Industrial policy is back on mainstream policy agendas in the U.S., Europe, and many developing countries, but the knowledge base to guide industrial policy remains underdeveloped. This conference on “New Thinking in Industrial Policy: Perspectives from Developed and Developing Countries” convened leading researchers from economics, sociology, political science, and related fields to take stock of what is known and what needs to be learned about the optimal design of industrial policy, the challenges in evaluating interventions empirically, and the difficulties that practitioners face on the ground. The conference, hosted by the Initiative for Policy Dialogue (IPD), the Firms & Industrial Policy Idea Lab of the Center for Political Economy (CPE), the Center for Development Economics and Policy (CDEP), and the Institute of Global Politics (IGP), took place on Nov. 6-7, 2025, at Columbia SIPA. It followed the successful 1st and 2nd meetings in the series in Nov. 2023 and Nov. 2024.
- Conference, Meetings and Workshops
- Date: November 4, 2025
The Committee highlights how inequality, particularly in the extremes, has many negative economic, political and