The term ‘State capitalism’ is a combination of the traditional economic planning of a state and ‘free-market’ competition, which includes openness to free trade and foreign investment. Over the past two decades, most of the developing countries have moved away from free-market economies to a modern state capitalism in which state has a direct control over two-third of the major corporations along with more free trade and overseas investment.
In this important book, State capitalism: How the Return of Statism is Transforming the World, the author Joshua Kurlantzick analyses the rise of state capitalism in the developing world. The author hypothesises that state capitalism has the potential to challenge the free-market capitalism and also that the countries, with more state interventions, in their economies are not necessarily slow-growing than those of the free market economies. With the help of secondary data and case studies, the author argues that there is a rise in state capitalism in the recent past and the countries as diverse as Brazil, Vietnam, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Russia, Venezuela and Singapore have both state control over the key companies with a degree of openness to the world economy as long as they do not threaten state control over the key industrial sector.
