Post-pandemic industrial policy: what will it look like?

Ever since the financial crisis over ten years ago, countries and local governments have been warming up to the idea of stimulating economies and creating jobs by generating solutions for climate change and the environmental breakdown. But these ideas had been slow to start and far from widespread. Can the recovery from the pandemic change all that?

There are signs that the sheer scale of the pandemic’s impacts has started to break inertia in policymaking. Industrial policy in particular is seeing a revival as governments face the balancing act of securing economic recovery, addressing deep inequalities magnified by the crisis, ensuring the transition to a low-carbon economy and adapting to climate change – all at the same time.

While much can be learned from past successes and failures, in many ways post-pandemic industrial policy is moving into uncharted waters as it attempts to reconcile ecological, social and economic ambitions against a backdrop of fast technological change.

What needs to fundamentally change in this new generation of industrial policy? How can countries harness rather than be threatened by disruptive technologies? How can they achieve diversification and resilience in supply chains? What should industrial policy include beyond manufacturing? And what lessons can we learn from pre-pandemic industrial policy?

These are some of the questions that will be discussed by some of the world’s leading experts on development – members of the UN Committee for Development Policy (CDP) José Antonio Ocampo, Adriana Abdenur, Ha-Joon Chang, Arunabha Ghosh and Kori Udovički. They will be joined by the UN DESA Assistant Secretary-General for Economic Development and Chief Economist of the UN Elliott Harris and Smeeta Fokeer of the UN Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO).

Join us on 17 November, from 8:15-9:45 am New York/ET

Register at https://bit.ly/CDPIndustrialPolicy2021 or watch the event live on our Facebook page.