Industrial policy, then and now

Abstract

After 40 years of neoliberalism, even governments believe that they are inefficient when compared to the private sector. And economics, in its swing to the right, reinforces this view. The philosophy behind public expenditure for social purposes and the criteria for judging such projects has not been a subject of public debate until recently. In particular, industrial policy was very simple: leave it to the private sector to allocate resources as the market prompts. In Keynes’s time, this was not the case. This article reviews some of the issues concerning the industrial policy that was aired in the interwar period. The debate needs to be revived, revisited and, where appropriate, revised to suit the present day, but on basic principles there is much to learn from the interwar discussions. The contrast between the recent (2018) UK government’s White Paper on industrial strategy and the Liberal Industrial Inquiry’s Britain’s Industrial Future (1928) is quite instructive.