Industrial policy for the medium to long-term

This report reviews the market failure and systems failure rationales for industrial policy and assesses the evidence on part experience of industrial policy in the UK. In the light of this, it reviews options for reshaping the design and delivery of industrial policy towards UK manufacturing. These options are intended to encourage a medium- to long-term perspective across government departments and to integrate science, innovation and industrial policy

Creativity: from discourse to doctrine

This is a short report on work in progress. It centres on the idea of ‘creativity’, which is of presently of key importance for current UK government thinking about the ‘creative economy’. ‘Creativity’, I shall argue, has established itself as a hegemonic term in an increasingly elaborated framework of policy ideas. Although my focus is on the UK, we are addressing a body of thought that is now increasingly international in scope. The ideas in question are influential and set the terms for thought and action across a number of policy fields. Not for nothing has David Puttnam, a key ‘New’ Labour figure, said that ‘the importance of the creative industries was quickly enshrined as an article of faith’. An analysis of New Labour discourse reveals an underlying credo – itself a fit subject for the critique of ideology. A concerted effort is under way to shape a wide range of working practices by invoking creativity and innovation. These attributes are supposed to make our societies and economies grow in a fiercely competitive world. At present, official thinking circulates in a dominant culture of largely uncritical acceptance. Alongside the elaboration of the doctrine of creativity by the government policy apparatus is a specialist discourse of academic analysis. If it is now fashionable to see the creative economy as pivotal to the wider economy, this view is certainly not limited to policy makers. As creativity has moved centre stage, it has also become extraordinarily banal. The mark of its present hegemony is that it is also increasingly ubiquitous. ‘British creativity’, for instance, ensures market success for Thornton’s, the chocolate manufacturers, so their advertising tells us. Not on its own, to be sure: cocoa and sugar are added ingredients. In a district nearby to mine in Glasgow, there is a ‘creative hairdresser’. We who stay without must ponder what wondrous transformations occur under the stylists’ hands. My inbox is regularly assaulted by spam offering courses to explore my creativity (and temptingly, to develop my ludic qualities) in New York City and various European locations. So far I have managed to resist. Such examples could easily be multiplied

New Budget, New Regulations, New Strategies : the 2006 Reform of EU Cohesion Policy

Examines the reform of EU cohesion policy in 2006

Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism and Urban Governance: A State Theoretical Perspective.

This paper discusses the recurrence and the recurrent limitations of liberalism as a general discourse, strategy, and regime. It then establishes a continuum of neoliberalism ranging from a project for radical system transformation from state socialism to market capitalism, through a basic regime shift within capitalism, to more limited policy adjustments intended to maintain another type of accumulation regime and its mode of regulation. These last two forms of neoliberalism are then related to a broader typology of approaches to the restructuring, rescaling, and reordering of accumulation and regulation in advanced capitalist societies: neoliberalism, neocorporatism, neostatism, and neocommunitarianism. These arguments are illustrated in the final part of the paper through a critique of the World Report on the Urban Future 21 (World Commission 2000), both as an explicit attempt to promote flanking and supporting measures to sustain the neoliberal project on the urban scale and as an implicit attempt to naturalize that project on a global scale

Target group segmentation in the virtual space as a tool for defining the concept of a territory brand

Purpose: The article is aimed at investigating the possibility of competitiveness increase and investment attractiveness of the territory by means of virtual space segmentation where territorial entities interact. Design/Methodology/Approach: At present, interaction of most economic agents is conducted by means of internet technologies and web platforms. In the framework of territory development special emphasis is given to a territory brand to attract investments. Sustainable territory development in the competitive environment directly depends on the unleashing of territory potential, which in its turn is closely related to the problem of attracting resources and investments. In the context of the developed information society competitiveness of territorial entities is largely determined by the level and activeness of their representation in the internet space. Since the quality of the territory is determined by a number of advantages over other territories claiming to the same investments, one of the key mechanisms of forming such advantages is an effective presence of a territorial entity in the internet space. Findings: A three-tier synthetic model of the target group segmentation in the territory virtual space defining the brand concept is elaborated and justified. Practical implications: In practice, a proposed toolkit allows organizing internet representation of the territory, which lets take the territory represented to a new level of competitiveness. Originality/value: An original tool mechanism of forming the concept of territory brand by means of the target segmentation of the virtual space is proposed.peer-reviewe

Capital controls re-examined: the case for ‘smart’ controls

The global financial crisis which began in east Asia in 1997 is not over, neither is the inquest into its implications for adjustment policy. In the wake of this crisis, we focus here on the role of capital controls, which formed a much publicised part of the crisis-coping strategy in one country (Malaysia) and, less openly, were also deployed by other crisis-afflicted countries. Evaluation so far has examined different target variables with different estimation methods, generally concentrating on efficiency and stability indicators and ignoring equity measures; it has also typically treated `control´ as a one-zero dummy variable, ignoring the `quality´ of intervention and in particular the extent to which efficiency gains are obtained in exchange for controls. Partly because of these limitations, the literature has reached no consensus on the impact of controls, nor therefore about where they fit within the set of post-crisis defence mechanisms. We propose an approach in which the government plays off short-term political security against long-term economic gain; the more insecure its political footing, the greater the weight it gives to political survival, which is likely to increase the probability of controls being imposed. The modelling of this approach generates a governmental `policy reaction function´ and an impact function for controls, which are estimated by simultaneous panel-data methods across a sample of thirty developing and transitional countries between 1980-2003, using, for the period since 1996, the `new´ IMF dataset which differentiates between controls by type. We find that controls appear to cause increases in income equality, and are significantly associated with political insecurity and relatively low levels of openness to trade. They do not, in our analysis, materially influence the level of whole-economy productivity or GDP across the sample of countries examined, although they do influence productivity in particular sectors, in particular manufacturing. But the dispersion around this central finding is wide: the tendency for controls to depress productivity by encouraging rent-seeking sometimes is, and sometimes is not, counteracted by purposive government policy actions to maintain competitiveness. Whether or not this happens – whether, as we put it, controls are `smart´, and the manner in which they are smartened - is vital, on both efficiency and equity grounds. We devise a formula for, and make the case for capital controls which are time-limited, and contain an inbuilt incentive to increased productivity, as a means of improving the sustainability and equity of the adjustment process whilst keeping to a minimum the cost in terms of productive efficiency

A comparative analysis of strategies for design in Finland and Brazil

This paper reports on work in progress and initial findings of a research project that is comparing existing strategies for design (in promotion, support and policy fields) in four selected countries: Finland, South Korea, Brazil and India. For this specific paper, Finland and Brazil are the case studies compared. The paper explains the criteria for selection of these subjects, based on their stage of development and position on the Global Competitiveness Index (World Economic Forum). The objective of the research project is to investigate how countries with different national contexts adopt different strategies for design in coherence with their positions, weaknesses and strengths. Keywords: Design Policy, Design Strategy, Case Study/Ies, Brazil, Finland, Economic Development.</p