Adam D Dixon
Biographic Data
| ID | 366087 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Adam D Dixon |
| GIVEN NAMES | Adam D |
| FAMILY NAME | Dixon |
| SIGNATURE | DIXON A D |
| AFFILIATIONS | Maastricht University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6175-906X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 30 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 412 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 30 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
The Spectre of State Capitalism
The state is back, and it means business. Since the turn of the twenty-first 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 tha…
China's Chance to Lead: Acquiring Global Influence via Infrastructure Development and Digitalization by Richard W. Carney
Journal Article China's Chance to Lead: Acquiring Global Influence via Infrastructure Development and Digitalization by Richard W. Carney Get access Richard W Carney. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2024. 363 pp. $39.99. Adam D Dixon Adam D Dixon Edinburgh Business School Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Political Science Quarterly, qqae067, https://doi.org/10.1093/psquar/qqae067 Published: 17 July 2…
Legitimacy and the extraordinary growth of ESG measures and metrics in the global investment management industry
ESG metrics are increasingly important in the global investment management industry. Why this came to pass given the limited appetite for responsible investing in the industry is the subject of this paper. Although the business case for ESG provides an explanation for its increasing uptake whereby market actors are increasingly convinced of the merits of ESG as a profit centre, this explanation is insufficient. By contrast, the adoption the ESG p…
Making space for the new state capitalism, part I: Working with a troublesome category
The theme issue 'Making Space for the New State Capitalism' brings together insights from critical economic geography and heterodox political economy through a series of papers to be published in three installments, each accompanied by an introductory essay written by the guest editors. In this, the first of these introductory commentaries, we highlight some of the potentially productive ambiguities that accompany the new state capitalism rubric.…
Uneven and combined state capitalism
This article contributes to the development of state capitalism as a reflexively critical project focusing on the morphology of present-day capitalism, and particularly on the changing role of the state. We bring analytical clarity to state capitalism studies by offering a rigorous definition of its object of investigation, and by demonstrating how the category state capitalism can be productively construed as a means of problematising the curren…
Making space for the new state capitalism, part II: Relationality, spatiotemporality and uneven development
The theme issue 'Making Space for the New State Capitalism' brings together insights from critical economic geography and heterodox political economy through a series of papers published in three installments, each accompanied by an introductory essay written by the guest editors. In this, the second of these introductory commentaries, we explore the consequences of embracing relationality, spatiotemporality and uneven development, together with …
Making space for the new state capitalism, part III: Thinking conjuncturally
The theme issue "Making Space for the New State Capitalism" brings together insights from critical economic geography and heterodox political economy through a series papers published in three installments, each accompanied with an introductory essay written by the guest editors. In this, the third of these introductory commentaries, we explore the challenges and opportunities associated with thinking conjuncturally, followed by a final collectio…
Is the China Effect Real? Ideational Change and the Political Contestation of Chinese State-Led Investment in Europe
Chinese outward investment is increasing in its relevance for the global economy, and its effects on host states are increasingly being scrutinized globally. While European policy-making was ambiguous about the question of hosting Chinese state-led investment (CSLI) in the early 2010s, we can observe a recent surge of protectionist legal measures across Europe. What explains this trend among different European countries? Through the lens of incre…
What does the state do in China’s state-led infrastructure financialisation
China’s state-led financialisation of infrastructure is an alternative narrative to prevailing accounts of neoliberal financialisation in the advanced capitalist core, where the expansion of private market-based finance-led growth is theorised to transform traditional forms of public infrastructure development and production-based growth. Drawing on the case of Chinese state capital investment in Europe, we demonstrate empirically how the imperat…
Decarbonising states as owners
Environmental state debates focus on the governance and steering functions of politics. Concurrently, many states stand out as large global owners and investors in carbon industries. Via various investment vehicles, states control around half of all global oil and gas reserves as well as other carbon assets. We know very little, however, about where these states are invested; how they conduct their carbon investment; and what possibilities and co…
