Industrial Policy, Information, and Government Capacity

Maloney, William F. ; Nayyar, Gaurav

World Bank, Washington, DC

关键词: INDUSTRIAL POLICY;    MARKET FAILURES;    GOVERNMENT FAILURES;    GOVERNANCE;    CAPTURE;   

DOI  :  10.1596/1813-9450-8056
RP-ID  :  WPS8056

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

Governments are resource and bandwidthconstrained, and hence need to prioritizeproductivity-enhancing policies. To do so requiresinformation on the nature and magnitude of market failureson the one hand, and government’s capacity to redress themsuccessfully on the other. The paper reviews perspectives onvertical (sectoral) and horizontal (factor markets, cluster)policies with an eye to both criteria. It first argues thatthe case for either cannot be made on the basis of thelikelihood of successful implementation: for instance,educational and picking the winner types of policies bothrun the risks of capture and incompetent execution. However,the profession has been able to establish more convincingmarket failures for horizontal policies than for verticalpolicies. Most of the recent approaches to identifyingfailures around particular goods, the paper argues, are oflimited help. Hence, for a given difficulty of execution,the former are generally to be preferred. A second criticalmessage is that improving the quality of governance in termsof collecting information, coordination ability, anddefending against capture is critical to successfulimplementation of productivity policies and should becentral on the policy agenda.