists,  arguing that unfettered markets were more efficient at allocating investments than “bureaucrats”. Structuralist authors (Amsden, 1992; Stiglitz, 1996; Wade, 2003; Cimoli, Dosi and Stiglitz,  2009) had always rejected the underlying assumptions. First, highlighting the pervasiveness of market failures and the fact that societal objectives matter, some of which may require  compromises with private sector investments (such as mitigating climate change or balancing living conditions across regions; Altenburg and Lütkenhorst, 2015); second, conceptualising  industrial policy as a coordinated process of public-private search for realistic and desirable techno-economic trajectories and associated policy interventions rather than top-down “picking  winners” by bureaucrats (Evans, 1995; Rodrik, 2008). While the neoliberal discourse dominated economic policymaking in many Latin American and African countries, policymakers and  practitioners in other parts of the world, especially in East Asia and Europe, remained largely immune to the ideological aberrations and pragmatically continued to apply industrial policies to protect and upgrade specific parts of their economies. [...]