Industrial policy, economic growth and international engagement: a comparison of selected countries

The current debate on industrial policies is no longer focused on whether such policies are necessary, but on how best to implement them and on the lessons that can be learned (and transferred) from successful industrialization experiences. Accordingly, the aim of this paper is to analyse the impact of different configurations of industrial policies on the growth and international engagement of nine Latin American economies. This impact is measured by analysing autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) models and intervention models for 1966–2014. The results show that the interventions analysed did not significantly modify the behaviour of the time series studied, except in the case of the economic growth series. For the other variables, the interventions were quite self-contained, and it was impossible to identify any behavioural pattern associated with the intervention periods analysed.