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INDUSTRIALIZATION
What my mother’s couscous teaches us about green industrial policy History shows that countries rarely industrialized themselves by faithfully following a recipe. They succeeded by learning how to experiment.
By Amir Lebdioui Director of the Technology and Industrialisation for Development (TIDE) Centre, University of Oxford
For most of the past 50 years — the lifetime of the OPEC Fund — debates about development have revolved around policy recipes. Which instruments work best? Import substitution. Tariffs. Subsidies. Local content requirements. Special economic zones. Cluster policies. Each arrived packaged as the next formula for industrial success, often promoted with the confidence of a cookbook promising perfect dishes every time. But anyone who has ever tried to reproduce a family recipe knows the limits of instructions. My mother’s couscous, for instance, follows a method that can be written down. Yet when I attempt it in my own kitchen, the outcome is often disappointing. The ingredients are the same, the steps identical, but the results never quite compare. What makes the difference is not the recipe itself, but the tacit skill, experience and adaptiveness of the cook when faced with changing ingredients and utensils. That principle applies to development. While economists have focused on judging the effectiveness of different policy instruments, history shows that countries rarely industrialized themselves by faithfully following a recipe: they succeeded by learning how to experiment. From South Korea’s steel industry, Chile’s salmon farming industry, Costa Rica’s electronics cluster and Viet Nam’s manufacturing boom, many successful sectors emerged through trial, adaptation and constant course correction. Policies were revised and reinvented as governments learned what worked and what did not. Contrary to conventional wisdom, China’s industrialization in particular was not the result of a perfect plan designed in advance but the product of continuous experimentation between government and firms, with new policies and laws evolving as new information emerged. Some projects succeeded spectacularly while others failed; what mattered was the ability to learn quickly. In contrast, one could argue that one of the reasons the Soviet Union failed despite its innovation capabilities is because of its failure to experiment and quickly adapt to changing technological landscapes.
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