Joe Studwell: evaluation

Transcript context

…For the world as a whole, how well do you feel industrial policy has worked? Oh, it’s worked extremely well, and it’s been refined well over a century. Yes, the whole approach of targeting cheap money at manufacturing, putting some protection in place, rewarding exporters of manufactured goods — it’s created jobs, it’s raised the technological level at which the economy operates, and there’s really no substitute for it because, as has been shown, manufacturing is the only bit of the economy that really delivers the convergence that we’re supposed to get across the whole economy and the sort of orthodox view of life. So, I think that industrial policy has done very well. The problem is, of course, getting away from it then proves extremely difficult. Not only getting away from industrial policy, but getting away from the trade surpluses that it tends to produce. Whether it’s Japan or Germany, or now China, the countries that have run the most effective industrial policy become a problem for the whole of the rest of the world. But as a means to develop your economy, as a means to raise your people up, I think it’s had a very good performance. But say you’re Brazil. Brazil seems to have underperformed for almost 50 years, and they do plenty of industrial policy, and they have actual scale. It’s now considered happy news that this year they might grow at 2 percent. Hasn’t it just failed in Brazil, in addition to Mexico and many other places?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.