Transformations  in
Business & Economics

National Champions – The Controversial Industry Policy
Rimantas Antanas Stanikunas, Arunas Burinskas

ABSTRACT. A national-champions-related industrial policy has regained legitimacy anew. However, not long ago critics of industrial policy were convincing that the best industrial policy is competition policy only. Indeed nowadays proponents of industrial policy agree on necessity to maintain competitiveness in markets. Nonetheless, they justify interventions of public institutions in particular cases of security, defence, and other public interest matters. The discussion runs on and new theories have emerged complementing arguments with new ideas and raising more questions than answers.

At the beginning, this paper focuses on the concept of national champions revealing not only traditional understanding of this category, but providing with more types of them too. They may be quite different at their individual life stages. Of course, national governments desire to host large and strong high competitive companies at the frontier of innovations and holding strong positions in foreign markets. Hidden champions may be considered as specific type of national champions because of their specific business strategy. Further, the paper explores literature, which is dedicated to competition topic. The paper reveals that there are 8.6% (in total) of scientific works on the topic of national champions where the attention is given to their activity and to the issues of their national states.

The study also demonstrates evidence that there is a lack of scientific works on the topic of national champions which are adequate to the challenges of small countries. The authors of the paper have also identified relationship between the number of scientific works that are dedicated to policies of national states related to national champions and the number of national champions in particular states.

At the end of the paper the arguments in favour of and against industrial policy are disclosed as well as the new pragmatic approach.

KEYWORDS: competition, national champions, GDP, industry policy.

JEL classification: F00, O3, O10, L50.