INDUSTRIAL POLICY FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY*

Dani Rodrik
Harvard University
John F. Kennedy School of Government
79 Kennedy Street
Cambridge, MA 02138(617) 495-9454
Fax: (617) 496-5747
E-mail: dani_rodrik@harvard.edu
http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/rodrik/This version
September 2004

* This paper has been prepared for UNIDO. I am grateful to Francisco Sercovich for his
guidance. I am also grateful to Robert Lawrence, Lant Pritchett, Andres Rodriguez-Clare,
Andres Velasco, and especially Ricardo Hausmann and Roberto Unger for conversations overthe last few years that led to the development of these ideas. None of these individuals should beheld responsible for the views expressed here. I also thank Magali Junowicz for expert research
assistance.

I. Introduction
Once upon a time, economists believed the developing world was full of market failures,and the only way in which poor countries could escape from their poverty traps was throughforceful government interventions. Then there came a time when economists started to believe
government failure was by far the bigger evil, and that the best thing that government could do
was to give up any pretense of steering the economy. Reality has not been kind to either set of
expectations. Import substitution, planning, and state ownership did produce some successes,
but where they got entrenched and ossified over time, they led to colossal failures and crises.
Economic liberalization and opening up benefited export activities, financial interests, andskilled workers, but more often than not, they resulted in economy-wide growth rates (in laborand total factor productivity) that fell far short of those experienced under the bad old policies ofthe past.
Few people seriously believe any more that state planning and public investment can act
as the driving force of economic development. Even economists of the left share a healthy
respect for the power of market forces and private initiative. At the same time, it is increasingly
recognized that developing societies need to embed private initiative in a framework of public
action that encourages restructuring, diversification, and technological dynamism beyond whatmarket forces on their own would generate. Perhaps not surprisingly, this recognition is now
particularly evident in those parts of the world where market-oriented reforms were taken thefarthest and the disappointment about the outcomes is correspondingly the greatest—notably in
Latin America.1

1

See for example de Ferranti et al. (2002). This is a report put out by the Latin America and Caribbean departmentof the World Bank. It is cognizant of the need to adopt some kind of industrial policies in order to generatetechnological dynamism in the region.

2
Therefore we now confront a rare historic opportunity. The softening of convictions on
both sides presents an opening to fashion an agenda for economic policies that takes anintelligent intermediate stand between the two extremes cited above. Market forces and private
entrepreneurship would be in the driving seat of this agenda, but governments would also
perform a strategic and coordinating role in the productive sphere beyond simply ensuring
property rights, contract enforcement, and macroeconomic stability.
This paper is a contribution to one component of such an agenda, focusing on policies for
economic restructuring. Such policies have been called in the past “industrial policies,” and forlack of a better term, I will continue to call them as such. I will use the term to apply torestructuring policies in favor of more dynamic activities generally, regardless of whether thoseare located within industry or manufacturing per se. Indeed, many of the specific illustrations inthis paper concern non-traditional activities in agriculture or services. There is no evidence thatthe types of market failures that call for industrial policy are located predominantly in industry,
and there is no such presumption in this paper.
The nature of industrial policies is that they complement—opponents would say“distort”—market forces: they reinforce or counteract the allocative effects that the existing
markets would otherwise produce. The objective of this paper is to develop a framework for
conducting industrial policy that maximizes its potential to contribute to economic growth while
minimizing the risks that it will generate waste and rent-seeking.
I shall argue that in order to achieve this objective we need to think of industrial policy ina somewhat different light than is standard in the literature. The conventional approach toindustrial policy consists of enumerating technological and other externalities and then targeting
policy interventions on these market failures. The discussion then revolves around the

3administrative and fiscal feasibility of these policy interventions, their informational
requirements, their political-economy consequences, and so on. I start also from generic market
failures, but then I take it as a given that the location and magnitude of these market failures ishighly uncertain. A central argument of this paper is that the task of industrial policy is as muchabout eliciting information from the private sector on significant externalities and their remedies
as it is about implementing appropriate policies. The right model for industrial policy is not thatof an autonomous government applying Pigovian taxes or subsidies, but of strategic
collaboration between the private sector and the government with the aim of uncovering where
the most significant obstacles to restructuring lie and what type of interventions are most likely
to remove them. Correspondingly, the analysis of industrial policy needs to focus not on thepolicy outcomes—which are inherently unknowable ex ante—but on getting the policy processright. We need to worry about how we design a setting in which private and public actors cometogether to solve problems in the productive sphere, each side learning about the opportunities
and constraints faced by the other, and not about whether the right tool for industrial policy is,say, directed credit or R&D subsidies or whether it is the steel industry that ought to be promotedor the software industry.
Hence the right way of thinking of industrial policy is as a discovery process—one wherefirms and the government learn about underlying costs and opportunities and engage in strategic
coordination. The traditional arguments against industrial policy lose much of their force when
we view industrial policy in these terms. For example, the typical riposte about governments’inability to pick winners becomes irrelevant. Yes, the government has imperfect information,
but as I shall argue, so does the private sector. It is the information externalities generated byignorance in the private sector that creates a useful public role—even when the public sector has

4worse information than the private sector. Similarly, the idea that governments need to keep
private firms at arms’ length to minimize corruption and rent-seeking gets turned on its head.
Yes, the government needs to maintain its autonomy from private interests. But it can elicit
useful information from the private sector only when it is engaged in an ongoing relationshipwith it—a situation that has been termed “embedded autonomy” by the sociologist Peter Evans(1995).
It is innovation that enables restructuring and productivity growth. A second key themeof this paper is that innovation in the developing world is constrained not on the supply side buton the demand side. That is, it is not the lack of trained scientists and engineers, absence of
R&D labs, or inadequate protection of intellectual property that restricts the innovations that areneeded to restructure low-income economies. Innovation is undercut instead by lack of demand
from its potential users in the real economy—the entrepreneurs. And the demand for innovation
is low in turn because entrepreneurs perceive new activities to be of low profitability.
I will discuss the reasons for this conjecture in greater detail in section II, but a usefulanalogy to keep in mind is with education and human capital. For quite a while, policy makers
thought that the solution to poor human capital lay in improving the infrastructure of schooling—
more schools, more teachers, more textbooks, and more access to all three. These interventions
did increase the supply of schooling, but when the results were in, it became evident that theincrease in schooling did not produce the productivity gains that were anticipated (Pritchett2004). The reason is simple. The real constraint was the low demand for schooling—that is, thelow propensity to acquire learning—in environments where the absence of economic
opportunities depress the return to education. Similarly, an expansion of an economy’s scientificand technological capacity will not endow it with the needed productive dynamism unless there

5is adequate demand for innovation by the business sector.
The plan of the paper is as follows. In section II, I review the main arguments in favor ofindustrial policy, emphasizing the pervasive role of market failures that result in the underprovision of entrepreneurship in pursuit of structural change. The standard rationale forindustrial policy is technological externalities, either static or dynamic in the form of learningby-doing that is external to firms. I will emphasize two other market failures which I believe are
far more rampant: information externalities entailed in discovering the cost structure of an
economy, and coordination externalities in the presence of scale economies. In section III, I
turn to the institutional requirements for an effective industrial policy. I will argue here thatgetting the institutional setting right, with an adequate balance between autonomy andembeddedness on the part of government officials, is far more important than worrying about the
precise policy instruments to be deployed. I will also provide some architectural and design
guidelines for institutionalizing industrial policies and describe an illustrative range of programs.
In section IV, I discuss existing industrial policy programs and evaluate them in light of
the foregoing discussion. Unlike what is commonly believed, the last two decades have not seen
the twilight of industrial policy. Instead, incentives and subsidies have been refocused onexports and direct foreign investment, in the belief (largely unfounded, as it turns out) that these
activities are the source of significant positive spillovers. Therefore, the challenge in mostdeveloping countries is not to rediscover industrial policy, but to redeploy it in a more effective
manner. Finally, section V asks whether the practice of industrial policy remains feasible under
today’s international rules of the game. I discuss the range of constraints that are embodied in
multilateral, regional, and bilateral agreements. I emphasize that most of these constraints—with
the significant exception of the WTO Agreements on Subsidies and TRIPS—are either voluntary

6or do not bind in a significant way. What stands in the way of coherent industrial policy is thewillingness of governments to deploy it, not their ability to do so.

II. Why Industrial Policy?
In an important article published in the American Economic Review, Jean Imbs andRomain Wacziarg (2003) examined the patterns of sectoral concentration and diversification in alarge cross-section of countries. They uncovered an important regularity in their data. As poor
countries get richer, sectoral production and employment become less concentrated and morediversified. And this process goes on until relatively late in the process of development. It isonly after countries reach roughly the level of Ireland’s income that production patterns start tobecome more concentrated. If sectoral concentration is graphed against income per capita, one
therefore obtains a U-shaped curve. Imbs and Wacziarg stress the robustness of their finding:“In fact, our result is an extremely robust feature of the data. The nonmonotonicity holds
above and beyond the well-known shift of factors of production from agriculture to
manufacturing and on to services—in particular, the U-shaped pattern is present when
focusing only on manufactured goods. It is valid whether a sector’s size is measured byits share in total employment or whether it is measured by shares in value added. It holds
within countries through time as well as in a pure cross section, for a variety of levels of
disaggregation and data sources. The estimated turnaround point occurs quite late in thedevelopment process and at a surprisingly robust level of income per capita. Thus,
increased sectoral specialization, although a signifcant development, applies only
to high-income economies. Countries diversify over most of their development path.”(Imbs and Wacziarg 2003, 64)
What is significant about this finding from our standpoint is that it goes against thestandard intuition flowing from the principle of comparative advantage. The logic ofcomparative advantage is one of specialization. It is specialization that raises overall
productivity in an economy that is open to trade. Those who associate under-development withinadequate exposure to international markets generally imply—although this is often left

7
unstated—that specialization according to comparative advantage is an essential ingredient ofdevelopment.
Imbs and Wacziargs’ findings suggest otherwise. Whatever it is that serves as the driving
force of economic development, it cannot be the forces of comparative advantage as
conventionally understood. The trick seems to be to acquire mastery over a broader range ofactivities, instead of concentrating on what one does best. This point is further underscored by
the detailed analysis of export data by Klinger and Lederman (2004), who show that the numberof new export products also follows an inverted U-curve in income.
The next question is what determines why some countries are better able to develop thismastery than others. Why do some economies find it easier to diversify from traditional to nontraditional products and keep the progression rolling along? We get a better handle on thisquestion by turning it on its head and asking why diversification is not a natural process and how
it can be easily derailed.
Imagine an economy with a well-behaved government that has done its Washington
Consensus homework. Macroeconomic instability is not a problem, market interventions areminimal, trade restrictions are few and far in between, property rights are protected, andcontracts are enforced. Will the type of entreprenurship that is required to build up nontraditional activities be amply supplied? There are good reasons to believe that the answer is no.
Most fundamentally, market prices cannot reveal the profitability of resource allocations that do
not yet exist. (In general equilibrium theory, this is finessed by assuming that markets are“complete” and there is a price for everything.) The returns from investing in non-traditional
activities are therefore hazy at best. It is possible to state this difficulty in the language of
conventional economics, and in what follows I will discuss two key “externalities” that blunt the

8incentives for productive diversification: information externalities and coordination externalities.
Both are reasons to believe that diversification is unlikely to take place without directed
government action.
Consider a recent example taken from the pages of the New York Times. Taiwan has
traditionally grown and exported sugar, an industry that has recently fallen into hard times due to
low international prices and other reasons. What should now be grown in the fields to replace
the sugarcane that is the source of income for many farmers? In many countries, the result
would have been a depressed rural sector, increasingly indebted farm households, and a drag on
the economy. In Taiwan, the response has been a $65 million government investment program
to develop a world-class orchid industry. The government pays for a genetics laboratory,
quarantine site, shipping and packing areas, new roads, water and electrical hookups forprivately-owned greenhouses, and an exposition hall—in fact everything except for the cost of
the greenhouses. It also provides low-interest credit to farmers to help them build thegreenhouses.2
This is admittedly an extreme example, and the Taiwanese experiment with orchids may
yet turn out to be an expensive flop. But I will suggest below that this vignette illustrates a
general principle rather than an exception. Most significant instances of productive
diversification are indeed the result of concerted government action and of public-private
collaboration. This is as much true of Latin America as it is of East Asia.

