Speaker

Sonja AVLIJAS, visiting professor at LIEPP and Assistant Professor in Economic Policy and Development and CERGE-EI Foundation Career Integration Fellow (2024-2027). 

Dr Avlijaš has two main research interests: 1) innovation and development in the semi-periphery, including the role of small and medium enterprises as agents of innovation; and 2) growth and development in the Central Eastern and Southeastern European semi-periphery, focusing on the gender implications of these processes and their connections to welfare state reforms.

Abstract

In recent years, growing interest in industrial policy and mission-oriented innovation has challenged earlier supply-side assumptions that investment in education and skills alone would generate high-quality employment. Yet even within this renewed policy paradigm, the relationship between innovation-led growth and job quality remains unsettled.

This seminar presents findings from a comparative project with Professor Bruno Palier (CEE & LIEPP, Sciences Po – Paris) that adopts an institutional approach to public policy evaluation focused on how innovation-oriented industrial policies are linked to employment objectives. Rather than assessing labour market outcomes ex post, we examine the extent to which policy instruments—such as public procurement frameworks, coordination mechanisms, and conditionality tools—are designed to shape labour demand and embed job quality considerations within innovation strategies aimed at shaping production systems.

To this end, we draw on a comparative analysis of four innovation-intensive “catch-up” economies—Finland, South Korea, Ireland, and Estonia—that share strong commitments to education, skills formation, and technological upgrading, but differ in how employment outcomes are institutionally governed within production systems. The analysis highlights cross-national variation in the ways labour demand considerations are integrated into the design and implementation of production-oriented innovation policies.

The project thus evaluates the extent to which public policy instruments in these four countries steer innovation-intensive growth regimes toward inclusive employment outcomes through the governance of firm-level production and upgrading processes. By shifting attention from labour market outcomes to the governance architectures through which supply- and demand-side policy instruments interact within production regimes, the paper contributes to ongoing debates on social investment, industrial policy, and the socio-fiscal governance of digital and green transitions.

This seminar will be discussed by Tim Vlandas (Université d’Oxford)