The influence of the state industrial policy on the formation of competitive advantages of national production complexes

Abstract

The subordination of industrial policy instruments to the competitive positions of national production complexes remains contested: horizontal regulation is treated either as a sufficient condition for building competitiveness or as a neutral background against which sectoral selection and localisation prove decisive. The study aims to quantify the channels through which state regulation of manufacturing is converted into sustainable competitive advantages of a processing complex. The calculation rests on an author's model of a production complex for 2021-2026; horizontal and vertical analysis, factor decomposition by chain substitution, scenario modelling and simulation with ten thousand iterations are applied. Decomposition of the 0.24-point increment of the integral competitiveness index showed that the largest contribution comes from the reduction of the share of imported components (about 0.11 points), whereas the fluctuation of profitability in 2025 produced a negative component of roughly 0.04 points. The scenario calculation recorded an increment of the index towards 2026 ranging from 0.03 points under the inertial regime to 0.12 points under active selective support, while the proportion of runs with positive discounted income rose from 0.62 to 0.89. The resulting distribution of contributions means that a competitive advantage is formed mainly through structural reconfiguration of the production base – localisation and asset renewal – rather than through direct subsidising of current operating activity; horizontal and selective instruments thereby reveal different response elasticities and are not interchangeable.