Information externalities
Diversification of the productive structure requires “discovery” of an economy’s cost
structure—i.e., discovery of which new activities can be produced at low enough cost to be2

This information is taken from New York Times, August 24, 2004, p. A1.

9profitable. Entrepreneurs must experiment with new product lines. They must tinker withtechnologies from established producers abroad and adapt them to local conditions. This is theprocess that Ricardo Hausmann and I called “self discovery” (Hausmann and Rodrik 2004), andwhich seems integral to the stylized facts about development uncovered by Imbs and Wacziarg(2003).
When we put ourselves in the shoes of an entrepreneur engaged in cost discovery, we
immediately see the key problem: this is an activity that has great social value and yet is very
poorly remunerated. If the entrepreneur fails in his venture, he bears the full cost of his failure.
If he is successful, he has to share the value of his discovery with other producers who canfollow his example and flock into the new activity. In the limit, with free entry, entrepreneurshipof this kind produces private costs and social gains. It is no great surprise that low-income
countries are not teeming with entrepreneurs engaged in self-discovery.
Note that the kind of discovery that matters in this context differs from innovation and
R&D as these terms are commonly understood. What is involved is not coming up with new
products or processes, but “discovering” that a certain good, already well established in world
markets, can be produced at home at low cost. This may involve some technological tinkering toadapt foreign technology to domestic conditions, but this tinkering rarely amounts to somethingthat is actually patentable and therefore monopolizable. The entrepreneurs who figured out that
Colombia was good terrain for cut flowers, Bangladesh for t-shirts, Pakistan for soccer balls, andIndia for software generated large social gains for their economies, but could keep very few ofthese gains to themselves. The policy regimes in developing countries have no analogues to thepatent system that protects innovation in the advanced countries.

10
In Hausmann and Rodrik (2004) we provised some informal evidence to suggest thatthese features are endemic to the process of economic development. We showed that countries
with nearly identical resource and factor endowments specialize in very different types of
products, once one looks beyond very broad aggregates such as labor-intensive commodities.
Bangladesh exports millions of dollars worth of hats, while Pakistan exports virtually none.
Conversely, Pakistan exports tons of soccer balls, while Bangladesh lacks a significant soccerball industry. At a different level of income, Korea is a world power in microwave ovens andbarely exports any bicycles, while the pattern is reversed in Taiwan. It is impossible to ascribe
these patterns of specialization to comparative advantage. They are more likely the result ofrandom self-discovery attempts, followed by imitative entry. Indeed, we showed how wholeindustries often arise out of the experimental efforts of lone entrepreneurs. Garments in
Bangladesh, cut flowers in Colombia, IT in India, and salmon in Chile (with a state entity acting
as the entrepreneur in the last case) are some of the better documented cases. In each one ofthese cases, imitative entry through managerial and labor turnover, was the key mechanism thatenabled industry growth (while undercutting the rents of incumbent entrepreneurs). The orchidcase in Taiwan provides an example in the earlier stages of development. It is unlikely that a
private farmer would have had the incentive to invest in orchids in the absence of good
information that the effort would have been profitable. Once the industry is established by thestate, the number of private greenhouses will surely take off if the early investments pay off.
Klinger and Lederman (2004) have recently provided more systematic evidence on themarket failures that restrict self-discovery. These authors show that their measure of selfdiscovery in a country (the number of new products being exported) is positively associated withthe height of entry barriers: the more costly are government regulations that impede business11
formation, the higher the rate of self-discovery in exports. This somewhat counterintuitive result
can only be understood in terms of the ideas considered here: easy of entry facilitates imitation,
undercuts the rents to entrepreneurship in self-discovery, and therefore reduces the level of selfdiscovery.
The first-best policy response to the informational externalities that restrict self-discovery
is to subsidize investments in new, non-traditional industries. As a practical matter, it is difficult
to implement such a subsidy. The difficulty in monitoring the use to which the subsidy would be
put—an investor might as well use it for purposes that provide direct consumption benefits—renders the first-best policy intervention largely of theoretical interest.3 In Hausmann and Rodrik(2003), we recommend generically a carrot-and-stick strategy. Since self-discovery requires
rents to be provided to entrepreneurs, one side of the policy has to take the form of a carrot. Thiscan be a subsidy of some kind, trade protection, or the provision of venture capital. Note that thelogic of the problem requires that the rents be provided only to the initial investor, not tocopycats. To ensure that mistakes are not perpetuated and bad projects are phased out, theserents must in turn be subject either to performance requirements (for example, a requirement toexport), or to close monitoring of the uses to which they are put. In other words, there has to bea stick to discipline opportunistic action by the recipient of the subsidy. East Asian industrial
policies have typically had both elements (see the classic discussion in Amsden 1989 and Wade
1990). Latin American industrial policies typically have used too much of the carrot, and too
little of the stick, which explains why Latin America has ended up with much inefficiency
alongside some world-class industries.

3

The situation is somewhat analogous with respect to technological externalities that flow from R&D. In this case,the first-best is an R&D subsidy. But advanced countries provide patent protection, which is second-best, tostimulate R&D.

12
A subtle but important point here is that that even under the optimal incentive program,some of the investments that are promoted will turn out to be failures. This is because optimal
cost discovery requires equating the social marginal cost of investment funds to the expected
return of projects in new areas. The realized return on some of the projects will necessarily be
low or negative, to be compensated by the high return on the successes. The stunning successthat Fundacion Chile—a public agency—achieved with salmon can pay for many subsequentmistakes.4 In fact, if there are no or few failures, this could even be interpreted as a sign that the
program is not aggressive or generous enough. However, a good industrial policy will prevent
such failures from gobbling up the economy’s resources indefinitely, and it will ensure that they
are phased out. The trick for the government is not to pick winners, but to know when it has aloser.

Coordination externalities
Many projects require simultaneous, large-scale investments to be made in order tobecome profitable. Return, for example, to the orchid case in Taiwan. An individual producer
contemplating whether to invest in a greenhouse needs to know that there is an electrical grid he
can access nearby, irrigation is available, the logistics and transport networks are in place,qurantine and other public health measures have been taken to protect his plants from hisneighbors’ pests, and his country has been marketed abroad as a dependable supplier of highquality orchids. All of these services have high fixed costs, and are unlikely to be provided byprivate entities unless they have an assurance that there will be enough greenhouses to demand
4

Fundacion Chile is a public agency that was created by funds donated by ITT. It began experimenting with salmon
in the second half of the 1970s and set up a firm in the early 1980s using a technology adapted from that in Norway
and Scotland. The company was eventually sold to a Japanese fishing company. Before Fundacion Chile’s efforts,
Chile exported barely any salmon. The country is now one of the world’s biggest salmon exporters. See Agosin(1999).

13
their services in the first place. This is a classic coordination problem. Profitable new industries
can fail to develop unless upstream and downstream investments are coaxed simultaneously.
The Taiwanese government’s investments upstream aim precisely to overcome this obstacle.
More generally, coordination failures can arise whenever new industries exhibit scaleeconomies and some of the inputs are non-tradable (or require geographic proximity) (Rodrik
1996). Big push models of development are based on the idea that such features are predominant
in low-income environments. The cluster approach to development represents a narrower
version of the same idea, focussing on the development of specific sectors such as tourism,
pharmaceuticals, or bio-tech. In all these versions, the coordination failure model places apremium on the ability to coordinate the investment and production decisions of different
entrepreneurs. Sometimes, when the industry in question is highly organized and the benefits of
the needed investments can be localized, this coordination can be achieved within the private
sector, without the government playing a specific role. But more commonly, with a nascentindustry and a private sector that has yet to be organized, a government role will be required.
An interesting but often neglected aspect of coordination failures is that they do notnecessitate subsidization, and overcoming them need not be costly to the government budget. In
this respect, coordination externalities differ from the information externalities discussed abovethat do necessitate subsidies of some sort. It is the logic of coordination failures that once thesimultaneous investments are made all of them end up profitable. Therefore none of theinvestors needs to be subsidized ex post, unless there is an additional reason (i.e., a nonpecuniary externality) that such subsidization is required. The trick is to get these investments
made in the first place. That can be achieved either by true coordination—“firm A will makethis investment if firm B makes this other investment”—or by designing ex ante subsidies that do

14
not need to be paid ex post. A implicit bail-out, or an investment guarantee is an example ofsuch an ex-ante subsidy. Suppose the government guarantees that the investor will be madewhole if the project fails. This induces the investor to proceed with the investment. If the
project succeeds, the investor does not need any cash transfer from the government, and no
subsidies are paid out. This is one way in which some industries got started out in South Korea,
as the regime of President Park gave implicit investment guarantees to leading Chaebols thatinvested in new areas. On the other hand, this type of policy is obviously open to moral hazard
and abuse; for a while it was common to blame the Asian financial crisis on the “cronyism”
engendered by these implicit bail-out guarantees.
As Andres Rodriguez-Clare (2004) has recently stressed, all industries in principle havethe characteristics that could produce clusters. Moreover, many industries can in principle
operate at some level in the absence of clusters. This suggests that what needs support is not
specific sectors per se, but the type of technologies that have scale or agglomeration economies
and would fail to catch on in the absence of support. Simply providing trade protection to aparticular sector may not overcome the coordination failure that prevents the adoption of amodern technology, since it increases the profitability of operating without that technology as
well. The appropriate policy intervention is focused not on industries or sectors, but on theactivity or technology that produces the characterictics of a coordination failure.
Hence, the policies that overcome coordination failure share an important characteristicwith those focused on information externalities. Both sets of interventions need to be targeted on
activities (a new technology, a particular kind of training, a new good or service), rather than on
sectors per se. It is activities that are new to the economy that need support, not those that are
already established.

15

Back to reality
When viewed from the perspective of the discussion above, it is not surprising to observethat industrial restructuring rarely takes place without significant government assistance. Scratch
the surface of nontraditional export success stories from anywhere around the world, and you
will more often than not find industrial policies, public R&D, sectoral support, export subsidies,preferential tariff arrangements, and other similar interventions lurking beneath the surface. The
role played by such policies in East Asia is well known. What is less well appreciated is how thesame holds for Latin America as well.
By way of illustration, Table 1 lists the top five export items (to the United States) of
three leading Latin American economies: Brazil, Chile, and Mexico. When one leaves aside
traditional commodity exports such as copper and crude oil, it is striking how each of the
products on the list has been the beneficiary of preferential support policies. In the case of
Brazil, the steel, aircraft, and (to an important extent) shoe industries are all the creation ofimport substitution policies of the past. High levels of protection (steel and shoes) and public
ownership, public R&D, and subsidized credit (aircraft) were deliberately used to generate rents
for entrepreneurs investing in new areas and to build up industrial clusters. In the case of Chile,industrial policies played a huge role in grapes, forestry, and salmon. The role of Fundacion
Chile in getting the salmon industry off the ground has been already mentioned. In grapes, there
was significant public R&D in the 1960s that transformed an industry that was primarily oriented
to the local market into a global powerhouse (Jarvis 1994). And in forestry, there is a history ofat least 60 years of subsidizing plantations (see Clapp 1995) as well as a big push since 1974 toturn the wood, pulp and paper, and furniture cluster into a major export industry (Agosin 1999).

