Industrial Policy and Economic Transformation in Africa: Strategies for Development and a Research Agenda

Discussion of industrial policy tends to generate much controversy and passion, a key reason for this being the lack of a clear and generally accepted definition of the term. In this paper, we use industrial policy to refer to any set of policies pursued by a government with the explicit goal of promoting the expansion, technological upgrading, or international competitiveness of a targeted set of economic activities. Targeting is key. The implementation of policies that improve the general environment for all economic activities (for example, a stable macroeconomic environment, a friendly private sector environment, promotion of education in general… and so on), while highly desirable and, in most cases, necessary for the successful promotion of targeted activities, are not by themselves, in our view, sufficient to constitute the existence of an industrial policy regime.