Green Industrial Policy in Europe

One lesson of the financial crisis has been that countries with higher shares of industry in their GDP seemed to be less affected by the crisis. Consequently, the call for an industrial renaissance has become stronger. This development has also changed the industrial policy discourse: after years of dominance of a more laissez-faire approach,1 economists have started to look into selective industrial policies again. However, this debate is not just a revival of the old concepts about sector-specific policies or of the lessons to be learned from the rapid catch-up of Asian countries. One significant difference is that industrial policies are also becoming aligned with approaches for tackling global challenges. Most prominent for this new trend is the case of green industrial policy.