Populism and the Re-birth of Manufacturing: New Trends or Empty Promises?

Populist political movements frequently campaign on promises to rebuild domestic manufacturing and reverse perceived losses from globalization. This paper evaluates whether populist governments succeed in improving manufacturing performance once global trends are taken into account. Using a panel of 86 countries from 1960 to 2019, we examine manufacturing output and employment—both in levels and relative to GDP—during periods of populist governance. To isolate country-specific effects from global structural change, outcomes are measured relative to peer groups defined by region, income level, economic size, population, and initial manufacturing structure. Two-way fixed effects estimates and dynamic event-study analyses based on the Sun and Abraham (2021) estimator reveal little evidence that populist regimes systematically increase manufacturing performance relative to comparable countries. Where statistically significant effects appear, they are short-lived and not part of sustained trends. The results suggest that populist policies do not meaningfully reverse long-run deindustrialization, though pre-treatment patterns in manufacturing employment may help explain the electoral appeal of re-industrialization rhetoric.