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Notes -
Industrial policy must either put cash up front, or create stable incentives that everyone knows will last for years, to see any results.
Suppose the US government wants to have a complete domestic supply-chain manufacture of computer chips--good idea for military defense purposes--and we are in a situation where US has no semi-conductor fabrication facilities (fabs) and no expertise in building or operating such. As was the case two years ago. US government's options are:
(a) Take on the task of building and operating a fab and subsidize the entire expense directly like one does for military projects.
(b) Put up massive up-front cash incentives for already-existing foreign companies to invest in building and running US-based fabs, and hope both companies and bureaucracy move fast enough to get started before political winds shift.
(c) Massively raise tariffs on imports of foreign-made chips, or any products containing foreign-made chips, using some mechanism that ensures those tariffs stay high for many years to come.
The tariffs option only works if there's a strong guarantee of the high tariffs sticking around for a long time. This way, the demand in the domestic market may be sufficient to entice US-based firms to put the costly investments of building a fab, developing or importing operational expertise, and training staff from scratch, which takes at least a few years to even begin to produce chips. One would also expect the first five years of production will be purely playing catch-up, even if one is optimistic in American manufacturing ingenuity in the long run, so the US-made chips will be more expensive to make than, say, the ones made in Taiwan's mature fabs.
So one could indeed use tariffs to promote the country's industrial policy, but it has to be through a stable policy that can't be easily reversed: at the least, it needs be a law passed by congress.
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