Special issue introduction: What Is the New State Capitalism
This article introduces and lays the groundwork for this Contemporary Politics special issue on the 'new' state capitalism. We start by noting that the rubric state capitalism tends to elicit paradoxical responses, from uncritically embracing the term and overstretching its realms of application, to rejecting its validity altogether. We argue that the source of such ambivalence resides in issues of conceptual definition, which have led to a numbe…
Geopolitics and the 'New' State Capitalism
We may be witnessing the emergence of a new ‘state capitalist’ normal, a term this Forum proposes to problematise in its geopolitical dimensions. The growing prevalence of state-sponsored entities (encompassing state enterprises, policy banks, and sovereign wealth funds) as leading vehicles of economic activity is a defining feature of our times. This reassertion of state authority is altering configurations of state and corporate power across th…
The Strategic Logics of State Investment Funds in Asia: Beyond Financialisation
Financialisation presents a constraint on state power. It also offers opportunities. State-led development, with the Asian experience at the forefront, is increasingly operationalised through different forms of state investment funds. Some of these funds have a strategic development mandate underwritten by a shareholder-value logic. While financialisation as a concept gives meaning to the embrace of the shareholder value model to explain the conv…
Expropriation of Capitalist by State Capitalist: Organizational Change and the Centralization of Capital as State Property
State enterprises, sovereign funds, and other state–capital hybrids have become major engines of global capitalism. How can we explain their global rise and organizational transformation into increasingly sophisticated and globally competitive forms? Why do they increasingly emulate the practices and organizational goals of comparable private-sector entities, adopt the techniques of modern finance, resort to mixed ownership, and extend their oper…
State Capitalism and the New Global D/development Regime
Official discourses of Development are being redefined. If the key geopolitical contexts shaping the post‐war Development project were decolonisation and the Cold War, the defining world‐historical transformations shaping the emerging vision of Development are the expansion of state capitalism and the rise of China. The IMF, the World Bank, the OECD, the G20, other multilaterals, and bilateral partners are increasingly taking stock of the rise of…
Legitimating State Capital: The Global Financial Professions and the Transnationalization of Chinese Sovereign Wealth
Increasing Chinese investment has raised the spectre of strategic state influence in Europe, yet the transformative potential of state capital as a global phenomenon remains under-explored. This article sheds light on the dual imperatives of transnationalizing state capital wherein the movement of capital entails both profit maximization and the extra-profit interests of the state. State-capitalist entities such as sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) a…
State capitalism(s) redux? Theories, tensions, controversies
This article interrogates the notion of state capitalism, exploring the contributions and limits of the concept as a means of theorizing the more visible role of the state across the world capitalist economy. We critically synthesize the key arguments, outlining commonly cited properties and practices of state capitalism, in three bodies of literature: strategic management, comparative capitalism and global political economy. We find that the ter…
The strange geographies of the 'new' state capitalism
The recent polymorphism of state intervention and attendant political geographies have been interpreted as a return of state capitalism. While commentators across the social sciences have offered competing characterizations of the new state capitalism, little attention has been dedicated to how narratives and geographical imaginaries of the new state capitalism operate as a form of geopolitical knowledge and practice. Drawing upon critical geopol…
Finance and Development
Finance and the financial system are key components in the workings of a capitalist market economy and of capitalist firms. The absence of finance, or an inefficient financial system, may be detrimental to economic growth and development, which is often the case for poor and developing regions. This entry reviews in the first instance debates over the direction of causality of finance in driving economic growth and development. It then considers …
Finance and Development
Finance and the financial system are key components in the workings of a capitalist market economy and of capitalist firms. The absence of finance or an inefficient financial system may be detrimental to economic growth and development, which is often the case for poor and developing regions. This entry reviews in the first instance debates over the direction of causality of finance in driving economic growth and development. It then considers gl…