16
Productive diversification in Chile is hardly the result of letting markets run free. In Mexico, themotor vehicles and computer industries are the creation of import-substitution policies (initially),
followed by preferential tariff policies under NAFTA. None of these are the result of hands-off
policies, or of level playing fields and unadulterated market forces.
Hence the difference between East Asia and Latin America is not that industrial
transformation has been state-driven in one and market-driven in the other. It is that industrial
policy has not been as concerted and coherent in Latin America as it has been in East Asia, withthe consequence that the transformation has been less deeply rooted in the former than it is in thelatter.

III. Institutional arrangements for industrial policy
In the previous discussion I have linked the need for industrial policy to two key market
failures that weaken the entrepreneurial drive to restructure and diversify low-income economies.
One has to do with the informational spillovers involved in discovering the cost structure of an
economy, and the other has to do with the coordination of investment activities with scaleeconomies. It is tempting to then go on to discuss the list of policy instruments, first-best andsecond-best, that can overcome these difficulties. But this would overlook two key issues thatbedevil the conduct of industrial policy.
First, the public sector is not omniscient, and indeed typically has even less information
than the private sector about the location and nature of the market failures that block
diversification. Governments may not even know what it is they do not know. Consequently,
the policy setting has to be one in which public officials are able to elicit information from thebusiness sector on an ongoing basis about the constraints that exist and the opportunities that are

17available. It cannot be one in which the private sector is kept at arms’ length and autonomous
bureaucrats issue directives. To use Peter Evans’ terminology, industrial policy-making has tobe embedded within a network of linkages with private groups.
Second, industrial policy is open to corruption and rent-seeking. Any system of
incentives designed to help private investors venture into new activities can end up serving as amechanism of rent transfer to unscrupulous businessmen and self-interested bureaucrats. The
natural response is to insulate policymaking and implementation from private interests, and toshield public officials from close interaction with businessmen. Note how this impulse—“keepbureaucrats and businessmen distant from each other”—is diametrically opposed to the previous
one arising from the need for information flows.
The critical institutional challenge therefore is to find an intermediate position between
full autonomy and full embeddedness. Too much autonomy for the bureaucrats, and you have asystem that minimizes corruption, but fails to provide the incentives that the private sector reallyneeds.5 Too much embeddedness for the bureaucats, and they end up in bed with (and in the
pockets of) business interests. Moreover, we would like the process to be democraticallyaccountable and to carry public legitimacy.
Getting this balance right is so important that it overshadows, in my view, all otherelements of policy design. In particular, once the institutional setting is “right,” we need toworry considerably less about appropriate policy choice. A first-best policy in the wrong
institutional setting will do considerably less good than a second-best policy in an appropriate

5Some years ago, I compared the effectiveness of six different export subsidy programs around the world, andfound, somewhat to my surprise, that the programs with the clearest rules and least opportunity for manipulation by
the private sector were not the most effective on the ground. The best functioning programs were those in places
like Brazil and South Korea where the bureaucrats were in close interaction with the exporters they were
subsidizing. See Rodrik (1995).

18
institutional setting. Put differently, when it comes to industrial policy specifying the process ismore important than specifying the outcome.
Thinking of industrial policy as a “process” has the added benefit that it leaves open thepossibility that the actual obstacles to diversification may differ significantly from thosehypothesized above. Listening to businessmen without getting captured may reveal that the real
problems are not the government’s errors of omission (e.g., externalities that have not beeninternalized), but its errors of commission (e.g., misguided interventions that have increased thecost of doing business). Occasionally, the problems may lie in unexpected areas—for example aquirk in the tax code or a piece of otherwise innocuous legislation. Policy recommendations
based on ex-ante reasoning would get it badly wrong in such cases.
These ideas have much in common with the recent literature on institutional innovation,
which emphasizes the shortcomings of the hierarchical, principal-agent model of governance inenvironments of volatility and deep uncertainty (see in particular Sabel 2003, 2004). Solving the
problems outlined in the previous section involves social learning—discovering where theinformation and coordination externalities lie and therefore what the objectives of industrial
policy ought to be and how it is to be targeted. In this setting, the principal-agent model, withthe government as the principal, the firms as its agent, and an optimal policy which aligns theagents’ behavior with the principal’s objectives at least cost, does not work very well. What isneeded instead is a more flexible form of strategic collaboration between public and private
sectors, designed to elicit information about objectives, distribute responsibilities for solutions,and evaluate outcomes as they appear. An ideal industrial policy process operates in an
institutional setting of this form.

19
As Charles Sabel emphasizes, institutions of learning have to be experimentalist by theirnature. Just as discovering underlying costs require entrepreneurial experimentation, discovering
the appropriate ways in which restructuring bottlenecks can be overcome needs a trial-and-error
approach to policymaking.
These ideas need to be operationalized in order to become useful in practice. The
challenge in a paper like this is to give a flavor of how this can be done without falling into thetrap of misplaced concreteness and appearing to recommend a one-size-fits all institutional
strategy. I proceed in two steps. First, I will discuss some generically desirable architecturalfeatures of institutions of industrial policy. Next, I will enumerate some design principles thatshould inform the formulation of industrial policy. These suggestions occupy an intermediate
position between the more abstract ideas discussed above and concrete recommendations on
institutional design.6

Elements of an institutional architecture
Political leadership at the top. The success of industrial policy often depends on thepresence of high-level political support. Fiscal prudence has a champion in the person of afinance minister and sound money has a champion in the person of a central bank governor.
Economic restructuring also needs a political advocate who has the ear of the president or prime
minister and can stand as equals with other members of the economic cabinet. This serves
several purposes. First, it raises the profile of industrial policies and enables problems of
economic transformation to receive a hearing at the highest levels of the government. Second, it
provides coordination, oversight and monitoring for the bureaucrats and the agencies entrusted
6

These ideas draw on work done in El Salvador and reported in Hausmann and Rodrik (2003b). See also Sabel andReddy (n.d.) for some suggestions on the architecture of industrial policymaking.

20
with carrying out industrial policies. If the bureaucrats are to have autonomy, it is critical that
their performance be systematically monitored by such a high-level official. Third, it identifies aclear political principal as accountable for the consequences of industrial policies. This politicaladvocate could be a cabinet-level minister, the vice-president (in presidential systems), or eventhe president himself (as was the case in South Korea under President Park).
Coordination and deliberation council(s). While institutional choices will naturally differ
from setting to setting, depending on initial conditions, there is a generic need for coordination ordeliberation councils within which the information exchange and social learning, as discussed
above, can take place. These are private-public bodies that ought to include relevant groups ortheir representatives. To avoid the biases of incumbents and insiders, these should go beyond thetypical “peak” organizations that include only well organized groups and business associations.
They would be the setting in which private-sector interests would communicate their requests forassistance to the government, and the latter would goad the former into new investment efforts.
These councils would seek out and gather information (from private sector and elsewhere) on
investment ideas, achieve coordination among different state agencies when needed, push forchanges in legislation and regulation to eliminate unnecessary transaction costs or other
impediments, generate subsidies and financial backing for new activities when needed, andcredibly bundle these different elements of support along with appropriate conditionalities. They
can be created both at the national and sub-national or sectoral levels. Preferably, the larger ofthese councils would have their staff of technocrats.
Mechanisms of transparency and accountability. Industrial policies need to be viewed bysociety at large as part of a growth strategy that is geared to expand opportunities for all, rather
than as giveaways to already privileged sections of the economy. This is particularly important

21
since pro-active policies of the type discussed in this paper can sometimes be partial to bigger
firms and entrepreneurs (unlike microcredit programs, say, or support of small and medium-sizedenterprises). Hence promotion activities need to be undertaken in a transparent and accountablemanner. The operation of the deliberation/coordination councils should be published and thedecisions reached announced. There should be full accounting of public resources spent insupport of new activities.

Ten design principles for industrial policy
For reasons explained earlier, it is impossible (and undesirable) to specify ex ante thepolicy outputs that the type of architecture discussed above will yield. All depends on theopportunities and constraints that will be identified through the deliberative process. One
country may choose to develop a services cluster around the expansion of the national port.
Another may decide to set up public venture capital funds targeted at biotech and computer
software. A third may go for tax breaks to encourage downstream processing of forestry
products. A fourth may find it is excessive red tape and bureaucratic regulations that inhibit
entreprenurship in new activities. Nonetheless, it is possible to list some general “designprinciples” that can inform the formulation of the resulting industrial policies.
1. Incentives should be provided only to “new” activities. The main purpose ofindustrial policy is to diversify the economy and generate new areas of comparative advantage.
It follows that incentives ought to focus on economic activities that are new to the domestic
economy. “New” refers to both products that are new to the local economy and to newtechnologies for producing an existing product. Many countries provide tax incentives for new
investments without sufficiently discriminating between investments that expand the range of22capabilities of the home economy and those that do not. Note also that this focus differs
substantially from the tendency that many incentive programs have to subsidize small andmedium sized enterprises (SMEs). SME support policies are based on the criterion of size—noton whether the activity in question has the potential to spawn new areas of specialization. It is
the latter that produces economic growth.
2. There should be clear benchmarks/criteria for success and failure. As I have alreadyemphasized, industrial policy is a necessarily experimental process. It is the nature ofentrepreneurship that not all investments in new activities will pay off. And not all promotion
efforts will be successful. In Korea, Taiwan, and Chile, successes have more than paid for the
mistakes. But in the absence of a clear idea of what constitutes success and observable criteria
for monitoring it, failures can get entrenched. Recipients of subsidies can game public agencies
and continue to receive support despite poor outcomes. Bureaucrats administering incentives
can claim success and keep their programs running. Ideally, the criteria for success should
depend on productivity—both its rate of increase and its absolute level—and not on employment
or output. While productivity can be notoriously difficult to measure, project audits by businessand technical consultants can provide useful indications. So can benchmarking, using theexperience of similar industries in neighboring countries. Performance in international markets(i.e., export levels) is also a good indicator, as it provides a quick-and-dirty way of gauging how
the industry is doing relative to world-class competitors.
3. There must be a built-in sunset clause. One way to ensure that resources (bothfinancial and human) do not remain tied up for a long time in activities that are not paying off isto phase out support by default. Hence, every publicly supported project needs to have not only23
a clear statement ex ante of what constitutes success and failure, but also an automatic sunset
clause for withdrawing support after an appropriate amount of time has elapsed.

.

