Industrial Policies in Production Networks*
研究了当经济部门通过投入产出联系形成生产网络时，产业政策的经济逻辑，发现上游部门因市场不完美而规模扭曲最大，因此有理由获得补贴，并用韩国和中国的数据验证了该理论。
Abstract Many developing economies adopt industrial policies favoring selected sectors. Is there an economic logic to this type of intervention? I analyze industrial policy when economic sectors form a production network via input-output linkages. Market imperfections generate distortionary effects that compound through backward demand linkages, causing upstream sectors to become the sink for imperfections and have the greatest size distortions. My key finding is that the distortion in sectoral size is a sufficient statistic for the social value of promoting that sector; thus, there is an incentive for a well-meaning government to subsidize upstream sectors. Furthermore, sectoral interventions’ aggregate effects can be simply summarized, to first order, by the cross-sector covariance between my sufficient statistic and subsidy spending. My sufficient statistic predicts sectoral policies in South Korea in the 1970s and modern-day China, suggesting that sectoral interventions might have generated positive aggregate effects in these economies.