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This paper elaborates a dynamic rationale of industrial policy, focusing on how to strengthen the socio-economic system's ability to evolve, i.e., how to achieve high real income together with qualitative change. It highlights that the ubiquitous rationalities of failure, be it of markets, governments, or systems, are rooted in a peculiar habit of accepting hypothetical perfect states as normative benchmarks. In contrast, a dynamic logic of intervention should start from the question, what the system aims to accomplish. Combining the structuralist ontology of micro, meso and macro with the functional principles of evolutionary change, the paper proposes a general typology of economic policies based on their respective contributions to the system's ability to evolve.

Der anhaltende Produktivitätsvorsprung der USA sowie die zunehmende Konkurrenz aus den Schwellenländern führen in Europa seit Mitte der 1990er-Jahre zu einer intensiven Auseinandersetzung mit Fragen der Wettbewerbsfähigkeit. Höhepunkt ist der jüngste Appell der Europäischen Kommission zur Reindustrialisierung verbunden mit dem Ziel eines Anteils der Industrie an der gesamtwirtschaftlichen Wertschöpfung von 20%. Vor diesem Hintergrund stellt dieser Beitrag die Frage, ob der Strukturwandel von den Sachgütern hin zu den Dienstleistungen grundsätzlich umkehrbar ist. Einzelne Länder können zwar durch komparative Vorteile im internationalen Handel ihren Industrieanteil erhöhen, insgesamt wird die Deindustrialisierung aber von der mit steigenden Einkommen unterdurchschnittlich wachsenden Nachfrage und der überdurchschnittlich wachsenden Produktivität in der Erzeugung von Sachgütern bestimmt. Eine passive, auf Handelsbeschränkungen gerichtete Politik ist nicht wünschenswert und aufgrund der zunehmenden globalen Verflechtungen auch praktisch immer schwieriger umzusetzen. Eine aktive, das Produktivitätswachstum stärkende Industriepolitik ist hingegen notwendig und sinnvoll. Paradoxerweise wird sie aber entgegen der Zielsetzung der Europäischen Union langfristig den Rückgang des Anteils der Industrie an den gesamtwirtschaftlichen Einkommen nicht umkehren, sondern beschleunigen.

This paper reviews the major finance-related causes of private under-investment in innovation and the consequent alternative choices for public policy. The focus is on incentive-based arguments that address the problem of limited appropriability of new knowledge, and on the lacking access to external sources of finance caused by imperfections in the capital market. Drawing a policy mind map, which aims to enhance the mutual awareness and coordination of policy makers at the crossroads of technology and corporate finance, the paper is organised along the following chain of thought: causes and rationales, aims and targets, critical constraints, and the main finance-related instruments of innovation policy.

The rapid advance and diffusion of new information technologies left pronounced imprints on the formation of human capital. Firstly, it favoured the growth of specific computer related occupations, secondly it raises the demand for higher levels of workforce education. Although IT equipment is the showcase of a general purpose technology, pervading the production process in any kind of economic activity, there is substantial heterogeneity among industries in terms of IT-labour intensity. The article demonstrates that these differences are sufficiently systematic to establish a new sectoral classification, which captures substantial portions of the total variation in the above dimensions. More specifically, the results contrast popular beliefs about a uniform dissemination of new information technologies in all sectors.

The study serves as a background document for the European Commission and is conducted in close cooperation with the ZEW Mannheim. The main tasks are to define the concept of competitiveness at the micro, meso, and macro levels of economic activity, to establish a set of indicators that is suitable for comparing the competitive performance of EU countries, to develop a systematic grid of indicators and policy objectives, and to determine the strengths and weaknesses of commonly used indicators, including their associated measurement problems or biases

AbstractWe investigate the drivers of firm‐level productivity in catching‐up economies by jointly estimating its relationship to innovation and competition using data from the EBRD‐WB Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey (BEEPS) in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. The findings confirm an inverted‐U shaped impact of competition on R&D. Both competition and innovation have a simultaneous positive effect on labour productivity in terms of either sales or value added per employee, as does a high share of university graduates and foreign ownership. Further positive impacts come from firm size, exports or population density. Innovation and foreign ownership appear to be the strongest drivers of multifactor productivity.