4. Public support must target activities, not sectors. It is common for investment
promotion agencies to specify their priorities in terms of sectors or industries—e.g., tourism, callcenters, or biotech. This leads to the misdirection of industrial promotion efforts. The targets ofpublic support should be viewed not as sectors but as activities. This facilitates structuring the
support as a corrective to specific market failures instead of generic support for this or that
sector. Rather than providing investment incentives, say, for tourism or call centers, government
programs should subsidize bilingual training, feasibility reports for nontraditional agriculture,
infrastructure investment, adaptation of foreign technology to local conditions, risk and venture
capital, and so on. Cross-cutting programs such as these have the advantage that they spanseveral sectors at once and are targeted at market failures directly.
5. Activities that are subsidized must have the clear potential of providing spillovers anddemonstration effects. There is no reason to provide public support to an activity unless that
activity has the potential to crowd in other, complementary investments or generate
informational or technological spillovers. Public support must be contingent on an analysis of
this sort. Moreover, activities that are supported should be structured in such a way to maximize
the spillovers to subsequent entrants and rivals.
6. The authority for carrying out industrial policies must be vested in agencies withdemonstrated competence. It is common to complain about incompetence and corruption ingovernment bureaucracies. But bureaucratic competence varies greatly among different agencies
within the same country, and most countries have some pockets of bureaucratic competence. It
is preferable to lodge promotion activities in such agencies instead of creating new agencies from

24
scratch or using existing ones with poor track records. This will have an implication about thetools of industrial policy that can be used. If the development bank is in good shape but tax
administration is a mess, promotion may need to be done through directed credit rather than tax
incentives. Note how this may conflict with the requirement that policy tools be targeted as
closely as possible to the source of a market failure. The location of competence may
predetermine the tools used. But this is a necessary compromise: when administrative andhuman resources are scare, it is better to employ second-best instrument effectively than to use
first-best instruments badly.
7. The implementing agencies must be monitored closely by a principal with a clear
stake in the outcomes and who has political authority at the highest level. As we have seen,
effective industrial policy requires a certain degree of autonomy for the bureaucratic agencies
implementing it. But autonomy does not and should not mean lack of accountability. Close
monitoring (and coordination) of the promotion activities by a cabinet-level politician, a“principal” who has internalized the agenda of economic restructuring and shoulders the main
responsibility for it, is essential. Such monitoring guards not only against self-interested
behavior on the part of the agencies, but also helps protect the agencies from capture by privateinterests. As suggested above, this principal could be a cabinet-level minister, a vice-president,
or even the president (or prime minister) himself.
8. The agencies carrying out promotion must maintain channels of communication withthe private sector. Autonomy and insulation do not mean that bureaucrats must maintain arms’length relationships with entrepreneurs and investors. In fact, ongoing contacts andcommunication are important so as to allow public officials to have a good information base on
business realities, without which sound decisionmaking would be impossible.

25
9. Optimally, mistakes that result in “picking the losers” will occur. Public strategies ofthe sort advocated here are often derided because they may lead to picking the losers rather than
the winners. It is important of course to build safeguards against this, as outlined above. But an
optimal strategy of discovering the productive potential of a country will necessarily entail somemistakes of this type. Some promoted activities will fail. The objective should be not tominimize the chances that mistakes will occur, which would result in no self-discovery at all, but
to minimize the costs of the mistakes when they do occur. If governments make no mistakes, it
only means that they are not trying hard enough.
10. Promotion activities need to have the capacity to renew themselves, so that the cycleof discovery becomes an ongoing one. Just as there is no single blueprint for undertaking
promotion, the needs and circumstances of productive discovery are likely to change over time.
This requires that the agencies carrying out these policies have the capacity to reinvent andrefashion themselves. Over time, some of the key tasks of industrial policy will have to bephased out while new ones are taken on.

An illustrative range of incentive programs
As I have argued, industrial policy should not be thought of as a generic range ofincentive programs. It is instead a process designed to elicit areas where policy actions are most
likely to make a difference. The output of such a process—the type of policies and approaches
used—will depend critically on a county’s own circumstances. Nonetheless, it may be useful todiscuss briefly a number of illustrative programs in order to provide a more concrete sense ofwhat industrial policies will entail.

26
1. Subsidizing costs of “self-discovery”. As I discussed above, uncertainty about what
new products can be profitably produced constitutes a key obstacle to economic restructuring.
The resolution of this uncertainty typically requires some upfront investments, as well as
productive tinkering to get imported technologies to work well under local conditions. Sinceboth of these areas are rife with externalities (successes can be easily emulated), the economic
case for subsidizing them is strong. Therefore, governments will generally need a facility to
defray the costs of the early stages of the cost discovery process. The manner in which thiswould be done can be envisaged as a “contest” whereby private-sector entrepreneurs would bid
for public resources by bringing forth pre-investment proposals. The criteria for financing suchstudies would be that (i) they relate to substantially new activities; (ii) they have the potential toprovide learning spillovers to others in the economy; and (iii) the private sector entities arewilling to submit themselves to oversight and performance audits.
2. Developing mechanisms for higher risk finance. Going from the pre-investment phaseof a project to the investment stage requires a more sizable expenditure of resources, which mustbe financed somehow. Commercial banks are typically not good at this: they intermediate
deposits and must remain liquid for prudential reasons. Business development and selfdiscovery require longer term and riskier forms of financial intermediation. Other forms of risk
finance, such as corporate debt markets, equity markets, or private venture capital funds, are also
typically conspicuous by their absence. Hence governments will need alternative sources offinance. This may come in several different forms, depending on the available fiscal andbureaucratic resources. Some examples are: development banks, publicly funded (butprofessionally managed) venture funds, public guarantees for longer term commercial bank27
lending, or special vehicles that direct a share of public pension fund assets to a portfolio of
higher risk investments.
3. Internalizing coordination externalities. Coordination externalities are highly specificto each activity and are essentially impossible to make concrete ex ante. The needs of tourism
are very different than the needs of call centers. What this means is that governments need tohave the capacity to identify these coordination failures and attempt to resolve them. The
coordination and deliberation councils discussed above are one mechanism for instituting anddeveloping such a capacity. But it is clear that these efforts need to be undertaken at multiple
levels—both at the national level as well as the regional and sectoral levels. In all this, chambersof commerce and industry and farmer and labor associations can play a useful constructive role.
As dicussed above, the government’s relationships with these private-sector entities need to besocially legitimized through mechanisms of accountability and transparency. Proposals need tobe made public, formally analyzed and evaluated by technocrats, and their fiscal impact costed
out. The goal is to identify coordination opportunities while constraining inconvenient rentseeking behavior.
4. Public R&D. Technology cannot be acquired from advanced countries in an off-theshelf manner. Whether it is table grapes in Chile or information technology in Taiwan, many
new industries have required publicly funded R&D efforts to identify, adapt, and transfer
technology from abroad. The trick is to ensure that these efforts are well integrated with private
sector activities and are targeted to their needs. Programs that work best are likely to be thosethat are responsive to private sector demands.
5. Subsidizing general technical training. New activities will eventually encounter ashortage of adequately trained personnel, even if this is not a binding constraint at the outset.

28
Innovating firms will fear that labor turnover will reduce the returns to on-the-job training andwill thus under-provide training. This will inevitably delay the process of self-discovery. So
there is a strong case to be made for subsidizing training for vocational, technical and language
skills. In general, public training facilities have a lousy reputation in developing countries, as
they seem rarely targeted on the real needs of the private sector. Therefore, it may be preferable
to offer subsidies or matching grants to private firms or institutes to co-finance their training
efforts.
6. Taking advantage of nationals abroad. Many if not most developing countries havesizable numbers of migrant workers in the advanced countries. These workers tend to be among
the most entrepreneurial in society, and often have higher skills than the workers at home (seeKapur and McHale forthcoming). Most governments look at these expatriate workers almost
exclusively as a source of remittance income. But given their entpreneurialism, skills, andexposure to business in the developed world, as well as the desire of many of them to returnhome (under the right set of circumstances), they may well be far more valuable as a source ofself-discovery at home. Governments can actively court them, encourage their return, and use
them to spawn new domestic economic activities. If even a fraction of the tax incentives used to
attract foreign investment is targeted at nationals abroad, the benefits could well be sizable.
IV. The exaggerated rumors of industrial policy’s deathAn agenda of the sort laid out above may seem overly ambitious and too big a departurefrom today’s accepted policy practice. After all, industrial policies are supposed to have been
confined to the trashbin of history in modern and modernizing economies, along with otheroutmoded policies like central planning and trade protection. The reality is that industrial
policies have run rampant during the last two decades—and nowhere more so than in those29
economies that have steadfastly adopted the agenda of orthodox reform. If this fact has escapedattention, it is only because the preferential policies in question have privileged exports andforeign investment—the two fetishes of the Washington Consensus era—and because theiradvocates have called them strategies of “outward orientation” and other similar sounding names
instead of industrial policies. Anytime a government consciously favors some economic
activities over others, it is conducting industrial policy. And by this standard, the recent past has
seen more than its share of industrial policies.
While exports have been supported in a number of different ways, export processing
zones (EPZs) are the most visible form of discrimination in their favor. There are close to 1000
EPZs around the world, and it is rare to find a country without one. Firms that locate in EPZs get
favored treatment in a number of ways: they are allowed unlimited duty-free access on all theirimports (provided they export their output); they receive tax holidays on corporate, property, andincome taxes; they are generally sheltered from bureacratic regulations that other firms have tocontend with; they are provided with superior infrastructure and communication services; they
are often exempt from labor legislation that applies to other firms (Madani 1998).
Incentives offered to foreign direct investment are, if anything, more common.
Practically all countries in the world have some government agency charged with attracting
foreign investment and a program of tax holidays and other subsidies directed at foreign firms.
In addition to these tax subsidies, foreign investors are offered one-stop shopping services,
receive help in navigating through domestic regulatory requirements, sometimes receive tradeprotection in return for their investment, and often receive privileged legal status. For example,
unlike domestic firms, foreign investors frequently have the option of submitting domestic legal
disputes to international arbitration. Developing countries actively compete with each other to30
provide generous incentives to attract foreign firms, even though such incentives tend to play atbest a marginal role in the location decisions of multinational firms.
The driving force behind the incentives in favor of exports and foreign investment has
been the belief that these economic activities are particularly prone to positive externalities andspillovers. Exports and foreign direct investment are supposed to generate technological andlearning spillovers for other activities. Hence, despite the decisive turn to markets during the lasttwo decades, the dominant view among policy makers—revealed at least through their actions—has been that particular externalities remain rampant and need to be corrected through the
deployment of generous subsidies. What stands out with this brand of industrial policy is thestrong presumption that the important externalities reside in exports and direct foreign
investment.
Economic research provides little support for this presumption. It has been known for awhile that exporting firms tend to be more productive and technologically more dynamic thanfirms that sell mainly to the home market. We now know that the reason has to do, as a generalrule, not with any benefits that accrue from the activity of exporting per se, but simply withselection effects: It is better firms (in all respects) that are able to or choose to export (seeTybout 2000 for a survey). Consequently, subsidizing exporting can do very little to enhanceoverall productive or technological capacity. Similarly, careful studies have been able to findvery little systematic evidence of technological and other externalities from foreign direct
investment, some even finding negative spillovers (see Hanson 2001 for a discussion of theissues). In these circumstances, subsidizing foreign investors is a particularly silly policy, as itserves to transfer income from poor-country taxpayers to the pockets of shareholders in richcountries, with no compensating benefit.

