ABSTRACT
Robert Howse’s chapter makes a compelling case, in the Canadian context, against a major emphasis on targeted public support of high technology industries-in part because it is not clear that there are major market failures that private economic agents cannot solve for themselves, and in part because even where there is some evidence of market failure, the political economy of government intervention in a decentralized federal state such as Canada is likely to make it extremely difficult to implement and sustain a set of coherent industrial policies directed to promoting high technology industries. Hence, my comments on the chapter are of a second-order nature.
