Industrial policies are sizeable. In 2021, participating countries spent on average 1.4% of GDP on industrial policies through grants and tax expenditures, and 0.7% of GDP through financial instruments (excluding export finance).

Industrial strategies are still dominated by a sectoral approach. On average, sectoral policies represent almost 30% of industrial policy grants and tax expenditures in 2021. However, some sectors are more supported than other, notably manufacturing and energy transport.

Green policies are on the rise and targeted. Green policies are growing in most countries over the three years of data and tend to be targeted at specific sectors and technologies.

COVID support dwarfed structural support. In 2020 on average 7% of GDP was offered in COVID support through financial instruments, with significant heterogeneity across countries and changes in 2021.

There is significant heterogeneity across countries. Differences in amounts are from 0.6% to 2.3% of GDP on grants and tax expenditures in 2021, and differences in priorities of 1% to 34% of grants and tax expenditures on green policies.

• Quantifying industrial strategies (QuIS): Measuring industrial policy expenditures. This paper provides a new methodology for reporting industrial policy expenditure in a comparable way across countries.
  
  
• Quantifying industrial strategies across nine OECD countries. This report summarises the composition of industrial strategies in the first nine countries participating in the QuIS project in terms of expenditures, priorities, and policy instruments for the period 2019-2021.
   
• Access the QuIS database. The database gathers data on industrial policy expenditures at the policy instrument level categorised by instrument type and eligibility criteria. 
   

In the first phase of the project, QuIS is focusing on industrial policy expenditures with annual expenditures higher than 0.002% of GDP, such as tax expenditures, grants, government venture capital, loans and guarantees, that are aimed at promoting investment, improving competitiveness, or supporting economic development. The project includes all sectors such as manufacturing, services, energy and mining, but excludes policy instruments targeting agriculture.

The work builds on the OECD’s conceptual framework for industrial strategies and the recently published methodology for data collection that also contains key definitions. All of the data collected are available in the OECD.stat data explorer.

For each instrument, several characteristics of the policy are recorded in the database. For instance, policies can be tagged in seven categories, which are not mutually exclusive: digital, green, sectoral, technology-focused, SMEs and young firms, R&D and jobs/skills policies.