31
Export processing zones and incentives for direct foreign investment are the mostnoticeable elements of industrial policy in developing countries, but they are not the only ones.
Most countries have continued to maintain industrial policies of different types, some of which
are the vestiges of import-substitution policies of the past and others are ad hoc responses toperceived shortcomings of existing policy setups. This is not adequately appreciated so I present
in Table 2 an illustrative list of credit and tax incentives for domestic investment and production
in a range of developing countries. The table is based on Melo (2001), which was confined tocountries in South America, and expands Melo’s compilation to countries in other parts of theworld using national and international sources. As the table shows, credit facilities and tax
incentives for favored sectors have been extremely widespread, in Latin America no less than in
Asia and Africa. In Latin America, the incentives tend to be focused on tourism, mining,
forestry, and agribusiness. Elsewhere, selected manufacturing and service industries also tend to
get promoted.
The lesson from this survey of current practice is that industrial policy has far fromdisappeared. In most countries, the challenge is not to reinstitute industrial policy, but toredeploy the machinery that is already in place in a more productive manner. As we have justseen, much of today’s industrial policy takes a presumptive stand on where the externalities
are—exports and direct foreign investment—and is formulated in sectoral terms. The
institutional architecture is rarely adequate to engage in the kind of discovery that I haveadvocated here. The overarching vision that informs their design is hardly ever articulated.
Consequently, what is needed is not more industrial policy, but better industrial policy. Indeed,
it would not be surprising if in many countries industrial policies could be rendered more32
effective by actually reducing their scope (and targeting them better).7

V. Is Industrial Policy Still Feasible?
Developing countries operate today in a global policy environment that is much different
than the one two or three decades ago. In particular, there has been a tendency to discipline
national economic policies through multilateral, regional, or bilateral agreements. These
disciplines impose restrictions on the ability of developing countries to conduct certain types ofindustrial poicies. I shall review these restrictions here. While it is true developing countries
have a somewhat narrower room for policy autonomy today, it is easy to exaggerate thesignificance of the restrictions. There remains much scope for coherent industrial policy of thetype I have outlined above, especially if countries do not give up policy autonomy voluntarily bysigning up for bilateral agreements with the U.S. or for restrictive international codes. Few of
the illustrative programs described in section III would come under international disciplines.
What constrains sensible industrial policy today is largely the willingness to adopt it, not theability to do so.
Restrictions on industrial policy come in different guises.8 I present a more detailed viewof these in Table 3, and point to some general features here. Foremost in the hieararchy are therules of the WTO, which are more far-reaching and intrusive than those under old GATT system.
Previously, membership in the world trading system had few or no entry requirements for poor
countries. The balance-of-payments and infant-industry exceptions were liberal enough to allow
7

For example, Uruguay has a generous tax holiday program for new investments that does not discriminate between
investments that are likely to generate the informational and coordination spillovers that I focused on above andthose that are not. As a consequence, the program ends up financing projects such as the renovation of ahippodrome (which apparently was the largest project which has benefited from tax incentives so far).

8

See also Lall (2004) for a discussion of existing constraints.

33
countries to adopt any and all industrial policies. Under the WTO, there are several restrictions.
Export subsidies are now WTO-illegal (for all but least-developed countries), as are domestic
content requirements and other performance requirements on enterprises that are linked to trade,quantitative restrictions on imports, and patent laws that fall short of international standards.
All of these had been part of the arsenal of industrial policies utilized by South Korea andTaiwan during the 1960s and 1970s. Moreover, countries that are not yet members of the WTO
are often hit with more restrictive demands as part of their accession negotiations.
Regional or bilateral agreements typically expand the range of disciplines beyond thosethat are found in the WTO. In particular, the U.S. has pushed for tighter restrictions in the areasof investment regulations, intellectual property protection, and capital account whenever it
negotiates a free-trade agreement with a developing country (see illustrations in Table 3). On thefinancial side, a number of international codes and standards have clauses that can beinterepreted as restricting the use of industrial policy (see Table 3). And IMF conditionality
often goes beyond narrow monetary and fiscal matters to prescribe policies on trade andindustrial policy (so-called structural conditionality). The pinnacle of IMF structural
conditionality was reached during the Asian financial crisis. While the IMF’s official line hasveered away from structural conditionality since then, IMF programs typically still contain many
detailed requirements on trade and industrial policies (see Table 3 for illustrations from Turkey
and Ethiopia).
It is important to emphasize that not all international disciplines are necessarily harmful.
For example, the principle of transparency that is enshrined in international trade agreements
and in international financial codes and standards is fully consistent with the industrial-policy
architecture recommended above, and hence is hard to find fault with. Moreover, when designed

34
appropriately, regional trade agreements can be a useful vehicle for industrial policy programs.
For example, both Morocco and Tunisia put in place ambitious industrial upgrading (mise aniveau) programs in conjunction with their free-trade agreements with the EU, and obtained EU
and World Bank funds to pay for them. Mercosur had a special regime for the automotive sector
that gave a big boost to auto and components industries in Argentina and Uruguay.
Governments with a strategic sense of their economic priorities can generally put suchinternational agreements to good use, and transform potential constraint into opportunity.
Among existing international disciplines, probably the most significant is the one that
constrains the use of export subsidies. The WTO’s Agreement on Subsidies essentially renders
illegal all Free Trade Zones of the type discussed previously (as well as other fiscal and credit
incentives geared towards exports) for countries above the $1,000 per-capita income level. How
much of a real loss this is is not all that clear. As I discussed in the previous section, at present
existing policies in many countries are probably too biased towards exporting as it is. There isnothing in the empirical literature to suggest that exports generate the kind of positive
externalities that would justify their subsidization as a general rule. On the other hand,conditioning subsidies on exports has the valuable feature that it ensures the incentives arereaped by winners (i.e., those that are able to compete in international markets) rather than thelosers. As such, export subsidies are a nice example of performance-based incentive policies(which makes them consistent with the design principles enunciated above). The success in East
Asia with export subsidies has much to do with this carrot-and-stick feature: you get the subsidy,
but only so long as you perform in world markets. On balance, therefore, the Agreement on
Subsidies must be judged to have made a significant dent in the ability of developing countries to35
employ intelligently-designed industrial policies.9
A second area where international rules may have some bite is in intellectual property.
As Richard Nelson (2003) has stressed, the ability to copy technologies developed in advanced
countries has been historically one of the most important elements determining the ability oflagging nations to catch up. The WTO’s TRIPS Agreeement and its more restrictive versions inbilateral/regional trade agreements make it virtually impossible to employ a strategy of reverse
engineering and copying. The developmental costs of TRIPS has so far received attention
mainly in regard to public health and access to essential medecines. Its adverse effects ontechnological capacity has yet to receive commensurate attention.
In light of this, it is encouraging that discussions of the multilateral trade regime are
increasingly paying attention (or at least lip service) to the question of “policy space” fordeveloping countries (see Hoekman 2004). There is growing recognition that the pendulum
between policy autonomy and international rules may have swung too far in the direction of thelatter in recent trade rounds. The attempt in the Doha Round to extend multilateral disciplines tonational competition and investment policies has gone nowhere. And many consider the “single
undertaking” model of trade negotiations adopted since the Uruguay Round and under which allnations, regardless of their levels of development and needs, sign on to the same text, to be all
but dead. This is all good news from the perspective developed in this paper. Developing
nations should push hard for “policy space” in future trade negotiations. In the past they
compromised on that in return for greater market access in rich country markets. This has turned
out to be a bad bargain. The purpose of international rules should be not to impose common

9Note that a prohibition on export subsidies cannot be justified using the traditional beggar-thy-neighbor arguments.
Unlike, say, the use of import tariffs by a large country, the use of export subsidies produces a net benefit to the restof the world since it lowers the world market price of the subsidized commodity and improves the external terms oftrade of the rest of the world.

36
rules on countries with different regulatory systems, but to accept these differences and regulate
the interface between them so as to reduce adverse spillovers (Rodrik 2001).

VI. Concluding Remarks
Markets can malfunction both when governments interfere too much and when theyinterfere too little. Development policies of the last two decades have been obsessed with thefirst category of policy mistakes—governments’ errors of commission. Hence the efforts to
reduce or eliminate regulations, trade restrictions, financial repression, and public ownership.
Governments’ errors of omission—needed interventions that were not supplied—were
deemphasized, in part as a reaction to the strong emphasis placed on them by earlier policies ofimport substitution. Recently governments around the world have begun to seek a morebalanced strategy, as liberalization and privatization have failed to deliver the expected
performance. I have argued in this paper that properly formulated industrial policies have an
important role to play in such strategies.
There is no shortage of arguments against industrial policy. A less than comprehensive
list of such arguments would include the following.
Governments cannot pick winners.
Developing countries lack the competent buraucracies to render it effective.
Industrial interventions are prone to political capture and corruption.
There is little evidence that industrial policies work.
What is needed is not industrial policy, but across-the-board support for R&D andintellectual protection.

37
And in any case international rules no longer leave scope for industrial policy
interventions.
There is more than a grain of truth in each of these claims. Yet, as we have seen, there are also
good counter-arguments in each case.
Yes, the government cannot pick winners, but effective industrial policy is predicatedless on the ability to pick winners than on the ability to cut losses short once mistakes
have been made. In fact, making mistakes (“picking wrong industries”) is part andparcel of good industrial policy when cost discovery is at issue.
Competent bureaucracies are a scarce resource in most developing countries, but mostcountries do have (or can build) pockets of bureaucratic competence. In any case, it is
not clear what the counterfactual is. The standard market-oriented package hardly
economizes on bureaucratic competence. As we have discovered during the last
decade, and the expansion of the Washington Consensus agenda into governance andinstitutional areas indicate, running a market economy puts a significant premium on
regulatory capacity. Industrial policy is no different.
Industrial policies can be captured by the interests whose behavior they aim to alter.
But once again, this is little different from any other area of policy. In many
countries, privatization has turned out to be a boon for insiders or government
cronies.
It is not true that there is a shortage of evidence on the benefits of industrial policy.
To the contrary, as I have illustrated above with reference to Latin America, it isdifficult to come up with real winners in the developing world that are not a productof industrial policies of some sort.

38
Supply-side innovation policies may have a role, but what constrains productive
restructuring is a more fundamental feature of low-income environments:
entrepreneurship in new activities has high social returns but low private returns.
There is plenty of scope for industrial policies in the present international economic
environment. In fact, contrary to general belief, the last two decades have seen atremendous amount of industrial policy.
I have taken the view in this paper that industrial policy is a process of economic selfdiscovery in the broader sense. The right image to carry in one’s head is not of omniscientplanners who can intervene with the first-best Pigovian subsidies to internalize any and all
externalities, but of an interactive process of strategic cooperation between the private and public
sectors which, on the one hand, serves to elicit information on business opportunities andconstraints and, on the other hand, generates policy initiatives in response.
It is impossible to specify the results of such a process ex ante: the point is to discoverwhere action is needed and what type of action can bring forth the greatest response. It is
pointless to obsess, as is common in many discussions of industrial policy, about policy
instruments and modalities of interventions. What is much more important is to have a process
in place which helps reveal areas of desirable interventions. Governments that understand thiswill be constantly on the lookout for ways in which they can facilitate structural change andcollaboration with the private sector. As such, industrial policy is a state of mind more thananything else.
I close by making two points that relate the discussion here to the broader policy agendathat faces developing countries. The first point is that much of industrial policy, as discussed
here, is concerned with the provision of public goods for the productive sector. Public labs and39public R&D, health and infrastructural facilities, sanitary and phytosanitary standards,
infrastructure, vocational and technical training can all be viewed as public goods required forenhancing technological capabilities. From this perspective, industrial policy is just good
economic policy of the type that traditional, orthodox approaches prescribe. Secondly, thecapacity to provide these public goods effectively is an important part of the social capabilities
needed to generate development. That in turn requires good institutions, with the key featuresthat I have discussed above. Such institutional development is at the core of today’s orthodox
development agenda.10 In both senses, then, the agenda of industrial policy laid out in this paper
not only does not greatly differ from today’s broader, conventional agenda of development, it ispart and parcel of it.

10

Paradoxically, as Ocampo (2004, 28) has rightly emphasized, the “suboptimal development of institutions in thearea of productive development has … become a direct institutional deficiency affecting economic growth, which is
generally ignored in the call to strengthen institutional development.”

