“The State must invest in companies and a long-term institution, to build ecosystems defined by the policy”

Tribune. “Japan’s semiconductor industry is doomed to become a footnote if the government fails to match the long-term strategic visions established in the United States and China »Declared, on October 19, Takayuki Kobayashi, appointed on October 4, Minister for Economic Security of Japan in the new government.

With very broad powers, Mr. Kobayashi will have the heavy task of coordinating all of Japanese industrial policy, central to the governance of an economic program combining three very powerful ministries (trade, finance and telecommunications).

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It should come as no surprise that Japan should establish strong governance of its industrial policy before specifying the details. In France, more than ten years after the launch of the Future Investment Program (PIA), it is difficult to assess the concrete achievements of the 57 billion euros mobilized. The Court of Auditors noted in a report of October 14 the complexity of its financing structures as well as the lack of monitoring tools for its “small team” with the General Secretariat for Investment.

Lack of industrial culture in the administration

After a decade of trial and error, the future of public investment in France, the Court notes bitterly, could not do without the definition by the State of a “Global investment support policy” as well as the establishment of a “Adapted governance”. With the disappearance of the Plan at the end of the Mitterrand era, the country dismantled the institutions supporting its industrial policy, transferring to the private sector its contingents of administrators trained in business strategy.

It is therefore hardly surprising that, a generation after this disappearance, the State cannot succeed in building an ambitious investment plan without at the same time reviving its capacity to make industrial ecosystems “readable”. It is into this void that many players, large private firms, who have replaced this function in the constitution of State investments and programs have been engulfed, sometimes with unfortunately a gap between the recommendations on paper and implementation in the field due to this lack of industrial culture in the administration.

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At the level of operators, France has set up with the Public Investment Bank (Bpifrance) a fabulous body of interaction between its productive apparatus and the State. Unfortunately, the investments it makes are more and more often confused with a real industrial policy, forgetting that the latter can only be built through the construction of ecosystems at the macro level, well upstream of the sprinkling of equity typical of the capital risk.

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