Nanotechnology as Industrial Policy: China and the United States

Johnson’s tripartite distinction of policymaking was based on two interacting dimensions: the principal type of economic governance (market driven vs. state planning) and the principal type of decision making (ideologically driven vs. what might be today called “evidence based”). In addition to the crudeness of the resulting binary distinctions, Johnson’s framework is missing a logical fourth category: “market-ideological.” As Henderson and Appelbaum (1992) reformulate Johnson’s original typology, [In] market-ideological political economies… public policy is oriented above all toward assuring free market operations. Like plan ideological political economies, market ideological regimes arise from ideological dogma: in the case of the former, the wisdom and benevolence of state managers in a command economy; in the case of the latter, the wisdom and benevolence of an invisible hand in a supposedly unfettered market.