Everything Everywhere All At Once: competition policy and industrial policy choices in an era of structural change

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Abstract: There is a clear revival of active industrial policy in many OECD economies. There is also a renewed activism in competition policy, with broad issues such as digital market power, the green transition, and geopolitics on the agenda of competition authorities. The new activism reflects technological transformations that are reshaping economic structures and hence presenting policy-makers with long-run supply-side economic challenges. In this context, there is no clear assignment of policy tools to different bodies, but rather a need for coordination of policies across domains. Nor can technical decision-making by economic regulators be separated from the need to make normative judgments about the strategic direction of the economy. This implies two fundamental unsolved institutional challenges: how to combine expert analysis with political legitimacy; and how to coordinate policies across bodies whose responsibilities or remits sometimes conflict.