Salient, resurgent, or a flash in the pan? A comparative legislative study of American industrial policy
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Citation
Abstract
This paper will conduct a comparative study of American industrial policy, focusing on the policies enacted during the late 1980s and under the Biden administration in response to high- tech challenges from Japan and China, respectively. It will build upon a model of transformation packages to understand how and why industrial policy gets implemented to argue that the recent pivot towards intervention and investment in federal decision-making stems from a good-faith desire to enhance innovation. That model will be deployed to theorize how the US will continue to compete with China into the future, and if new legislation like CHIPS and the IRA represent one-off measures or are part of a broader shift in American economic policymaking.