New Industrial Policy Observatory (NIPO)

The global policy landscape has entered a new phase. As governments confront digital and energy transitions, supply-chain vulnerabilities, and intensifying geopolitical rivalry, selective industrial policy interventions have become a central tool for shaping competition, production, and market access. These policies go well beyond horizontal support or crisis management. They are increasingly designed to alter relative competitive positions across firms, sectors, and countries—often with lasting effects on trade, investment, and global value chains.

Until recently, there was no dedicated, systematic initiative to track these competition-shaping industrial policy interventions across countries and over time. The New Industrial Policy Observatory (NIPO) fills this gap.

NIPO is a comprehensive, policy-level database that records targeted state interventions that change competitive conditions—at home and abroad. Built by the Global Trade Alert (GTA) team in collaboration with the International Monetary Fund, NIPO tracks industrial policy measures announced or implemented since 1 January 2009, providing both a historical baseline and high-frequency monitoring of contemporary policy dynamics.

NIPO is designed to capture industrial policy as it is practiced today: selective, strategic, and internationally consequential. It goes beyond existing policy inventories in several important respects.

NIPO distinguishes clearly between:

• Industrial strategies and plans,
• Policies and regulations enacted to implement those strategies, and
• Firm-specific or sector-specific interventions, such as subsidy awards, FDI authorisations, localisation requirements, and trade defence actions.

This structure allows users to trace how high-level policy intent translates into concrete actions affecting firms and markets.

All NIPO entries satisfy the GTA’s criteria for meaningful policy change and relative treatment. The database therefore emphasises interventions that alter competitive conditions—for example by favouring domestic producers, restricting foreign rivals, or reallocating rents along strategic value chains—rather than broad macroeconomic or purely horizontal measures.

Where official documentation allows, NIPO records the stated motive behind each intervention, including: strategic competitiveness, national security and geopolitical concern, resilience and security of supply, climate change mitigation, and digital transformation.

For earlier years (2009–2020), stated motives are systematically inferred using large-language-model methods applied to GTA policy descriptions, ensuring consistent coverage over time 

Interventions are tagged to pre-defined strategic sectors and technologies, including: semiconductors and advanced ICT, critical raw materials, dual-use goods, medical products, low-carbon technologies (EVs, batteries, hydrogen, PV, wind), and selected digital services.

This enables granular analysis of how industrial policy concentrates on chokepoints and enabling technologies within global value chains.

NIPO tracks a wide range of industrial policy tools, including: subsidies and state aid, export incentives and export restrictions, import barriers and trade defence, FDI screening and incentives, procurement and localisation policies, and other technology-related and behind-the-border measures.

Where available, NIPO records: subsidy values (in USD millions), and trade coverage estimates, measuring the value of goods potentially affected by each intervention.

These features allow users to move beyond simple counts toward assessing scale, exposure, and spillovers.

NIPO explicitly accounts for reporting lags and tracks whether measures remain in force, enabling consistent time-series analysis and assessment of policy persistence—an increasingly important feature of modern industrial policy.

The NIPO database supports a wide range of analytical and policy uses, including:

• Systematic tracking of industrial policy interventions across countries and over time.
• Evidence-based briefings for senior policymakers, central banks, and international organisations.
• Analysis of strategic interaction, retaliation, and policy sequencing across jurisdictions.
• Identification of sectoral exposure, chokepoints, and firm-level risks.
• Comparative assessment of policy design and governance across economies
• Forensic tracking of specific products, sectors, and companies affected by industrial policy.

Recent research using NIPO shows that industrial policy has become persistent, strategic, and internationally interactive.

The methodology underlying NIPO was developed by Simon J. Evenett, Johannes Fritz, and Fernando Martín, in collaboration with Adam Jakubik and Michele Ruta (International Monetary Fund). Evidence collection and coding are carried out by the Global Trade Alert team using a combination of automated data collection and expert validation. 

Evenett, S., Jakubik, A., Martín, F., & Ruta, M. (2024). The return of industrial policy in data. The World Economy, 47, 2762–2788. https://doi.org/10.1111/twec.13608  

Simon Evenett, Adam Jakubik, Jaden Kim, Fernando Martín, Samuel Pienknagura, Michele Ruta, Sandra Baquie, Yueling Huang, and Rafael Machado Parente. "Industrial Policy Since the Great Financial Crisis", IMF Working Papers 2025, 222 (2025), accessed 1/15/2026, https://doi.org/10.5089/9798229027786.001

Assembling and maintaining a high-quality, policy-relevant dataset like NIPO requires significant expertise and resources. For this reason, NIPO is available on a subscription basis. Details of subscription options are provided in the materials linked. Discounted access is available for academic researchers.