The New Geography of Capitalism: Firms, Finance, and Society
The organizing logic of the nation-state still claims legitimacy and relevance. The nation-state is a crucial site of economic governance and regulation, and an incubator of cultural and linguistic tradition. Nonetheless, such legitimacy is juxtaposed with a strong unease in the social sciences and the public sphere over whether the nation-state has the capacity to deliver on its promises and to provide opportunities to its citizens. Indeed, the …
Frontier Finance
A growing community of long-time-horizon institutional investors that includes sovereign wealth funds, pension funds, and other beneficiary institutions located in cities outside of the major international financial centers (IFCs) is pushing back against the misaligned incentives and power asymmetries present in the for-profit asset management industry. This expanding group of beneficiary institutions, which we define as frontier investors, is re…
Banking Across Boundaries: Placing Finance in Capitalism
Banking Across Boundaries: Placing Finance in Capitalism." Regional Studies, 47(8), pp. 1376–1377
Function before form: Macro-institutional comparison and the geography of finance
This article considers the treatment of institutions and institutional change in relation to finance and macro-institutional comparison in economic geography. Where recent contributions are sympathetic to the ‘Varieties of Capitalism ’ framework, this article argues instead for an analytical approach that is attentive to the functions of finance and institutions. While the former contends that institutional function follows from form, the latter …
Rethinking the sovereign in sovereign wealth funds
Nation‐states are increasingly sharing sovereignty, both with other states and with supranational and non‐governmental institutions. This is partly due to a long period of economic and financial globalisation, which has undercut territorial notions of sovereignty and varieties of capitalism. In trying to understand this phenomenon, we are drawn to sovereign wealth funds (SWFs), as they offer a unique lens into the changing dynamics of contemporar…
Variegated capitalism and the geography of finance: Towards a common agenda
In this article I review Jamie Peck and Nik Theodore’s call to engage with the ‘varieties of capitalism’ approach to heterodox political economy through a ‘variegated capitalism’ approach, rooted in economic geography. I argue in favor of this strategy, but argue specifically that this approach may be most effectively implemented through the study of financial geographies of the firm, as a primary component of a multipronged effort. The goal of t…
State Capitalism and the New Global D/development Regime
Official discourses of Development are being redefined. If the key geopolitical contexts shaping the post‐war Development project were decolonisation and the Cold War, the defining world‐historical transformations shaping the emerging vision of Development are the expansion of state capitalism and the rise of China. The IMF, the World Bank, the OECD, the G20, other multilaterals, and bilateral partners are increasingly taking stock of the rise of…
Uneven and combined state capitalism
This article contributes to the development of state capitalism as a reflexively critical project focusing on the morphology of present-day capitalism, and particularly on the changing role of the state. We bring analytical clarity to state capitalism studies by offering a rigorous definition of its object of investigation, and by demonstrating how the category state capitalism can be productively construed as a means of problematising the curren…
Special issue introduction: What Is the New State Capitalism
This article introduces and lays the groundwork for this Contemporary Politics special issue on the 'new' state capitalism. We start by noting that the rubric state capitalism tends to elicit paradoxical responses, from uncritically embracing the term and overstretching its realms of application, to rejecting its validity altogether. We argue that the source of such ambivalence resides in issues of conceptual definition, which have led to a numbe…
The strange geographies of the 'new' state capitalism
The recent polymorphism of state intervention and attendant political geographies have been interpreted as a return of state capitalism. While commentators across the social sciences have offered competing characterizations of the new state capitalism, little attention has been dedicated to how narratives and geographical imaginaries of the new state capitalism operate as a form of geopolitical knowledge and practice. Drawing upon critical geopol…
Geopolitics and the 'New' State Capitalism
We may be witnessing the emergence of a new ‘state capitalist’ normal, a term this Forum proposes to problematise in its geopolitical dimensions. The growing prevalence of state-sponsored entities (encompassing state enterprises, policy banks, and sovereign wealth funds) as leading vehicles of economic activity is a defining feature of our times. This reassertion of state authority is altering configurations of state and corporate power across th…
