Singapore Changi Airport opening and air-hub strategy, 1981

Singapore's Changi airport, SIA, port-state, and open-city strategy produced a durable air-services and visitor hub: by the pre-COVID endpoint, tourist arrivals were multiple times resident population, receipts were material, and the same economy remained extremely trade-open.

Canada’s long-run prosperity after the Canada–US Free Trade Agreement (1988) and NAFTA (1994) is more associated with market openness than with national industrial-policy initiatives.

Across a broad panel of countries 1960-2019, higher trade openness predicts faster long-run convergence of real GDP per capita toward the global frontier (the United States) than industrial-policy intensity does.

In a panel of middle-income countries 1990-2020, export complexity (Hausmann-Hidalgo Economic Complexity Index) rises more following reforms that improve foreign market access and reduce domestic entry barriers than following expansions of subsidy-only industrial policy.

Estonia adopted among the most radical market-liberalisation packages of any post-Soviet state — flat tax (26% universal rate, 1994), currency board (EEK pegged to DM/EUR, 1992), rapid privatisation, unilateral free trade, and minimal capital controls — and by 2007 had recovered to Soviet-era GDP per capita levels and substantially exceeded them, while Belarusian and Ukrainian peers had not recovered comparably.

Lula third-term's Nova Indústria Brasil 2024 industrial-policy package, conditioned on export performance and technology-diffusion metrics, produces measurable sectoral capability gains (semiconductors, green hydrogen, health-industrial complex) by 2030 — replicating the East Asian export-discipline conditionality pattern rather than the earlier Latin American import-substitution-industrialisation pattern.

Hong Kong's long-run income convergence to the productivity frontier without classic industrial policy (sectoral targeting, directed credit, national champions, or SOE promotion) matches or exceeds that of developmentalist East Asian comparators after controlling for initial income, human capital, and trade openness.

Consumer product variety and price-adjusted welfare improve more after episodes of trade liberalisation and competition-policy reform than after state industrial-policy episodes of comparable duration and scale, in a panel of middle- and high-income countries 1980-2020.

East Asian high-performing economies (South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong) achieved superior long-run total factor productivity and manufacturing productivity growth because export-market discipline forced competitive efficiency and technology upgrading, whereas economies that relied on protected domestic industrial policy without rigorous export exposure (Malaysia, Thailand in select sectors) experienced weaker long-run productivity.