Grants

University of British Columbia

To accelerate the production of empirical economics research on industrial strategy

  • Amount $770,576
  • City Vancouver, Canada, Canada
  • Investigator Reka Juhasz
  • Year 2023
  • Program Research
  • Sub-program Economics

A nation’s industrial strategy consists of state interventions to support specific industries that are deemed strategically important. Such policies can help to correct externalities and coordination failures as well as provide key public goods. One example is the investment made by the Department of Defense’s research and development organization, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), in the experimental computer network ARPANET – the precursor to the internet – in the late 1960s. The undertaking was too costly, risky, and uncertain for any private sector actor to undertake. But once in place, companies joined in and the internet as we know it is the result. The theoretical and empirical economics literature on industrial strategy is still underdeveloped, not least because the Washington Consensus that emerged during the 1980s favored free-market policies and limited government interference as drivers of economic growth. Times have changed, however, with recent geopolitical challenges pushing industrial strategy back into the foreground of economic policy discussions worldwide. A growing body of empirical research suggests that well-designed industrial strategy can effectively drive economic growth, while ongoing studies explore why particular types of policies function better in some settings than others and how industrial strategy has changed over time. At the field’s forefront are early-career scholars Reka Juhasz (University of British Columbia) and Nathan Lane (University of Oxford).  Together, they founded the Industrial Policy Group (IPG), an international empirical economics lab devoted to this topic.  The IPG uses large-language models to classify policies in ways that enable cross-country comparison and rigorous econometric analysis. They plan to publish their comprehensive, granular, and standardized dataset and demonstrate its usefulness in proof-of-concept research on how industrial policies are used around the world. They will also complete at least four other projects, including a descriptive paper on the political economy of industrial strategy; a methods paper on measuring industrial policies from news text; and two evaluation papers on the efficacy of industrial strategy in East Asia after World War II and globally after the year 2000.  The PIs’ demonstrated commitment to fostering a highly diverse, inclusive, and collaborative culture will also ensure that a growing number of graduate students will receive high-quality mentorship, training, and co-authorship through their involvement in these projects.

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