Function before form: Macro-institutional comparison and the geography of finance
This article considers the treatment of institutions and institutional change in relation to finance and macro-institutional comparison in economic geography. Where recent contributions are sympathetic to the ‘Varieties of Capitalism ’ framework, this article argues instead for an analytical approach that is attentive to the functions of finance and institutions. While the former contends that institutional function follows from form, the latter …
Making space for the new state capitalism, part II: Relationality, spatiotemporality and uneven development
The theme issue 'Making Space for the New State Capitalism' brings together insights from critical economic geography and heterodox political economy through a series of papers published in three installments, each accompanied by an introductory essay written by the guest editors. In this, the second of these introductory commentaries, we explore the consequences of embracing relationality, spatiotemporality and uneven development, together with …
Rethinking the sovereign in sovereign wealth funds
Nation‐states are increasingly sharing sovereignty, both with other states and with supranational and non‐governmental institutions. This is partly due to a long period of economic and financial globalisation, which has undercut territorial notions of sovereignty and varieties of capitalism. In trying to understand this phenomenon, we are drawn to sovereign wealth funds (SWFs), as they offer a unique lens into the changing dynamics of contemporar…
Making space for the new state capitalism, part I: Working with a troublesome category
The theme issue 'Making Space for the New State Capitalism' brings together insights from critical economic geography and heterodox political economy through a series of papers to be published in three installments, each accompanied by an introductory essay written by the guest editors. In this, the first of these introductory commentaries, we highlight some of the potentially productive ambiguities that accompany the new state capitalism rubric.…
The power of finance: Accounting Harmonization's Effect on Pension Provision
Journal Article The power of finance: accounting harmonization's effect on pension provision Get access Adam D. Dixon, Adam D. Dixon **University of Oxford, School of Geography and the Environment, South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3QY, UK. email Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Ashby H. B. Monk Ashby H. B. Monk ****University of Oxford, School of Geography and the Environment, and Boston College, Center for Ret…
The Rise of Pension Fund Capitalism in Europe: An Unseen Revolution
In recent years European countries have begun to reform their pension systems favouring funded to pay-as-you-go (PAYG) social security systems and supporting the creation of more 2nd and 3rd pillar funded retirement schemes. Though funded pensions remain small in most European countries, they are growing significantly and may limit the persistence of strong 'varieties of capitalism' by providing an endogenous source of change to economic organisa…
What does the state do in China’s state-led infrastructure financialisation
China’s state-led financialisation of infrastructure is an alternative narrative to prevailing accounts of neoliberal financialisation in the advanced capitalist core, where the expansion of private market-based finance-led growth is theorised to transform traditional forms of public infrastructure development and production-based growth. Drawing on the case of Chinese state capital investment in Europe, we demonstrate empirically how the imperat…
The Strategic Logics of State Investment Funds in Asia: Beyond Financialisation
Financialisation presents a constraint on state power. It also offers opportunities. State-led development, with the Asian experience at the forefront, is increasingly operationalised through different forms of state investment funds. Some of these funds have a strategic development mandate underwritten by a shareholder-value logic. While financialisation as a concept gives meaning to the embrace of the shareholder value model to explain the conv…
Decarbonising states as owners
Environmental state debates focus on the governance and steering functions of politics. Concurrently, many states stand out as large global owners and investors in carbon industries. Via various investment vehicles, states control around half of all global oil and gas reserves as well as other carbon assets. We know very little, however, about where these states are invested; how they conduct their carbon investment; and what possibilities and co…
Is the China Effect Real? Ideational Change and the Political Contestation of Chinese State-Led Investment in Europe
Chinese outward investment is increasing in its relevance for the global economy, and its effects on host states are increasingly being scrutinized globally. While European policy-making was ambiguous about the question of hosting Chinese state-led investment (CSLI) in the early 2010s, we can observe a recent surge of protectionist legal measures across Europe. What explains this trend among different European countries? Through the lens of incre…
