Across the world, the free market is being overtaken by state capitalism, a system in which the state is the leading economic actor. How should the United States respond?
IAN BREMMER is President of Eurasia Group. He co-authored The Fat Tail: The Power of Political Knowledge for Strategic Investing with Preston Keat.
This week, Ian Bremmer answers questions submitted by readers about the rise of state capitalism and the future of the free market.
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Across the United States, Europe, and much of the rest of the developed world, the recent wave of state interventionism is meant to lessen the pain of the current global recession and restore ailing economies to health. For the most part, the governments of developed countries do not intend to manage these economies indefinitely. However, an opposing intention lies behind similar interventions in the developing world: there the state's heavy hand in the economy is signaling a strategic rejection of free-market doctrine.
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Does the current financial crisis resemble Japan's "lost decade" of the 1990s? It may be even worse, argues Robert Madsen. Not so, replies Richard Katz.
Compares the processes of economic liberalization in the USSR and China, to the latter's advantage, and considers that "China may be a more receptive environment for economic reform", possibly because the reform process has been going on longer there, possibly for cultural reasons, i.e. willingness to undertake labour-intensive activity "regarded as exploitative and beneath Soviet dignity" (in other words, because China is at a lower stage of development). Both countries have embarked upon a venture for which there is no blueprint and which may spill over beyond the economic realm.

What we are seeing is a rise in statism not state capitalism. As more governments seize the wealth of private corporations, capitalism will get the blame when it is the government controlled entities that are the cause.
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