State Capitalism Comes of Age
The End of the Free Market?
Article Summary and Author Biography
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.
Author Interview
This week, Ian Bremmer answers questions submitted by readers about the rise of state capitalism and the future of the free market.
Reading List
An annotated Foreign Affairs syllabus on states and markets.
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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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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.