Expropriation of Capitalist by State Capitalist: Organizational Change and the Centralization of Capital as State Property
State enterprises, sovereign funds, and other state–capital hybrids have become major engines of global capitalism. How can we explain their global rise and organizational transformation into increasingly sophisticated and globally competitive forms? Why do they increasingly emulate the practices and organizational goals of comparable private-sector entities, adopt the techniques of modern finance, resort to mixed ownership, and extend their oper…
Making space for the new state capitalism, part III: Thinking conjuncturally
The theme issue "Making Space for the New State Capitalism" brings together insights from critical economic geography and heterodox political economy through a series papers published in three installments, each accompanied with an introductory essay written by the guest editors. In this, the third of these introductory commentaries, we explore the challenges and opportunities associated with thinking conjuncturally, followed by a final collectio…
Frontier Finance
A growing community of long-time-horizon institutional investors that includes sovereign wealth funds, pension funds, and other beneficiary institutions located in cities outside of the major international financial centers (IFCs) is pushing back against the misaligned incentives and power asymmetries present in the for-profit asset management industry. This expanding group of beneficiary institutions, which we define as frontier investors, is re…
Legitimacy and the extraordinary growth of ESG measures and metrics in the global investment management industry
ESG metrics are increasingly important in the global investment management industry. Why this came to pass given the limited appetite for responsible investing in the industry is the subject of this paper. Although the business case for ESG provides an explanation for its increasing uptake whereby market actors are increasingly convinced of the merits of ESG as a profit centre, this explanation is insufficient. By contrast, the adoption the ESG p…
Legitimating State Capital: The Global Financial Professions and the Transnationalization of Chinese Sovereign Wealth
Increasing Chinese investment has raised the spectre of strategic state influence in Europe, yet the transformative potential of state capital as a global phenomenon remains under-explored. This article sheds light on the dual imperatives of transnationalizing state capital wherein the movement of capital entails both profit maximization and the extra-profit interests of the state. State-capitalist entities such as sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) a…
The Geography of Finance: Form and Functions
The financial system is a core component of any capitalist market economy, as it facilitates the allocation and deployment of economic resources, temporally and spatially, under conditions of risk and uncertainty. As such, understanding the form and functions of finance and financial systems across space and time is key to understanding the geography of economic activity from the local to the global. This paper provides an introduction to the geo…
Finding the Collective in an Era of Pension Individualization
SozW Soziale Welt , page 47 - 62
Banking Across Boundaries: Placing Finance in Capitalism
Banking Across Boundaries: Placing Finance in Capitalism." Regional Studies, 47(8), pp. 1376–1377
The Rise of Pension Fund Capitalism in Europe: An Unseen Revolution
In recent years European countries have begun to reform their pension systems favouring funded to pay-as-you-go (PAYG) social security systems and supporting the creation of more 2nd and 3rd pillar funded retirement schemes. Though funded pensions remain small in most European countries, they are growing significantly and may limit the persistence of strong 'varieties of capitalism' by providing an endogenous source of change to economic organisa…
The power of finance: Accounting Harmonization's Effect on Pension Provision
Journal Article The power of finance: accounting harmonization's effect on pension provision Get access Adam D. Dixon, Adam D. Dixon **University of Oxford, School of Geography and the Environment, South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3QY, UK. email Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Ashby H. B. Monk Ashby H. B. Monk ****University of Oxford, School of Geography and the Environment, and Boston College, Center for Ret…
Finding the Collective in an Era of Pension Individualization
SozW Soziale Welt , page 47 - 62
Variegated capitalism and the geography of finance: Towards a common agenda
In this article I review Jamie Peck and Nik Theodore’s call to engage with the ‘varieties of capitalism’ approach to heterodox political economy through a ‘variegated capitalism’ approach, rooted in economic geography. I argue in favor of this strategy, but argue specifically that this approach may be most effectively implemented through the study of financial geographies of the firm, as a primary component of a multipronged effort. The goal of t…
Rethinking the sovereign in sovereign wealth funds
