6. Discussion The review of international literature on industrial policy, the history of economic development of Singapore as well as the configuration of relevant policy domains with various policy instruments/interventions in action allowed to situate the ITP within the broader Singapore economic and policy context. This also allows concluding, based on publicly available evidence that the ITP can be described as a governance instruments, i.e. re-arranging the institutional framework of governance and consultation, rather than being a direct market intervention. Based on the classification provided by Inter-American development bank (IAB, 2014) such an intervention would correspond to horizontal, public-input intervention, like policies aimed to provide macro-level favourable business working conditions. However, unlike business-focused policies like competition, property rights or intellectual property, the ITP is targeted primarily at the public sector bodies themselves and only indirectly/unintentionally might have effects on actors external to the public sector. As a public governance instrument, ITP is thus also very intimately linked to the overall underlying logic/ “raison d’etre” of public economic governance model in Singapore. This linkage is very clearly seen from the structure of ITP, i.e. the four pillars corresponding clearly to the priorities of long-term economic strategy set, for example, by the Committee on the future economy (CFE). Majority of ITM’s also explicitly refer to the discourse of growth-accounting framework, as main targets identify value added growth, productivity growth, employment size and numbers of high-quality (i.e. PMET) jobs. Therefore, an assessment of ITP is in essence can be viewed as assessment of (i) the underlying logic of economic development as viewed through the lens of growth accounting framework (i.e. “system-level” analysis); (ii) the links between ITP and other industrial policy instruments not fully covered by the ITP (policy-level analysis) and (iii) the consistency of the logic between different levels and/or different areas of ITP (intervention-level analysis). Before summarising the reflections as regards the policy configuration and alignment within Singapore, it is also important to reflect on the aspect of cross-national comparison, as initially planned within the strategy of this research exercise. Based on the review of literature about industrial policy context and interventions across major world economies and regions, only very tentative comparisons are feasible due to often superficial level of policy analysis at the international level across countries as well as the fact that that focus of this research exercise – the ITP – is not so much an industrial policy intervention, but rather a policy governance, coordination and consultation framework. Existing literature on industrial policy only very sporadically address the issue of governance and consultation. Two notable exceptions, one focusing on Asia and Africa is the compilation of reviews by Page, J. and Tarp, F., 2017 and another one, focusing on Latin America, by Schneider, B. R., 2015). Therefore, besides similarities as regards high level priorities like automation, advanced and additive manufacturing and new technologies in general, few conclusions can be drawn if based solely on the review of existing literature, referring here to research tasks 1.1. and 1.2. Furthermore, the analysis of existing conceptual/analytical frameworks that could be applied for the analysis of industrial policy in a particular country or across countries, as the next element of literature review (referring to research task 1.3.) provides more insights. This is particularly useful as regards the understanding and de-construction of some elements of Singapore’s industrial policy intervention logic. First of all, the varieties of capitalism framework provide some potential explanations as regards one of long-time concerns in Singapore – the unsatisfactory level of innovation activities, particularly among local businesses, or alternatively the capacity to enhance multi-factor productivity (MFP). In addition, the recent discussion on the role of intangible capital also provides some new insights on the
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