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During the last two to three decades policy-makers have increasingly became concerned about the role of innovation for economic performance and, more recently, for the solution of challenges that arise (such as the climate challenge). The view that policy may have a role in supporting innovation has become widespread, and the term innovation policy has become commonly used. This paper takes stock of this rapidly growing area of public policy, with particular focus on the definition of innovation policy (what it is); theoretical rationales (why innovation policy is needed); and how innovation policy is designed, implemented, and governed.

Many developing economies adopt industrial policies favoring selected sectors. Is there an economic logic to this type of intervention? I analyze industrial policy when economic sectors form a production network via input-output linkages. Market imperfections generate distortionary effects that compound through backward demand linkages, causing upstream sectors to become the sink for imperfections and have the greatest size distortions. My key finding is that the distortion in sectoral size is a sufficient statistic for the social value of promoting that sector; thus, there is an incentive for a well-meaning government to subsidize upstream sectors. Furthermore, sectoral interventions’ aggregate effects can be simply summarized, to first order, by the cross-sector covariance between my sufficient statistic and subsidy spending. My sufficient statistic predicts sectoral policies in South Korea in the 1970s and modern-day China, suggesting that sectoral interventions might have generated positive aggregate effects in these economies.

We exploit changes in the area-specific eligibility criteria for a program to support jobs through investment subsidies. European rules determine whether an area is eligible for subsidies, and we construct instrumental variables for area eligibility based on parameters of these rule changes. Areas eligible for higher subsidies significantly increased jobs and reduced unemployment. A 10-percentage point increase in the maximum investment subsidy stimulates a 10 percent increase in manufacturing employment. This effect exists solely for small firms: large companies accept subsidies without increasing activity. There are positive effects on investment and employment for incumbent firms but not Total Factor Productivity.

We build a model of firm-level innovation, productivity growth, and reallocation featuring endogenous entry and exit. A new and central economic force is the selection between high- and low-type firms, which differ in terms of their innovative capacity. We estimate the parameters of the model using US Census microdata on firm-level output, R&D, and patenting. The model provides a good fit to the dynamics of firm entry and exit, output, and R&D. Taxing the continued operation of incumbents can lead to sizable gains (of the order of 1.4 percent improvement in welfare) by encouraging exit of less productive firms and freeing up skilled labor to be used for R&D by high-type incumbents. Subsidies to the R&D of incumbents do not achieve this objective because they encourage the survival and expansion of low-type firms.

Policy makers are increasingly embracing the idea of using industrial and innovation policy to tackle the ‘grand challenges’ facing modern societies. This article argues that through well-defined goals, or more specifically ‘missions’, that are focused on solving important societal challenges, policymakers have the opportunity to determine the direction of growth by making strategic investments across many different sectors and nurturing new industrial landscapes, which the private sector can develop further, and as a result induce cross-sectoral learning and increase macroeconomic stability. This ‘mission-oriented’ approach to industrial policy is not about ‘top down’ planning by an overbearing state; it is about providing a direction for growth and increasing business expectations about future growth areas and catalysing activity that otherwise would not happen. It is not about de-risking and levelling the playing field, nor about supporting more competitive sectors over less since the market does not always ‘know best’ but tilting the playing field in the direction of the desired societal goals, such as the sustainable development goals. To achieve this requires a different policy framework, what we call the ‘ROAR’ framework, which involves strategic thinking about the desired direction of travel (Routes), the structure and capacity of public sector Organisations, the way in which policy is Assessed and the incentive structure for both private and public sectors (Risks and Rewards). The article argues that if we want to take grand challenges such as the SDGs seriously as policy goals, market shaping should become the over-arching approach followed in various policy fields.

We examine the ways in which political realities shape industrial policy through the lens of modern political economy. We consider two broad \"governance constraints\": (1) the political forces that shape how industrial policy is chosen and (2) the ways in which state capacity affects implementation. The framework of modern political economy suggests that government failure is not a necessary feature of industrial policy; rather, it is more likely to fail when countries pursue industrial policies beyond their governance capacity constraints. As such, our political economy of industrial policy is not fatalist. Instead, it enables policymakers to constructively confront challenges.

Is there a role for governments in emerging countries to accelerate economic development by intervening in product and factor markets? To address this question, we study optimal dynamic Ramsey policies in a standard growth model with financial frictions. The optimal policy intervention involves pro-business policies like suppressed wages in early stages of the transition, resulting in higher entrepreneurial profits and faster wealth accumulation. This, in turn, relaxes borrowing constraints in the future, leading to higher labor productivity and wages. In the long run, optimal policy reverses sign and becomes pro-worker. In a multi-sector extension, optimal policy subsidizes sectors with a latent comparative advantage and, under certain circumstances, involves a depreciated real exchange rate. Our results provide an efficiency rationale, but also identify caveats, for many of the development policies actively pursued by dynamic emerging economies.

This paper critically assesses recent place-based approaches to industrial and regional policy epitomised in the EU’s 2020 ‘smart specialisation’ programme. It suggests that these are a move in the right direction in so far as they acknowledge ‘place’ as a key, constituent part of policymaking. Drawing upon examples from across the world, we emphasise the importance of regions pursuing strategies that allow them to capture—in a sustainable way—a part of the value they help create and co-create with other entities, such as multinational firms and other organisations. This involves policymakers acting as public entrepreneurs, devising and implementing strategies, structures and policies to enable the regional ecosystem and its constituent parts to capture value sustainably. In addition to the extant focus on linkages and embeddedness, a key aspect of this involves the adoption of regional value capture and positioning strategies.

Economic theory justifies policy when there are concrete market failures. The article shows how in the case of innovation, successful policies that have led to radical innovations have been more about market shaping and creating through direct and pervasive public financing, rather than market fixing. The paper reviews and discusses evidence for this in three key areas: (i) the presence of finance from public sources across the entire innovation chain; (ii) the concept of 'mission-oriented' policies that have created new technological and industrial landscapes; and (iii) the entrepreneurial and lead investor role of public actors, willing and able to take on extreme risks, independent of the business cycle. We further illustrate these three characteristics for the case of clean technology, and discuss how a market-creating and -shaping perspective may be useful for understanding the financing of transformative innovation needed for confronting contemporary societal challenges.

Green growth requires green technologies: production techniques that economize on exhaustible resources and emit fewer greenhouse gases. The availability of green technologies both lowers social costs in the transition to a green growth path and helps achieve a satisfactory rate of material progress under that path. The theoretical case in favour of using industrial policy to facilitate green growth is quite strong. Economists' traditional scepticism on industrial policy is grounded instead on pragmatic considerations having to do with the difficulty of achieving well-targeted and effective interventions in practice. While these objections deserve serious attention, I argue that they are not insurmountable. A key objective of this paper is to show how the practice of industrial policy can be improved by designing institutional frameworks that counter both informational and political risks.