Description
After 30 years from the publication of a firm critique of the East Asian Miracle, the World Bank has recently issued a new report, recognising industrial policy as an appropriate vehicle for economic development. Why are international economic organisations shifting their approach towards industrial policy?
This paper will investigate how the idea of industrial policy has travelled from East Asian economies to the major international organisations. Contributing to debates on norm diffusion and East/West political economy, this paper will look at China’s role in economic governance in the past twenty years. China’s ideas of state-led growth and state intervention on industrial policy, that have often been criticised as against the western principles of free trade and hindered by international organisations like the World Bank, are now recognised as valuable means to growth.
Building on constructivist theories of norm diffusion and change, this paper will analyse how the idea of industrial policy circulated in international economic governance. This paper will adopt a qualitative analysis approach, looking at primary documents of international organisations (e.g. official reports, minutes of meetings, Trade Policy Reviews), as well as official documents of China from national database of the Ministry of Foreign Commerce. The paper aims to understand how the Eastern idea of industrial policy has influenced Western international organisations, analysing China’s discourse in international organisations like the World Trade Organisation.