Well-designed industrial policies can improve a nation’s economic performance. Using a range of tools, such as subsidies, tax incentives, infrastructure development, protective regulations, and R&D support, governments are able to support specific industries or economic activities. Steve Coulter examines the patterns of industrial policymaking across late capitalist societies. Drawing on case studies from a range of countries, each with different growth models, national capabilities, policy traditions, and political/welfare state regimes, he is able to offer a nuanced comparative assessment of states’ responses to specific economic challenges. The book draws broad conclusions about the trajectories of industrial policy and highlights key technical and political drivers that policymakers consider when addressing whether best practice should centre on general or nationally-specific approaches. The book also focuses on fresh challenges and opportunities for industrial policy and questions the sustainability of current policy practice.

Much of economics is a top-down analysis that simplifies and reduces the huge varieties between individuals to a predictable range of characteristics that lend themselves to systematic analysis. This book eschews this conventional perspective, which sees national economies as simply agglomerations of the activities of millions of people, and instead explores the role played by the individual in the economy, in particular, how the individual experiences the economy. In so doing, the book is able to illuminate the economic landscape for the non-technical reader in a much more engaging and accessible way. Steve Coulter examines those areas of our lives that most direcly connect with the economy - jobs, education, healthcare, housing, personal finance, welfare, consumption - and explores how the individual choices we make are determined. He shows how the things we experience, need and consume fit into a fast-changing and interdependent global economic setting and highlights the role of government and markets in shaping our lives.

Much of economics is a top-down analysis that simplifies and reduces the huge varieties between individuals to a predictable range of characteristics that lend themselves to systematic analysis. This book eschews this conventional perspective, which sees national economies as simply agglomerations of the activities of millions of people, and instead explores the role played by the individual in the economy, in particular, how the individual experiences the economy. In so doing, the book is able to illuminate the economic landscape for the non-technical reader in a much more engaging and accessible way. Steve Coulter examines those areas of our lives that most direcly connect with the economy - jobs, education, healthcare, housing, personal finance, welfare, consumption - and explores how the individual choices we make are determined. He shows how the things we experience, need and consume fit into a fast-changing and interdependent global economic setting and highlights the role of government and markets in shaping our lives.