The law and development literature has been drawing attention to a new type of state action in economy. Departing from this analysis, this paper intends to evaluate in both ways, qualitative and vertical, how the Brazilian state has been acting in the industrial sector. Particularly, this analysis lays on the current industrial policy - Plano Brasil Maior (PBM). Assuming that there is a new type of state activism, this paper wonder whether this activism has been able to generate a sort of economic intervention that is potentially transformative of the existing industrial pattern. The hypothesis of this article is that industrial policy in action is more driven to produce corrective effects, something like a Ricardian-type of policy, than to produce transformations in the industrial specialization, which would be equivalent to Schumpeterian-type of policy. This profile, in turn, is associated to the capacity of its institutional arrangement that is characterized by the weakness in both dimensions analyzed: technical-administrative and political.