Description
Nowhere else in the world has a change of heart in favour of industrial policy been as significant as in the European Union (EU). While the bloc had historically focused on internal market liberalisation, recent grand intervention plans in energy transition, semiconductor production, and international competitiveness pledged to mobilise hundreds of billions of euros in an unprecedented move to shape development outcomes. And yet, despite the income redistribution implications of industrial policymaking, in that funding and spending decisions inevitably create winners and losers, little is known about what distributive considerations guided the EU’s momentous turn towards market intervention. Crucially, as rising economic inequality represents one of Europe’s most acute challenges, with far-reaching consequences for inter-state cooperation and democratic stability, understanding the extent to which tackling this issue permeates the design of expensive policy initiatives makes for an original contribution to the growing literature on the rebirth of industrial policy in an increasingly unequal and unstable rich world. To achieve this goal, the article interviews dozens of EU bureaucrats to ask what, if any, and how, if at all, distributional concerns have been embedded in industrial policy formulation. As traditional norm entrepreneurs and policy-design gatekeepers, the bureaucracy offers a privileged window into the redistributive conflicts that lawmaking often entails. Analytically, and by combining elite interviews with the thematic analysis of policy documents and news pieces, the article maps the funding and spending questions of major recent EU-led industrial policies, traces the evidence of bureaucrats’ distributional concerns with these policies, and categorises emerging patterns. At a time when growing inequality coincides with a rising reliance on industrial policy, the article provides detailed evidence of how these two transformative trends intersect and the bureaucratic mechanisms attempting to govern them.
