S9 Ep43: Navigating industrial policy

Recorded at the PSE-CEPR Policy Forum, Paris.

In 2019 the IMF called the increasing adoption of industrial policy: "The return of the policy that shall not be named". No one is scared to name it in 2026. Governments in rich and poor economies alike are intervening to change what their countries produce, and the pace has picked up sharply.

Zsóka Kóczán (EBRD) was one of the leads on the Transition Report 2024-25, which draws on a database of more than 31,000 industrial policies in 150 economies. She talks to Tim Phillips about who is using these policies, and the mistakes that happen when they aren't managed well. They multiply before elections, they discriminate against foreign interests, many are firm-specific - and until recently few had an end date, whether they worked or not. Picking winners is hard. Letting go of losers is even harder, she warns.

The research behind this episode:

EBRD. 2024. "Transition Report 2024-25: Navigating Industrial Policy." London: European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. The digital edition, with country assessments and interactive charts, is at 2024.tr-ebrd.com.

To cite this episode:

Phillips, Tim, and Zsoka Koczan. 2026. "Navigating industrial policy." VoxTalks Economics (podcast).

About the guest

Zsoka Koczan is Associate Director and Lead Economist in the Office of the Chief Economist at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, where she works on the Transition Report, edits the Regional Economic Prospects and runs the Life in Transition Survey. Before joining the EBRD she was an economist at the International Monetary Fund. She holds a PhD in economics from the University of Cambridge, and her research spans income disparities within countries, migration and inequality.

Research cited in this episode

Moving the goalposts. The analysis of industrial policy objectives in the report is developed in Koczan, Zsoka, Victoria Marino, and Alexander Plekhanov. 2025. "Moving the Goalposts: The Changing Objectives of Industrial Policy." EBRD Working Paper No. 311. It codifies the stated objectives of more than 31,000 industrial policies using large language model processing; in the EBRD regions and other emerging markets, around 75% of policies pursue multiple objectives, and more than 10% pursue three or more.

The Juhász, Lane, Oehlsen and Pérez dataset. The report builds on the industrial policy dataset assembled by Réka Juhász, Nathan Lane, Emily Oehlsen, and Verónica C. Pérez in "The Who, What, When, and How of Industrial Policy: A Text-Based Approach" (STEG Working Paper No. WP050, 2023), which uses natural language processing to identify industrial policies in the Global Trade Alert repository; the EBRD team extended its coverage of emerging markets.

The Global Trade Alert. An independent monitoring initiative that has documented policy interventions affecting international commerce since 2009; it is the underlying source for both datasets above.

The policy that shall not be named. Cherif, Reda, and Fuad Hasanov. 2019. "The Return of the Policy That Shall Not Be Named: Principles of Industrial Policy." IMF Working Paper No. 19/74. The title captures how unfashionable the subject was among economists before its recent revival, which is Koczan's point in raising it; the interventions themselves never went away.

Reagan's nine words. In 1986 President Ronald Reagan remarked that the nine most terrifying words in the English language were "I'm from the government and I'm here to help." Koczan cites the line as a marker of the era when industrial policy fell out of favour, and as a reminder that government failures can replace the market failures these policies are meant to correct.

The Industrial Accelerator Act. The European Commission's proposal, presented in March 2026, would introduce "Made in EU" and low-carbon requirements for public procurement and support schemes in strategic sectors. Koczan cites it as evidence that the upward trend in industrial policy adoption is continuing.

More VoxTalks Economics episodes

Europe in the Middle, recorded at the same forum, in which Pol Antras and Beata Javorcik ask how Europe should make policy when it is caught between the US and China in a realigning world trade system.

Addressing Global Imbalances, also from the forum, in which Gita Gopinath and Philip Lane discuss the third wave of global imbalances and what central banks can and cannot do about it.

Related reading on VoxEU

The visible hand of the state: Industrial policies in emerging markets, a VoxEU column by the EBRD team presenting the Transition Report's findings on how emerging markets use industrial policy.

The new economics of industrial policy, a VoxEU column by Réka Juhász, Nathan Lane and Dani Rodrik summarising the recent empirical literature on when these policies work.

The return of industrial policy in data, a VoxEU column introducing the New Industrial Policy Observatory and documenting the recent wave of interventions.