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The economic crisis has pushed several countries to adopt selective industrial policies to promote manufacturing and some selected strategic sectors. Despite this new activism, the process of defining strategic targets risks being carried out with poor rigour on a political level, setting governments up for failure. This paper discusses the notion of strategic sector and proposes a new methodology to increase transparency and effectiveness in the identification of what can be defined as ‘strategic’. Focusing on the analysis of the US manufacturing system, we develop a composite indicator – the Strategic Sector Index (SSI) – to rank manufacturing industries on the basis of their strategic significance. Furthermore, we apply an uncertainty analysis methodology to the SSI to evaluate the robustness of the ranking and to minimise the degree of policy-makers’ discretionality in influencing the results

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