Getting Europe on the Industrial Policy Train
January 26, 2023
A Tale of Two Industrial Policies
“The climate crisis requires economic transformation at a scale and speed humanity has never attempted in our 5,000 years of written history,” Roosevelt’s Todd N. Tucker told Ana Swanson of the New York Times this week.
Central to a task that sweeping: green industrial policy of the sort the US advanced with last year’s Inflation Reduction Act.
But as implementation gets underway, the US will need to convince a Europe fearful of trade wars that industrial policy isn’t a zero-sum game.
“Whether the United States and the EU embrace a genuine collaborative effort or find themselves in a competitive race to the top depends in part on whether Europeans pick up Washington’s olive branch and accept US policymakers’ insistence that they are not steering the country toward isolationism,” Roosevelt’s Felicia Wong and Tucker write in Foreign Affairs.
“Getting Europe on board will be a crucial first step toward forging a stronger international order and ultimately decarbonizing the world.”
Read more in “A Tale of Two Industrial Policies: How America and Europe Can Turn Trade Tensions into Climate Progress.”
Bargaining for Stability
“Historically, the starting point for any successful wage policy has been the early inclusion of organized labor,” historian Andrew Elrod writes in a new brief.
Examining US economic history since World War II, Elrod draws an essential lesson for policymakers today: “Collective bargaining has been the only successful institutional device for wage policies that did not rely on unemployment.”
“[P]rogressives interested in developing tools to manage a hot economy should look to sectoral bargaining by unions with representational legitimacy and economic power”—both to grow the labor movement and center labor in economic policy.
Read more in “Bargaining for Stability: Wage Policies under Full Employment.”
What We’re Reading
The Fed Has Climate Responsibilities, Like It or Not [co-authored by Roosevelt fellow David Arkush] – Barron’s
Checking In with Joseph Stiglitz on the State of Inequality – Oxfam Politics of Poverty
A Recession Is Not Inevitable – The Atlantic
Reclaiming US Industry – The American Prospect