As industrial strategy reemerges in our national policy conversation and begins to shape a greener economy through legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act, Roosevelt’s Isabel Estevez poses a vital question: How can we design policies to serve multiple societal goals at once? In a new brief released this week, Estevez lays out a framework for minimizing trade-offs, maximizing social progress, and honestly identifying what societal goals are sacrificed for the sake of others.
“Multi-Solving, Trade-Offs, and Conditionalities in Industrial Policy” explains how policymakers can use a range of industrial policy conditionalities—from labor and accountability standards to guardrails against worker exploitation and environmental injustice—to better align government action with social and economic objectives.
There’s “an urgent imperative to correct our historic practice of designing economic policies that routinely sacrifice the health and well-being of Black and Indigenous communities,” Estevez writes.
Developing countries need more revenue to tackle large-scale problems like the climate crisis, but the global economic system isn’t currently equipped for such challenges—and is instead enabling multinational corporations to gain at the public’s expense.
“[W]hy should we expect the private sector to solve a long-run public-goods problem like climate change?” Joseph Stiglitz, Roosevelt’s chief economist and senior fellow, wrote this week. “[Big private financial firms] are ready to feed at the public trough, hoping for new arrangements that will privatize the gains while socializing the losses—as past ‘public-private partnerships’ have done.”
Preventing a climate crisis requires changing the current “flawed arrangements” in international trade and strengthening existing financing paths for developing countries.
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