• Date: November 1st, Wednesday, 2023, 14:00 – 16:00
• Location: Room 303, SNUAC (Bldg. 101) [in English]

Many developing countries have recently adopted a swathe of development strategies ranging from extremely selective to non-discretionary, functional policies—some if not all of which constitute what we may term as ‘industrial policy’. The presentation provides an overview on the state of the art about new industrial policy and the place of politics in contemporary analysis of state intervention in the global political economy. This paper revisits the importance of state-backed economic policies not simply as a reaction to the limitations of market reforms implemented in the 1980s and 1990s, but as a radically new development strategy moving onto the 21st century. The task of the paper is three-fold: first, it maps out the lessons from East Asian industrial policy and demonstrates how a new generation of political economy scholars have brought in a more political approach to industrialization; second, it synthesizes the political economy literature to build a framework that incorporates new aspects of industrial policy, notably on the significance of economic linkages and rent management as a way of addressing global value chains; and third, it demonstrates the analytical purchase of an “industrial policy paradigm” approach in exploring new globalization strategies in the context of strategic competition by way of examining emerging industries, such as semi-conductor and clean energy technologies.

Moderator: Haeran Lim (Dept. of Political Science & Int’l Relations)
Speaker: Jewellord T. Nem Singh (Int’l Inst of Social Studies)
Discussants: Seungjoo Lee (Chung-Ang Univ.), Hanna Cho (Inst of Korean Political Studies)

Jewellord (Jojo) T. Nem Singh is Assistant Professor at the International Institute of Social Studies, part of Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Hague. He is a Global Fellow at the Wilson Center, Washington D.C. and Affiliate Research Fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS), Leiden. Nem Singh is the principal investigator of a five-year research programme entitled Green Industrial Policy in the Age of Rare Metals: A Trans-regional Comparison of Growth Strategies in Rare Earths Mining (GRIP-ARM), funded by the European Research Council (Starting Grant No. 950056). He is author of at least 45 publications, including Business of the State: Why State Ownership Matters for Resource Governance (Oxford University Press, 2024), and editor of The Politics of Designing and Negotiating Industrial Policy in the 21st Century (Routledge, 2024), and Developmental States beyond East Asia (Routledge, 2020).