Institutions for Industrial Policy: The Foundation of Economic Development

We propose an institutional architecture for the successful implementation of industrial policy inspired by the Asian Miracles—Japan, Korea, Taiwan Province of China, Singapore, and Hong Kong SAR. The key institutional arrangement is a leading agency, accumulating sector-specific knowledge through continuous experimentation and feedback from markets, to design the sector- and context-appropriate package of policies, which is a priori unknown, and coordinate its implementation. We also postulate a 4A model of institutional features of the leading agency: Ambition-Agency, Autonomy, Accountability, and Adaptability. We draw strong parallels with the rise of independent central banks, inferring concrete steps to achieve these characteristics.