DN Debate: Warning for the return of failed industrial policy

According to them, large-scale covert business subsidies worked poorly in the 1970s. Yet, despite the lack of scientific support, the pandemic and the war in Ukraine have led to a renaissance of state industrial policy. This is problematic because history is full of wide-ranging policy plans that have yielded unintended and sometimes disastrous results.

In the new book "Questioning the entrepreneurial state", 30 leading international researchers show that scientific support for large-scale industrial policy is weak. It risks distorting healthy competition for the economy, and is a form of disguised business support reminiscent of the 1970s.