Nation‐states are increasingly sharing sovereignty, both with other states and with supranational and non‐governmental institutions. This is partly due to a long period of economic and financial globalisation, which has undercut territorial notions of sovereignty and varieties of capitalism. In trying to understand this phenomenon, we are drawn to sovereign wealth funds (SWFs), as they offer a unique lens into the changing dynamics of contemporar…
The Geography of Finance: Form and Functions
The financial system is a core component of any capitalist market economy, as it facilitates the allocation and deployment of economic resources, temporally and spatially, under conditions of risk and uncertainty. As such, understanding the form and functions of finance and financial systems across space and time is key to understanding the geography of economic activity from the local to the global. This paper provides an introduction to the geo…
Function before form: Macro-institutional comparison and the geography of finance
This article considers the treatment of institutions and institutional change in relation to finance and macro-institutional comparison in economic geography. Where recent contributions are sympathetic to the ‘Varieties of Capitalism ’ framework, this article argues instead for an analytical approach that is attentive to the functions of finance and institutions. While the former contends that institutional function follows from form, the latter …
Banking Across Boundaries: Placing Finance in Capitalism
Banking Across Boundaries: Placing Finance in Capitalism." Regional Studies, 47(8), pp. 1376–1377
The New Geography of Capitalism: Firms, Finance, and Society
The organizing logic of the nation-state still claims legitimacy and relevance. The nation-state is a crucial site of economic governance and regulation, and an incubator of cultural and linguistic tradition. Nonetheless, such legitimacy is juxtaposed with a strong unease in the social sciences and the public sphere over whether the nation-state has the capacity to deliver on its promises and to provide opportunities to its citizens. Indeed, the …
Frontier Finance
A growing community of long-time-horizon institutional investors that includes sovereign wealth funds, pension funds, and other beneficiary institutions located in cities outside of the major international financial centers (IFCs) is pushing back against the misaligned incentives and power asymmetries present in the for-profit asset management industry. This expanding group of beneficiary institutions, which we define as frontier investors, is re…
Finance and Development
Finance and the financial system are key components in the workings of a capitalist market economy and of capitalist firms. The absence of finance or an inefficient financial system may be detrimental to economic growth and development, which is often the case for poor and developing regions. This entry reviews in the first instance debates over the direction of causality of finance in driving economic growth and development. It then considers gl…
Finance and Development
Finance and the financial system are key components in the workings of a capitalist market economy and of capitalist firms. The absence of finance, or an inefficient financial system, may be detrimental to economic growth and development, which is often the case for poor and developing regions. This entry reviews in the first instance debates over the direction of causality of finance in driving economic growth and development. It then considers …
State capitalism(s) redux? Theories, tensions, controversies
This article interrogates the notion of state capitalism, exploring the contributions and limits of the concept as a means of theorizing the more visible role of the state across the world capitalist economy. We critically synthesize the key arguments, outlining commonly cited properties and practices of state capitalism, in three bodies of literature: strategic management, comparative capitalism and global political economy. We find that the ter…
The strange geographies of the 'new' state capitalism
The recent polymorphism of state intervention and attendant political geographies have been interpreted as a return of state capitalism. While commentators across the social sciences have offered competing characterizations of the new state capitalism, little attention has been dedicated to how narratives and geographical imaginaries of the new state capitalism operate as a form of geopolitical knowledge and practice. Drawing upon critical geopol…
State Capitalism and the New Global D/development Regime
Official discourses of Development are being redefined. If the key geopolitical contexts shaping the post‐war Development project were decolonisation and the Cold War, the defining world‐historical transformations shaping the emerging vision of Development are the expansion of state capitalism and the rise of China. The IMF, the World Bank, the OECD, the G20, other multilaterals, and bilateral partners are increasingly taking stock of the rise of…
Legitimating State Capital: The Global Financial Professions and the Transnationalization of Chinese Sovereign Wealth
