The Spectre of State Capitalism

· Oxford University Press
Ebook
336
Pages
Eligible
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About this ebook

The state is back, and it means business. Since the turn of the 21st century, state-owned enterprises, sovereign funds, and policy banks have vastly expanded their control over assets and markets. Concurrently, governments have experimented with increasingly assertive modalities of statism, from techno-industrial policies and spatial development strategies to economic nationalism and trade and investment restrictions. This book argues that we are currently witnessing a historic arc in the trajectories of state intervention, characterized by a drastic reconfiguration of the state's role as promoter, supervisor, shareholder-investor, and direct owner of capital across the world economy. It offers a comprehensive analysis of this “new state capitalism”, as commentators increasingly refer to it, and maps out its key empirical manifestations across a range of geographies, cases, and issue areas. Alami and Dixon show that the new state capitalism is rooted in deep geopolitical economic and financial processes pertaining to the secular development of global capitalism, as much as it is the product of the geoeconomic agency of states and the global corporate strategies of leading firms. The book demonstrates that the proliferation of muscular modalities of statist interventionism and the increasing concentration of capital in the hands of states indicate foundational shifts in global capitalism. This includes a growing fusion of private and state capital, and the development of flexible and liquid forms of property that collapse the distinction between state and private ownership, control, and management. This has fundamental implications for the nature and operations of global capitalism and world politics. This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on the Oxford Academic platform and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.

About the author

Dr Ilias Alami is an Assistant Professor in the Political Economy of Development in the Centre of Development Studies and the Department of Politics and International Studies at Cambridge University. Prior to joining Cambridge, he held research and teaching positions at Uppsala University, Maastricht University, and Manchester University. He also held visiting positions at the Getulio Vargas Foundation in Sao Paulo, the University of Johannesburg, and Sciences Po Paris. He holds a PhD in Politics from the University of Manchester. Professor Adam D. Dixon holds the Adam Smith Chair in Sustainable Capitalism at Adam Smith's Panmure House, the last and final home of moral philosopher and father of economics Adam Smith. Previously, he worked at the University of Bristol and Maastricht University in the Netherlands, where he led a large European Research Council project on sovereign wealth funds. He holds a D.Phil. in economic geography from the University of Oxford, a Diplôme (Master) de l'Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris, and a BA in international affairs and Spanish literature from The George Washington University in Washington, DC.

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