A distinctive feature of economic trends of the past three decades has been the increase in microeconomic intervention by state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in the market economies of rich industrial and poor developing nations. The majority of SOEs were established as policy instruments of choice in response to a variety of socioeconomic needs and socio-political problems. As persuasively demonstrated in this book, microeconomic efficiency criteria alone, stemming from the theory of a perfectly competitive economy, are badly designed criteria for public firms. The historical part of the book, in particular, discusses quite compellingly a number of causes other than market failures for the existence of state-owned enterprises. This discussion develops complex answers regarding causes for the existence of public firms.

The untold story of how welfare and development programs in the United States and Latin America produced the instruments of their own destruction In the years after 1945, a flood of U.S. advisors swept into Latin America with dreams of building a new economic order and lifting the Third World out of poverty. These businessmen, economists, community workers, and architects went south with the gospel of the New Deal on their lips, but Latin American realities soon revealed unexpected possibilities within the New Deal itself. In Colombia, Latin Americans and U.S. advisors ended up decentralizing the state, privatizing public functions, and launching austere social welfare programs. By the 1960s, they had remade the country’s housing projects, river valleys, and universities. They had also generated new lessons for the United States itself. When the Johnson administration launched the War on Poverty, U.S. social movements, business associations, and government agencies all promised to repatriate the lessons of development, and they did so by multiplying the uses of austerity and for-profit contracting within their own welfare state. A decade later, ascendant right-wing movements seeking to dismantle the midcentury state did not need to reach for entirely new ideas: they redeployed policies already at hand. In this groundbreaking book, Amy Offner brings readers to Colombia and back, showing the entanglement of American societies and the contradictory promises of midcentury statebuilding. The untold story of how the road from the New Deal to the Great Society ran through Latin America, Sorting Out the Mixed Economy also offers a surprising new account of the origins of neoliberalism.

China's breathtaking economic growth, has often led observers to assume that the country's economic system has been transformed into a capitalist economy dominated by private enterprise. Although China's reliance on private enterprise and market-based incentives has been growing, and the CCP's treatment of private enterprises and entrepreneurs has been changing, it would be a mistake to minimize the current role of the State and the CCP in shaping economic outcomes in China and beyond. The Chinese government and state-owned enterprises (SOEs) remain potent economic forces. Indeed, some of China's SOEs are among the largest firms in China and the world. They are major investors in foreign countries. They have been involved in some of the largest initial public offerings in recent years and remain the controlling owners of many major firms listed on Chinese and foreign stock exchanges.

A distinctive feature of economic trends of the past three decades has been the increase in microeconomic intervention by state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in the market economies of rich industrial and poor developing nations. The majority of SOEs were established as policy instruments of choice in response to a variety of socioeconomic needs and socio-political problems. As persuasively demonstrated in this book, microeconomic efficiency criteria alone, stemming from the theory of a perfectly competitive economy, are badly designed criteria for public firms. The historical part of the book, in particular, discusses quite compellingly a number of causes other than market failures for the existence of state-owned enterprises. This discussion develops complex answers regarding causes for the existence of public firms.

Dynamics of the Mixed Economy applies the insights of modern Austrian political economy to examine economic policy in mixed economies. It compares and contrasts standard approaches to the growth of the state (including public choice) with that of modern Austrian political economy; examines in detail the nature and operation of the interventionist process in the context of nationalization, regulation and the welfare state; analyzes conditions that produce instability under laissez-faire capitalism; argues that the interventionist process is a 'spontaneous order'; and offers several 'pattern predictions' regarding the character and behaviour of really existing economies.

A major history of economic regimes and economic performance throughout the twentieth century. Ivan T. Berend looks at the historic development of the twentieth-century European economy, examining both its failures and its successes in responding to the challenges of this crisis-ridden and troubled but highly successful age. The book surveys the European economy's chronological development, the main factors of economic growth, and the various economic regimes that were invented and introduced in Europe during the twentieth century. Professor Berend shows how the vast disparity between the European regions that had characterized earlier periods gradually began to disappear during the course of the twentieth century as more and more countries reached a more or less similar level of economic development. This accessible book will be required reading for students in European economic history, economics, and modern European history.