Moving the Goalposts: The Changing Objectives of Industrial Policy

Alexander Plekhanov, Koczan Zsoka and Victoria Marino of European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) in this research paper look at moving goalposts of industrial policy: This paper relies on a novel dataset of more than 31,000 industrial policies in 150 economies over the period 2009-2022 to codify and examine the stated objectives of these policies and their characteristics. We find that industrial policies increasingly pursue multiple objectives, often ones that may be hard to...