Event

How does history affect the future?

Professor Dr. Adam Szirmai, Professional Fellow at the United Nations University - Maastricht Economic and Social Research Institute on Innovation and Technology (UNU-MERIT) traces modern industrial policy and looks at new challenges and new opportunities and asks the question, “Is the manufacturing sector still the main engine of growth?” in a public lecture entitled Making 21st Century business work for growth: Industrial Policy and Global Competitiveness.

Attendees will be guided through various alternative industrialisation strategies - the balanced growth path, unbalanced growth, support for small scale and informal enterprises and the most important alternative, export oriented industrialisation. Szirmai will discuss variants of this last approach including labour intensive exports, technological upgrading and learning, foreign investment-led exports and resource based industrialisation. He will then focus on 21st century challenges such as the emergence of global value chains, danger of the middle income trap, premature de-industrialisation, jobless growth, global warning and sustainable models of industrialisation, competition from the global Chinese workforce and restrictions of policy space. Finally, he will explore the emergence of global value chains and the new opportunities it offers for smaller economies, new types of industrial policy for learning economies, the key role of entrepreneurial innovation, new relationships between public policy and private enterprise and the need for permanent experimentation.

The lecture takes place at the Noor Hassanali Auditorium, Faculty of Law from 5:30pm.

All are invited.