40
REFERENCES
Agosin, Manuel, “Trade and Growth in Chile: Past Performance and Future Prospects,”
Department of Economics, University of Chile, June 1999.
Amsden, Alice H., Asia’s Next Giant: South Korea and Late Industrialization, Oxford University
Press, New York and Oxford, 1989.
Clapp, Roger Alex, “Creating Comparative Advantage: Forest Policy as Industrial Policy inChile,” Economic Geography, vol 71, no. 3, July 1995, 273-96.
De Ferranti, David, Guillermo E. Perry, Daniel Lederman, and William F. Maloney, From
Natural Resources to the Knowledge Economy, World Bank, Washington, DC, 2002.
Evans, Peter, Embedded Autonomy: States and Industrial Transformation, Princeton, NJ,
Princeton University Press, 1995.
Hanson, Gordon H., “Should Countries Promote Foreign Direct Investment?” G-24 Discussion
Paper No. 9, 2001.
Hausmann, Ricardo and Dani Rodrik, “Economic Development as Self-Discovery,” Journal of
Development Economics, vol. 72, December 2003.
Hausmann, Ricardo, and Dani Rodrik, “Discovering El Salvador’s Production Potential,” John F.
Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, August 2003. (2003b)
Hoekman, Bernard, “Operationalizing the Concept of Policy Space in the WTO: Beyond Special
and Differential Treatment,” World Bank, 2004.
Imbs, Jean, and Romain Wacziarg, “Stages of Diversification,” American Economic Review,
93(1), March 2003, 63-86.
Jarvis, Lovell S. Changing Private and Public Roles in Technological Development: Lessons
from the Chilean Fruit Sector, in Agricultural Technology: Policy Issues for the International
Community, J.R. Anderson, ed. Wallingford: CAB International, 1994.
Kapur, Devesh, and McHale, John, Sharing the Spoils: International Human Capital Flows andDeveloping Countries, Center for Global Development, Washington, DC, forthcoming.
Klinger, Bailey, and Daniel Lederman, “Discovery and Development: An Empirical Explorationof ‘New’ Products,” World Bank, August 2004.
Lall, Sanjaya, “Reinventing Industrial Strategy: The Role of Government Policy in Building
Industrial Competitiveness,” G-24 Discussion Paper No. 28, April 2004.
Madani, Dorsati, “A Review of the Role and Impact of Export Processing Zones,” World Bank,
1998.

41

Melo, Alberto, “Industrial policy in Latin America at the turn of the century,” IADB, Research
Department WP No 459, 2001.
Nelson, Richard R., “The Changing Institutional Requirements for Technological and Economic
Catch Up,” Columbia University, June 2004.
Ocampo, José Antonio, “Structural Dynamics and Economic Growth in Developing Countries,”
September 2004.
Pritchett, Lant, “Does Learning to Add Up Add Up? The Returns to Schooling in Aggregate
Data,” Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2004.
Rodriguez-Clare, Andres, “Clusters and Comparative Advantage: Implications for Industrial
Policy,” Inter-American Development Bank, June 2004.
Rodrik, Dani, "Taking Trade Policy Seriously: Export Subsidization as a Case Study in Policy
Effectiveness," in A. Deardorff, J. Levinson, and R. Stern (eds.), New Directions in Trade
Theory, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1995.
Rodrik, Dani, "Coordination Failures and Government Policy: A Model with Applications toEast Asia and Eastern Europe," Journal of International Economics 40(1-2), February 1996, 122.
Rodrik, Dani, "The Global Governance of Trade as if Development Really Mattered," UNDP,
New York, 2001.
Sabel, Charles F., “Beyond Principal-Agent Governance: Experimentalist Organizations,Learning and Accountability,” Columbia University, July 2004 (to appear in Ewald Engelen &Monika Sie Dhian Ho (eds.), De Staat van de Democratie. Democratie voorbij de Staat. WRR
Verkenning 3, Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press).
Sabel, Charles F., “Theory of a Real Time Revolution,” Columbia University, July 2003
(forthcoming in Organizational Studies, Winter 2004).
Sabel, Charles F., and Sanjay Reddy, “Learning to Learn: Undoing the Gordian Knot ofDevelopment Today,” Columbia University, n.d.
Tybout, James R., “Manufacturing Firms in Developing Countries: How Well Do They Do, andWhy?” Journal of Economic Literature 38(1) (March 2000), pp. 11-44.
Wade, Robert, Governing the Market, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1990.

42

Table 1: Top 5 export items (HS4) to the U.S. (in 2000)
Country Item
Brazil aircraft
shoes
non-crude petroleum
steelchemical woodpulp
Chilecoppergrapesfish
lumberwood

Mexico motor vehicles
crude oilcomputers & peripherals
ignition wiring setstrucksValue ($ mil)
1,435
1,069
689
485
465
457
396
377
144
142
15,771
11,977
6,411
5,576
4,853

Table 2. Illustrative list of industrial policies in support of production and investment
Country

Loans forworking capital

Loans for fixed
assets and/or
investment
projects

X

X

South
AmericanCountries
Argentina

Equityinvestment

Loans to specificsectors

Creditprograms forparticularregions

X

X

Horizontaltax
incentives

X

BahamasX
Barbados
BelizeBolivia

X
X

X

X

X

X
X

X

X
X

X
X

X

BrazilChile
Colombia
Costa Rica
Dominican
Republic
EcuadorEl Salvador
Guatemala
GuyanaHaiti
Honduras

JamaicaOil, natural gas,shipping, power sector,
telecom, software,motion picture industry

Motion picture industry

Mining,forestry
Hotels,financial services,
spirits and beer
Financial services,
insurance, information
technology
MiningMiningX

X
X

Tax incentives to specificTaxsectors
incentives toparticularregions

X

X

Forestry, oil, nuclear
materials

X

X
Forestry, tourism
Tourism, agribusiness

X

Mining, tourism
Mining; services sector
Agribusiness
X

X

X

X

Transport sector, shrimp
Motion picture industry,
tourism, bauxite, aluminum,factory construction

Table 2. Illustrative list of industrial policies in support of production and investment (cont.)
Loans for
Loans for fixed
EquityLoans to specificCreditworking capital
assets and/or
investment
sectors
programs forCountry
investment
particular
projects
regions
X
X
X
Motion picture industry

Horizontaltax
incentives
X

MexicoNicaragua
PanamaParaguay
Peru
SurinamTrinidad &Tobago

X
X
X
X

X
X
X
X

X
X
X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

Uruguay

Venezuela

Tax incentives to specificTaxsectors
incentives toparticularregions
Forestry, motion pictureindustry, air and maritime
transportation, publishingindustry
Tourism
Tourism, forestry
X
Tourism, mining, oil
X
Hotels, construction
Hydrocarbons, printing ,shipping, forestry, militaryindustry, airlines,
newspapers, broadcasters ,theaters, motion pictureindustry
Hydrocarbons and otherprimary sectors

Othercountries

India

?

Motion Picture Industry,
jute textiles, tea
plantations

X

X

infrastructure facilities,
Power projects, newindustries in electronic
hardware/softwareparks,airports, ports, inland
ports and waterways, andindustrial parks,for hotels,
cold-storage firms andmanufacturers of priority
items.

X

Table 2. Illustrative list of industrial policies in support of production and investment (cont.)
Loans for
Loans for fixed
EquityLoans to specificCreditworking capital
assets and/or
investment
sectors
programs forCountry
investment
particular
projects
regions
X
X?
Software,X

Horizontaltax
incentives
?

China

X

X

?

Shipping industry,
Shipyard Industry andmaritime Related
Activities

X

?

X

X

X

?

?

?

X

X

?

X

?

Malaysia

ThailandNigeria

Agriculture

Tax incentives to specificTaxsectors
incentives toparticularregions
Hight Tech. IC
Xmanufacturers and softwaredevelopment enterprisesthat source production
equipment madedomestically in China.
Manufacturing
Sector,Technology
Industries, Agricultural
Sector, Tourism Industry,
Research andDevelopment, Software,
Computers and ICT
agriculture and agricultural
products, direct involvementin technological and humanresource development,
public utilities andinfrastructure,environmental protection
and conservation, andtargeted industries.
Agriculture, Oil and Gas
sectors, Minerals such as
Barytes, Gypsum, Kaolin
and Marble, Energy Sector

X

X

X

Table 2. Illustrative list of industrial policies in support of production and investment (cont.)
Loans for
Loans for fixed
EquityLoans to specificCreditworking capital
assets and/or
investment
sectors
programs forCountry
investment
particular
projects
regions?
X
X?
manufacturing andprocessing industries,
including agro-industrial,fishing and agricultural
sectors — foodGhana
production, livestock
breeding, poultry farming
and processing ofagricultural produce
X

UgandaX?

Agriculture, Forestry,
Animal Husbandry
including pisciculture,
Agro-industries including
manufacturing anddistribution of agricultural
inputs?

Horizontaltax
incentives?

?

Tax incentives to specificTaxsectors
incentives toparticularregions
Non-Traditional Export ,X
Hotels, Real Estate, Rural
Banks, Agriculture and agroindustry, Waste Processing,Free Zones
Enterprise/Development

Plants, machinery andconstruction materials

XTable 2. Illustrative list of industrial policies in support of production and investment (cont.)
Sources: Melo (2001) for South American countries. See below for others.
http://www.idbi.co http://www.idbi.com/
http://www.idbi.com/,
http://www.finanm/
http://www.finance.india ce.indiamart.coIndiamart.com/exports_import m/exports_impos/incentives/index.html rts/incentives/in
dex.html
EIU (general
EIU (general
http://english1.p
Incentives)
Incentives)
eopledaily.com.
cn/english/2000
China
05/18/eng20000
518_41146.html

Malaysia

http://www.smide http://www.smidec.gc.gov.my/detailpa ov.my/detailpage.jsp
ge.jsp?section=fi ?section=financialas
nancialassistanc sistance&subsection
e&subsection=lo =loan&detail=bankin
an&detail=bankin dustri3&level=4
dustri3&level=4
http://www.ifct.co.
th/database/index.asp?l=eng andIndustrail FinanceCorporation ofThailandThailandNigeria

Ghana

Uganda-EIU

http://www.ifc
t.co.th/datab
ase/index.asp?mid=7&sid=15&cid=54

http://www.nigeria http://www.nigeriabu
businessinfo.com sinessinfo.com/ifcfin
ance/ifcfinancenigeria2002.htm nigeria2002.htm
The National Investment Bank is anindustrial development bank providing
financial assistance to manufacturing
and processing industries,
including agro-industrial projects.(noweb site)
http://www.bou.or http://www.bou.or.ug.ug/DevFIN.htm /DevFIN.htm

http://www.smidec.gov.my/detailpage.jsp?section=financialassistance&su
bsection=loan&detail=ba
nkindustri3&level=4

-

-

EIU

-

http://www.finance.indiamart http://www.tec.com/exports_imports/incent hnoives/general_tax_incentives. preneur.net/ti
html and EIU
meis/haryana/i
ncentive.html
http://www.ey.com/GLOBAL http://www.hsb/content.nsf/China_E/Tax_- c.com.hk/hk/c_Tax_Insight_orp/aoc/businf.
_2003_July_31
htm-

http://edirectory.com.my/web/swinvestorinfo-incentive.htm

http://www.mid
a.gov.my-

http://www.deltha.cec.eu.int/ http://www.delt
bic/doing_business_thailand ha.cec.eu.int/b/incentive_investment_prom ic/doing_busin
otion_act.htm
ess_thailand/in
centive_invest
ment_promotio
n_act.htm

http://www.nipcnigeria.org/dfi.htm The
Nigerian Industrial
Development Bank(NIDB)
but don know which
specific sectors
http://www.ghanaembassy.org/financial_in
titutions.htm

