ABSTRACT
The new European debate on industrial policy started as an anachronism. European industrial policy has been practising for decades what the Positive Adjustment approach. One of the great virtues of the OECD's Positive Adjustment initiative is its call to governments to monitor the cost-effectiveness of their policies, taking overall social objectives. The OECD also attempts, in its patient way, to improve the methodology of measuring such effects, of regional policy on employment. The European share of the world market, including its domestic market, will become the residual—that which has to adjust. The danger for the Community as an institution, of a confrontation with adjustment pressures with which on both technical and political grounds it cannot cope, is the gradual erosion of the Common Market. Macroeconomic and capital-market policies which create incentives and opportunities for investment, including "implicit investment contracts" between workers and managers.