Increasing Chinese investment has raised the spectre of strategic state influence in Europe, yet the transformative potential of state capital as a global phenomenon remains under-explored. This article sheds light on the dual imperatives of transnationalizing state capital wherein the movement of capital entails both profit maximization and the extra-profit interests of the state. State-capitalist entities such as sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) a…
Is the China Effect Real? Ideational Change and the Political Contestation of Chinese State-Led Investment in Europe
Chinese outward investment is increasing in its relevance for the global economy, and its effects on host states are increasingly being scrutinized globally. While European policy-making was ambiguous about the question of hosting Chinese state-led investment (CSLI) in the early 2010s, we can observe a recent surge of protectionist legal measures across Europe. What explains this trend among different European countries? Through the lens of incre…
What does the state do in China’s state-led infrastructure financialisation
China’s state-led financialisation of infrastructure is an alternative narrative to prevailing accounts of neoliberal financialisation in the advanced capitalist core, where the expansion of private market-based finance-led growth is theorised to transform traditional forms of public infrastructure development and production-based growth. Drawing on the case of Chinese state capital investment in Europe, we demonstrate empirically how the imperat…
Decarbonising states as owners
Environmental state debates focus on the governance and steering functions of politics. Concurrently, many states stand out as large global owners and investors in carbon industries. Via various investment vehicles, states control around half of all global oil and gas reserves as well as other carbon assets. We know very little, however, about where these states are invested; how they conduct their carbon investment; and what possibilities and co…
Special issue introduction: What Is the New State Capitalism
This article introduces and lays the groundwork for this Contemporary Politics special issue on the 'new' state capitalism. We start by noting that the rubric state capitalism tends to elicit paradoxical responses, from uncritically embracing the term and overstretching its realms of application, to rejecting its validity altogether. We argue that the source of such ambivalence resides in issues of conceptual definition, which have led to a numbe…
Geopolitics and the 'New' State Capitalism
We may be witnessing the emergence of a new ‘state capitalist’ normal, a term this Forum proposes to problematise in its geopolitical dimensions. The growing prevalence of state-sponsored entities (encompassing state enterprises, policy banks, and sovereign wealth funds) as leading vehicles of economic activity is a defining feature of our times. This reassertion of state authority is altering configurations of state and corporate power across th…
The Strategic Logics of State Investment Funds in Asia: Beyond Financialisation
Financialisation presents a constraint on state power. It also offers opportunities. State-led development, with the Asian experience at the forefront, is increasingly operationalised through different forms of state investment funds. Some of these funds have a strategic development mandate underwritten by a shareholder-value logic. While financialisation as a concept gives meaning to the embrace of the shareholder value model to explain the conv…
Expropriation of Capitalist by State Capitalist: Organizational Change and the Centralization of Capital as State Property
State enterprises, sovereign funds, and other state–capital hybrids have become major engines of global capitalism. How can we explain their global rise and organizational transformation into increasingly sophisticated and globally competitive forms? Why do they increasingly emulate the practices and organizational goals of comparable private-sector entities, adopt the techniques of modern finance, resort to mixed ownership, and extend their oper…
Making space for the new state capitalism, part I: Working with a troublesome category
The theme issue 'Making Space for the New State Capitalism' brings together insights from critical economic geography and heterodox political economy through a series of papers to be published in three installments, each accompanied by an introductory essay written by the guest editors. In this, the first of these introductory commentaries, we highlight some of the potentially productive ambiguities that accompany the new state capitalism rubric.…
Uneven and combined state capitalism
This article contributes to the development of state capitalism as a reflexively critical project focusing on the morphology of present-day capitalism, and particularly on the changing role of the state. We bring analytical clarity to state capitalism studies by offering a rigorous definition of its object of investigation, and by demonstrating how the category state capitalism can be productively construed as a means of problematising the curren…
Economics (25 works) · Political science (22 works) · State Capitalism and Financial Governance (21 works) · Capitalism (16 works) · Politics (16 works) · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism (15 works) · Law (15 works) · Economic system (12 works) · Political economy (11 works) · Business (10 works)