Abstract
Industrial policy remains a term prone to trigger strong reactions. Many economists in Europe and especially the US have long viewed such policies with strong suspicion. They are concerned about the conceptual pitfalls of governments steering the allocation of e-sources across sectors away from market signals. They are also concerned about the empirical challenges of getting policies right in practice that could work in theory, given political economy dynamics and the lack of data. Policy practitioners have always less circumspect, ready to take industrial policy action if there were political reasons to do so. For them the challenge is to get guidance on how to implement such policies in an effective way, moving beyond the question of whether they should be used at all.