EIU-

http://www.nigeria.gov.ng/bu http://www.nig
siness/incentives.htm
eria.gov.ng/business/incentiv
es.htm--http://www.bou.or.ug/De
vFIN.htm--

http://www.gipc.org.gh/IPA_I http://www.gip
nformation.asp?hdnGroupID c.org.gh/IPA_I
nformation.asp=3&hdnLevelID=3?hdnGroupID=
3&hdnLevelID=3
http://www.unctad.org/en/do http://www.uga
cs//iteipcmisc3_en.pdf
ndainvest.com/incentives.htm

Table 3: Restrictions imposed by international agreements on the ability of countries to undertake industrial policies.
Restriction

How the restriction is defined

Under what condition it applies

WTO
A product made in one member country be treated no less favorably than It applies unconditionally. Although exceptions are made for theformation of free trade areas or custom unions and for
Most Favored Nation "like" good that originates in another country
preferential treatment of developing countries
The obligation applies whether or not a specific tariff commitment
Foreign gods, once they have satisfied whatever border measures areapplied, be treated no less favorably, in thermos of internal taxation than was made, and it cover taxes and other policies, which must be
National Treatment
applied in a non discriminatory fashion to like domestic andlike or directly competitive domestically produced goodforeign products
Mutual or correspondent concessions of advantages or privileges in the The developed contracting parties do not expect reciprocity forcommercial relations between two countries
commitments made by them in trade negotiations to reduce orReciprocity
remove tariffs an the barriers to the trade of less developed
contracting parties (yet, this condition is not legally binding)
A WTO member may take a “safeguard” action (i.e., restrict imports of a a) to attain no economic objectives (public health or national
security) b) to ensure fair competition ( antidumping measures,product temporarily) to protect a specific domestic industry from an
Safeguard Actionsetc) c) economic reasons (serious balance of payment deficits oincrease in imports of any product which is causing, or which isthreatening to cause, serious injury to the industry
desire of the government to support infant industries)
Impose discipline son the use of antidumping by countries. Is one of the Contains a number of provisions aimed at reducing the extent towhich antidumping can be used against developing countries
Antidumping agreememain safeguard instruments used among developing countries
that are trying to develop their exports
Prohibits exports subsidies by countries with incomes per capita above Provision related to developing countries: If the subsidy is less
Agreement on
U$1.000 and lays out rules for the use of countervailing measures to offsethan 2% of the per unit value of the product exported, developing
Subsidies andcountries are exempt form countervailing measures (whereas thi
injury to domestic industries caused by foreign production subsidies
Countervailing
figure is 1% when a product from and industrial country is under
Measures (SCM)
investigation
The agreement requires mandatory notification of all nonProhibits the use of a number of investment performance-related
Agreement on trade measures that have an effect on trade: local content and trade-balancing conforming TRIMs and their elimination within two years for
related Investment requirements
developed countries, within five years for developing countries
Measuresand within seven years for least-developed countries.

TRIPS Agreement

The required strengthening of protection of intellectual property
The IP areas covered are patents and the protection of plant varieties;
rights (IPR) has implications for industrial policy. In the case of
copyrights and related rights, undisclosed information, trademarks,
geographical indications, industrial designs, and the layout of designs of domestic firms, it implies both a need to and greater incentives tointegrated circuits. Generally, IP gives creators exclusive rights over the innovate and compete dynamically, reverse engineering anduse of their creations for a fixed duration of time. In some cases however, imitations has become less feasible. For foreign firms it means
the IPR are valid indefinitely.
that market access through a commercial presence may become
more attractive as IPR protection improves TRIPS Article 66.2
requires industrial countries to support technology transfer toleast developed countries.

Restriction

How the restriction is defined

Under what condition it applies

International Financial Codes and Standards
Basel Core Principles for Effective Banking Supervision
Bank supervisors must set prudential limits to restrict bank exposures to These principles are voluntary, but compliance with them issingle borrowers or groups of related borrowers; they must have in place frequently checked in the context of World Bank or IMF
Directed lending and requirements that banks lend to related companies and individuals on an programs.
connected lending arm's-length basis, that such extensions of credit are effectively monitored
and that other appropriate steps are taken to control or mitigate the risks.
Code of Good Practices on Transparency in Monetary and Financial Policies
These principles are voluntary, but compliance with them is
Requires transparency in the conduct of Central Banking and financial
Transparency offinancial practices in operations, inter alia, when those operations are undertaken in suppotr of frequently checked in the context of World Bank or IMF
programs.
government economic policies.
support ofgovernment policies
Code of Good Practices on Fiscal Transparency
Government involvement in the private sector (e.g., through regulation andThese principles are voluntary, but compliance with them is
Nondiscrimination in
equity ownership) should be conducted in an open and public manner, andfrequently checked in the context of World Bank or IMF
government
programs.
on the basis of clear rules and procedures that are applied in a
regulation
nondiscriminatory way.
Regional trade agreements
NAFTA
Except as otherwise provided in this Agreement, no Party may increase Each Party may adopt or maintain import measures to allocate inany existing customs duty, or adopt any customs duty, on an originating quota imports, provided that such measures do not have trade
Tariff Elimination
restrictive effects on imports additional to those caused by thegoodimposition of the tariff rate quota.
1) No Party may refund the amount of customs duties paid, or waive or This Article does not apply to: a) a good entered under bond for
reduce the amount of customs duties owed, on a good imported into its transportation and exportation to the territory of another Party; b)
territory.2) No Party may, on condition of export, refund, waive or reduce: a good exported to the territory of another Party in the same
condition as when imported into the territory of the Party froma) an antidumping or countervailing duty that is applied pursuant to a
Restriction onwhich the good was exported (processes such as testing,
Drawback and Duty Party's domestic law
cleaning, repacking or inspecting the good, or preserving it in its
Deferral Programs
same condition, shall not be considered to change a good's
condition).c) a refund of customs duties by a Party on aparticular good imported into its territory and subsequently
exported to the territory of another Party

Waiver of Customs
DutiesThis Article shall not apply to measures subject to Article 303
No party may adopt any new waiver of customs duties, or expand withrespect to existing recipients or extend to any new recipient the application(Restriction on Drawbacks and Duty Deferral Programs)of an existing waiver of customs duties, where the waiver is conditioned,
explicitly or implicitly, on the fulfillment of a performance requirement.

Restriction

Investment:
Performancerequirements

Import and Export
Restrictions

How the restriction is defined

Under what condition it applies

No Party may impose or enforce any of the following requirements, to an Provided that such measures are not applied in an arbitrary or
investment or an investor of a Party or of a non-Party in its territory: (a) to unjustifiable manner, or do not constitute a disguised restriction
export a given level or percentage of goods or services; (b) to achieve a on international trade or investment, the restriction does notprevent any Party from adopting or maintaining measures,
given level or percentage of domestic content; (c) to purchase, use oraccord a preference to goods produced or services provided in its territoryincluding environmental measures:or to purchase goods or services from persons in its territory; (d) to relate (a) necessary to secure compliance with laws and regulationsin any way the volume or value of imports to the volume or value of exportthat are not inconsistent with the provisions of this Agreement;(b) necessary to protect human, animal or plant life or health; oror to the amount of foreign exchange inflows associated with such(c) necessary for the conservation of living or non-living
investment; (e) to restrict sales of goods or services in its territory thatsuch investment produces or provides by relating such sales in any way toexhaustible natural resources.
the volume or value of its exports or foreign exchange earnings; (f) totransfer technology; or (g) to act as the exclusive supplier of the goods it
produces or services it provides to a specific region or world market.
Except as otherwise provided in this Agreement, no Party may adopt or Applies under all conditions except in accordance with Article XI
maintain any prohibition or restriction on the importation of any good of of the GATT, including its interpretative notes, and to this end
another Party or on the exportation or sale for export of any good destinedArticle XI of the GATT and its interpretative notes, or any
equivalent provision of a successor agreement to which all
for the territory of another Party, .
Parties are party, are incorporated into and made a part of thisAgreementEU
It follows from the abolition, in intra-Community trade, of customs duties It applies unconditionallyand charges having equivalent effect in addition to quantitative restrictions
in trade and measures having equivalent effect. In both cases, theFreedom of
movement for goods dismantling of barriers is based on the standstill concept, according towhich Member States are not authorized to restore such instruments
between themselves.
Certain limits have been set by the Treaty, which excludes
The concept of the freedom to perform services is closely linked to theservices linked to the civil service and which stipulates thatright of establishment. In both cases, the non-national or Community
business in question must be given national treatment i.e. the conditions restrictions on the freedom to perform services can be justified
applied to them must not be different from those applied to nationals or on grounds of public policy, public security and public health. In
Freedom ofaddition, certain sectors such as transport, banking andnational businesses.
movement for
insurance also have their own systems. These sectors haveservices
usually been subject to substantial regulation in the Member
States and the application of the freedom of movement forservices could not easily be achieved simply through mutual
recognition of standards.

Restriction

How the restriction is defined

Under what condition it applies

In connection with the free movement of capital , the Treaty prohibits all
restrictions on capital movements (investments) and all restrictions on
payments (payment for goods or services).

Member States are, however, authorized to take any measurejustified by the wish to prevent infringements of their own
legislation, specifically relating to fiscal provisions or prudential
supervision of financial institutions. Moreover, Member States
may lay down procedures for declaring capital movements foradministrative or statistical information purposes in addition tomeasures associated with public policy or public security.
However, these measures and procedures must not be a meansof arbitrary discrimination or a disguised restriction on the freemovement of capital and payments.

Freedom of
movement for capital

EU-Morocco

Free Movement of
Goods

There are some products that are exempt of this restriction
No new customs duties on imports nor charges having(those listed in Annexes 3, 4, 5 and 6). Also, exceptional
equivalent effect shall be introduced in trade between theCommunity and Morocco. Customs duties and charges having equivalent measures of limited duration may be taken by Morocco in theform of an increase or reintroduction of customs duties. These
effectmeasures may only concern infant industries, or certain sectors
applicable on import into Morocco of products originating inundergoing restructuring or facing serious difficulties, particularly
the Community shall be abolished upon the entry into force of thiswhere these difficulties produce major social problems.
Agreement.
Products originating in Morocco shall be imported into theCommunity free of customs duties and charges having
equivalent effect.
No new quantitative restriction on imports or measure
having equivalent effect shall be introduced in trade between
the Community and Morocco.
The two Parties shall refrain from any measures orpractice of an internal fiscal nature establishing, whether
directly or indirectly, discrimination between the products ofone Party and like products originating in the territory of theother Party.

