Industrial policy is sparking renewed interest across OECD member countries and partner economies. However, amidst an increasing number of objectives for industrial policy, and despite the availability of information on countries’ strategies and plans, it remains difficult to properly measure and compare resources spent on industrial policies and identify countries’ strategic priorities. The lack of a cross-country comparable source of information on resources dedicated to industrial policy partly results from the absence of a common methodology to account for industrial policy expenditures.

This paper provides a new methodology for reporting industrial policy expenditure in a comparable way across countries.

It is the first deliverable of the “Quantifying Industrial Strategies” project, which aims at measuring industrial policy expenditures across OECD countries and will gather harmonised data on industrial policy expenditures, their composition, and their mode of delivery.