Industrial Policy 2025: Bringing the State Back In (Again) by Todd N. Tucker (Foreword), Kyunghoon Kim, Saule T. Omarova, Jonas Algers, Andrea Furnaro, César F. Rosado Marzán, Lenore Palladino published by The Roosevelt Institute (2024).
This collection of essays is a first-of-its-kind interdisciplinary analysis by a diverse group of scholars from around the world that aims to answer the question: What institutions and strategies are missing from US industrial policy that could help it be more successful? The collection looks at the potential tools of economic statecraft that could complement the tax credits and grants that have formed the core of the Biden administration’s first term industrial agenda. What institutions and strategies are missing from US industrial policy that could help it be more successful? The ideas in this collection have two things in common. First, the cases described in each essay involve a more active role for the state in the economy than neoliberal scholars or policymakers in the United States have embraced in recent decades. Second, they have been practiced somewhere in the world at some point in time (including right now). In other words, they are not merely theoretical; they are real-world precedents that scholars, policymakers, and the broader public can study and learn from—assuaging potential concerns about an expanded role for the American state. The case studies do not revel in “statism” for its own sake. Rather, each of this collection’s contributors analyzes a toolkit or strategy that would address concrete problems that currently bedevil US industrial strategy. This foreword starts by taking stock of the last three years of industrial policy developments, and the criticisms these have generated from certain observers about what has been seen as excessive levels of state intervention. A second section looks to how comparative politics research can provide further context as to whether and how higher levels of intervention could be justified. A third section introduces the reader to the essays that make up this compilation, and how they push both theory and practice forward.