Restriction

How the restriction is defined

Under what condition it applies

EU-Tunisia

Free Movement ofGoods

No new customs duties on imports nor charges having equivalent effect This shall not preclude the retention by the Community of an
shall be introduced in trade between the Community and Tunisia. Product agricultural component on imports of the goods originating in
originating in Tunisia shall be imported into the Community free of custom Tunisia listed in Annex 1.The agricultural component shall reflect
differences between the price on the Community market of theduties and charges having equivalent effect and without quantitative
agricultural products considered as being used in the production
restrictions or measures having equivalent effectof such goods and the price of imports from third countries
where the total cost of the said basic products is higher in theCommunity. The agricultural component may take the form of a
fixed amount or an ad valorem duty. Such differences shall be
replaced, where appropriate, by specific duties based on
tariffication of the agricultural component or by ad valorem duties
Exceptional measures of limited duration which derogate from th
provisions of Article 11 may be taken by Tunisia in the form of anincrease or reintroduction of customs duties.
These measures may only concern infant industries, or certain
sectors undergoing restructuring or facing serious difficulties,
particularly where these difficulties produce major social problem
The Community and Tunisia shall gradually implement greater liberalizatioof their reciprocal trade in agricultural and fishery products.
Where any product is being imported in increased quantities andWithout prejudice to the provisions of the GATT:(a) no new quantitative restriction on imports or measure having equivalentunder such conditions as to cause or threaten to cause:
effect shall be introduced in trade between the Community and Tunisia; - serious injury to domestic producers of like or directly(b) quantitative restrictions on imports and measures having equivalent competitive products in the territory of one of the Contracting
effect in trade between Tunisia and the Community shall be abolished
Parties, orupon the entry into force of this Agreement;- serious disturbances in any sector of the economy or difficulties(c) the Community and Tunisia shall apply to the other's exports customs which could bring about serious deterioration in the economic
neither duties or charges having equivalent effect nor quantitative
situation of a region, the Community or Tunisia may takerestrictions or measures of equivalent effect.
appropriate measures under the conditions and in accordancewith the procedures laid down in Article 27."The safeguard
measures shall be immediately notified to the Association
Committee by the Party concerned and shall be the subject of
periodic consultations, particularly with a view to their abolition assoon as circumstances permit."
1. The two Parties shall refrain from any measures or practice of aninternal fiscal nature establishing, whether directly or indirectly,
discrimination between the products of one Party and like products
originating in the territory of the other Party.
2. Products exported to the territory of one of the Parties may not benefit
from repayment of indirect internal taxation in excess of the amount of
indirect taxation imposed on them directly or indirectly.

Restriction

How the restriction is defined

Under what condition it applies

US-Jordan

Tariffs

The FTA eliminates all tariff barriers on virtually all goods traded between Not every export of the United States or Jordan will qualify for
the United States and Jordan within ten years.
this duty-free treatment. The United States and Jordan has
agreed to eliminate existing tariffs only on “originating goods ofthe other Party”. Goods must qualify under the Rules of Origin inorder to take advantage of the FTA. Also, Products under specia
staging categories including certain alcohol and textile products,
generalized system of preference (GSP) exports, agriculture
quota-class goods, poultry, apples, and cars will experience
either an accelerated reduction of tariffs or a delay in reduction.

The United States and Jordan have agreed to take measures
Jordan has agreed to accede to: Articles 1-14 of the World Intellectual
related to certain regulated products, particularly in the area ofProperty Organization’s (WIPO) Copyright Treaty; Articles 1-23 of the“approving the marketing of pharmaceuticals or agricultural
WIPO Performances and Phonographs Treaty; Articles 1-22 of thechemical products that utilize new chemical entities” andInternational Convention for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants;
Intellectual property
Articles 1-6 of the Joint Recommendation Concerning Provisions on the protecting the information against disclosure and unfair
commercial use.
Protection of Well-Known Marks; Patent Cooperation Treaty (1984);
Protocol Relating to the Madrid Agreement Concerning the International
Registrations of Marks (1989)
Liberalization of bilateral trade in services between the United States andJordan. With the liberalization of trade in services, United Statescompanies will have greater access to Jordanian service industries,
Services
especially tourism, transportation, health, financial, education,
environmental, business, communications, distribution andrecreational/cultural services.
The direct transport requirement and permitted exceptions are
The FTA defines originating goods as having three components: a
discussed in Chapter 9 of the Rules of Origin. not significant)qualitative definition of origin (“the “wholly obtained”/”substantial
Rules of Origin
transformation” tests), a quantitative definition of origin (the 35% domestic
content requirement) and a direct transport requirement.

Restriction

How the restriction is defined

Under what condition it applies

US-Chilea Party may:(a) raise a customs duty back to the level
Neither Party may increase any existing customs duty, or adopt any
established in its Schedule to Annex 3.3 following a unilateralcustoms duty, on an originating good. Each Party shall progressively
eliminate its customs duties on originating goods. 3. The United States reduction; or (b) maintain or increase a customs duty as
authorized by the Dispute Settlement Body of the WTO.
shall eliminate customs duties on any non-agricultural originating
Tariffs eliminations
goods that, after the date of entry into force of this Agreement, aredesignated as articles eligible for duty-free treatment under the U.S.
Generalized System of Preferences, effective from the date of suchdesignation.
Neither Party may refund the amount of customs duties paid, or waive or This applies on condition that the good is:(a) subsequently
reduce the amount of customs duties owed, on a good imported into its exported to the territory of the other Party; (b) used as a material
in the production of another good that is subsequently exported
territory. Neither Party may, on condition of export, refund, waive, or
reduce:(a) an antidumping or countervailing duty; (b) a premium offered orto the territory of the other Party; or (c) substituted by an identica
Drawback and Duty collected on an imported good arising out of any tendering system inor similar good used as a material in the production of another
Deferral Programs respect of the administration of quantitative import restrictions, tariff rate good that is subsequently exported to the territory of the otherquotas, or tariff preference levels; or (c) customs duties paid or owed on a Party.
good imported into its territory and substituted by an identical or similar
good that is subsequently exported to the territory of the other Party

Import and Export
Restrictions

Neither Party may adopt or maintain any prohibition or restriction on the This prohibit any country form adopting (a) export and importimportation of any good of the other Party or on the exportation or sale for price requirements, except as permitted in enforcement ofcountervailing and antidumping orders and undertakings; (b)export of any good destined for the territory of the other Party
import licensing conditioned on the fulfillment of a performancerequirement; or (c) voluntary export restraints not consistent with
Article VI of GATT 1994, as implemented under Article 18 of the
SCM Agreement and Article 8.1 of the AD Agreement.

Neither Party may adopt or maintain any duty, tax, or other charge on the Applies always , unless such duty, tax, or charge is adopted orexport of any good to the territory of the other Party
maintained on any such good when destined for domestic
consumption.
If, as a result of the elimination of a duty provided for in this Agreement, a The importing Party may take an emergency action under thistextile or apparel good benefiting from preferential tariff treatment under Article only following an investigation by its competent authorities
this Agreement is being imported into the territory of a Party in such
Also, (a) no emergency action may be maintained for a period
increased quantities, in absolute terms or relative to the domestic market exceeding three years; (b) no emergency action may be taken orfor that good, and under such conditions as to cause serious damage, or maintained beyond the period ending eight years after duties on
actual threat thereof, to a domestic industry producing a like or directly
good have been eliminated pursuant to this Agreement; (c) no
Textile and Apparel competitive good, the importing Party may, to the extent and for such timeemergency action may be taken by an importing Party against
as may be necessary to prevent or remedy such damage and to facilitate any particular good of the other Party more than once; and (d) on
adjustment, take emergency action, consisting of an increase in the rate otermination of the action, the good will return to duty-free status.
duty on the good to a level not to exceed the lesser of:(a) the most-favorednation (MFN) applied rate of duty in effect at the time the action is taken;
and (b) the MFN applied rate of duty in effect on the date of entry into forcof this Agreement.
Export taxes

Both parties need to accede or ratify to a series of patent and Intellectual Each Party may, but shall not be obliged to, implement in its
property treaties
domestic law more extensive protection than is required by thisIntellectual Property
Agreement provided that such protection does not contravene
the provisions of this Agreement.

Restriction

How the restriction is defined

IMF (structural conditionality)
Complete equalization of excises on all domestic, imported goods andTrade Policy
Eliminate reference prices for all imports and remove exchange controls(general)Indonesia.
Eliminate all restrictions on foreign investment in palm oil plantations, retailStand-By Agreement and wholesale trade and establish a level playing field in the import anddistribution of essential food items between BULOG and private sector
1998
participants.
Eliminate subsidies on sugar, wheat flour, corn, soybean meal andfishmeal.
Phase out local content program for motor vehicles and abolish local
content regulations on dairy products.
Discontinue budgetary and extra budgetary support and privileges to IPTN
(Nusantara Aircraft Industry) projects.
Reduce by 5 percentage points tariffs on items currently subject to tariffs
of 15 to 25 percent. Tariff reduction on non-food agricultural, chemical,
steel-metal, and fishery products
Phase out remaining quantitative import restrictions and other non-tariffbarriers.
Abolish export taxes on leather, cork, ores and waste aluminum products
and Reduce export taxes on logs, sawn timber, rattan and minerals
Eliminate all other export restrictions.
Take effective action to allow free competition in:(i) importation of wheat, wheat flour, soybeans and garlic;(ii) sale or distribution of flour; and(iii) importation and marketing of sugar.
Korea
Stand-By
1) Eliminate trade-related subsidies;
Arrangement
2) Eliminate restrictive import licensing;
December 5, 1997 3) Eliminate the import diversification program; andEconomic Program 4) Streamline and improve the transparency of the import certification
TurkeyAgriculture reform program : removal of credit subsidies from state banks,
stand-byarrangement with the reform the sugar market and liberalization of the tobacco sector
International
Monetary Fund.
2001
Ethiopia
Cease price verification on all nonagricultural commodity exports and non
Letter of Intent,
cofee agricultural exports for which verifiable international prices are not
Memorandum of
readily available. For other agricultural exports, except coffee, replace ex
Economic andante price verification with ex post audit, and, for coffee, replace the
Financial Policies,
verification of a single point price with the verification of a range of prices
and Technicalfor each variety; Reduce import tariffs and liberalize the payments andMemorandum of
exchange regulations for foreign trade in goods and services
Understanding 2001

Under what condition it applies

Restriction

How the restriction is defined

Under what condition it applies(i) removing restrictions on foreign suppliers'/partners' credit and on
importing inputs without payment from foreign collaborators, as well as onother implicit forms of credit not involving formal loan agreements; (ii)allowing all exporters of manufactures (including of agro-processed
products) to obtain foreign commercial borrowing; (iii) easing theconstraints on debt-equity ratios for exporters by allowing the NBE toauthorize exporters to exceed the limit of 60/40 that currently obtains; and(iv) allowing banks to open import letters of credit for exporters withconfirmed letters.
Eliminate price and quality preferences for domestic input suppliers andfurther improve the duty drawback and exemption schemes
Mozambique
Rationalize import tariffs. Lower the top import tariff rate from 35 percent t
Enhanced Structuralat least 30 percent. Reduce export tax exemptions
Adjustment Facility
1998–2000
Sources:
WTO: World Bank (2002) "Development, Trade and WTO: A Handbook" Edited by Bernard Hoekman, Aaditya Mattoo and Philip English
NAFTA: http://www.nafta-sec-alena.org/DefaultSite/home/index_e.aspx
EU http://europa.eu.int/pol/comm/index_en.htm
EU-Morocco http://europa.eu.int/eur-lex/pri/en/oj/dat/2000/l_070/l_07020000318en00020190.pdf
EU-Tunisia http://europa.eu.int/eur-lex/pri/en/oj/dat/1998/l_097/l_09719980330en00020174.pdf
US-Jordan. http://www.jordanusfta.com/
US-Chile.http://www.ustr.gov/new/fta/Chile/final/03.market%20access.PDF
IMF http://www.imf.org/external/np/pdr/cond/2001/eng/trade/index.htm, http://www.imf.org/external/np/pdr/cond/2001/eng/trade/index.htm
Indonesia. http://www.imf.org/external/np/loi/041098.pdf
Korea. http://www.imf.org/external/np/oth/korea.htm & http://www.imf.org/external/np/loi/122497.htm#box5
Turkey. http://www.imf.org/external/np/loi/2001/tur/02/index.htm Letter of Intent. May 2001.
EThiopia. http://www.imf.org/external/np/pfp/eth/etp.htm, http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/scr/1999/cr9998.pdf
Mozambique. http://www.imf.org/external/np/pfp/mozam/moztap.htm