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The geographical contours of political world economy can be discussed through a continuously changing structure of both core and peripheral areas on an international and intra-national scale and a collection of states and their corresponding national economies. Regional economies imply that the competitive advantages and economic fate of individual firms are linked to those of all the other local firms. Regional economies can also be considered as political entities since it take structures of collective order into account. This chapter summarises the author's insights regarding how the revival of regions as the focus of economic and political activity may be able to result in the rethinking of issues that concern citizenship and democracy in local society.

This is the first of three chapters on the role of economic interests, and of systems for representing those interests, in the politics of welfare state reform. They explore the linkages between national welfare states and national economies, and examine the processes through which economic actors press their interests on policy makers. Huber and Stephens explore at length the linkages between different types of welfare states and different production regimes, and demonstrate that there are in fact quite different configurations within the universe of affluent democracies, with particular types of welfare states strongly associated with distinct systems of economic organization. Their analysis proceeds in three steps: first, a conceptualization is provided of welfare state and production regimes, with an analysis of their performance up to the 1980s; second, an analysis is made of pressures on these regimes and the resulting welfare state retrenchments since the 1980s; and third, an assessment is made of possible future paths to adaptation, recovery, and consolidation.

This chapter discusses developments in the global securities market from 1900 to the onset of the First World War. By 1914, securities markets played a key role in the financial systems of the most advanced world economies and had established a niche position within the less developed countries. Though far from being the universal means through which government and business raised funds or people employed their savings, securities had achieved a high level of penetration by the most sophisticated borrowers and investors. Internationally, securities markets were instrumental in the worldwide movement of funds that provided finance for major infrastructure projects and development of the earth's minerals and oil.

This chapter discusses developments in the global securities market from the mid-nineteenth century to the year 1900. During this period, stock exchanges evolved into the most important institutions of the capitalist world providing an essential interface between money and capital markets at national and international levels. In the process, they facilitated the mobilization of vast amounts of money to finance the world's railway systems and contributed significantly to stability of the world monetary system, normally associated with the gold standard.

The industrial distribution of inbound foreign direct investment (FDI) within a national economy is uneven, differing among and also within the subnational units. This chapter analyses the impact of the globalization of production and markets at the subnational level by studying FDI in the state of New Jersey (NJ), USA. A summary is presented of quantitative statistics, analysing the trends, significance, concentration, and source of FDI in the state. Next, the determinants of FDI in the state are examined from an academic and business literature view as well as from interviews with practitioners; in addition, the policy implications for corporate practitioners and the role of government in the attraction, development, and retention of inbound FDI to the state are briefly addressed. Finally, it is argued that the intranational distribution of inward FDI stock provides a sensitive guide to the resources, capabilities, and policies of subnational units; and that a national analysis of FDI may not be sufficient or necessary to understand the drivers of international economy.

This concluding chapter reiterates the significance of the role of the state in managing national economies, especially under new pressures and opportunities arising from globalization. The continuity of state activism was captured by modifying the conventional definition of economic nationalism and underscoring it as a dynamic concept and process, which is historically contingent on new social forces. In looking ahead, this chapter critically assesses the common presumption that economic nationalism benefits society. East Asia has certainly benefited but the outcomes are mixed in South Asia and Latin America. Today, India and China are also beneficiaries of the global economy and their respective states have a bearing on such an outcome. However, their market reforms and economic liberalization have also unleashed social disruptions in the form of rising inequality, unemployment, and job-less growth. Future research on economic nationalism under globalization ought to address these acute challenges.

This chapter discusses the national economy and transition strategies of Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan's national economic history divides sharply between 1991 and 1998, and the years since 1999. The first period, dominated by nation-building, saw traumatic economic adjustment to the shocks of the early 1990s and a large unanticipated decline in living standards. As the country started to recover from the economic nadir in 1997 it was hit by the 1998 Russian crisis, and only in 1999 did sustained economic growth begin. However, when growth did begin—stimulated by policy decisions such as a large currency devaluation and sustained by rising oil prices—Kazakhstan enjoyed a decade during which it was one of the fastest growing economies in the world. The chapter also considers the banking crisis in 2007–2008, whose impact was exacerbated by the collapse in the price of oil in the second half of 2008.

In the last few years, many heterogeneous phenomena have been put together under the label ‘technological globalization’ and the concept has thus lost much of its original clarity. This chapter aims to identify three different categories that compose the globalization of technology, with a view to understanding what the impact of each is on national economies, and what public policies can do to exploit the available technological knowledge for welfare and growth. The first section analyses the effects of globalization of innovation for single nations according to a taxonomy that breaks down into three categories: the international exploitation of technology, the global generation of innovations, and global technical collaborations. The next section explores the implications of each of these three typologies of the globalization of technology for public policies, and suggests that no single strategy can be used to address all three globalization processes. However, contrary to what is held to be the dominant laissez‐faire view, it is argued that the dynamics of globalization need a more active role of governments and a much broader battery of public policy instruments to allow national economies to exploit the available opportunities.

This chapter focuses on the Valley of the Sun. “The Valley of the Sun” was not only an idealized place. It was also a political project, the result of two of the most powerful forces in the postwar American political economy. The first was the ongoing legacy of New Deal policies that sought to fuel the national economy through debt-driven personal consumption. Part of the general postwar economic philosophy historians have labeled “growth liberalism” offered federal loan guarantees to a select population of white Americans choosing suburban living. The resulting “landscape of mass consumption” was plainly evident in Phoenix, both in the huge numbers of homes built after World War II and in the increasing numbers of electrical appliances that filled them. Local efforts to attract these consumers, and the potential capital they embodied, was the second force that created the Valley of the Sun.

The national economy and the sovereign state — the highest social entity personifications of economic and political life respectively — have such a strong relationship that national economy may even be called a necessary condition of sovereign state, and vice versa. An important consequence of this notion, though, involves the disorderly field of competition attributed to the international system. There is now a pressure for the national economy to adapt to the changes in the structures of economic and political interaction, perhaps through a reconceptualisation of the economic and political geography of the modern world. The discussion focuses on the global and regional levels of hierarchy and how these can lead to a proposition that a new global capitalist economy may come to be by introducing globalisation.

Capitalism cannot be confined to fixed geographic terms; it has always found ways to go beyond territorial boundaries in search of new sources of raw materials, labor, investment opportunities, and new markets. Because of this, world trade has continued to grow. After experiencing major economic depression and extreme political instability, major capitalist economies have seemed to shift from internationalisation to globalisation. This chapter discusses some historical events that may have contributed to this shift. Also, this chapter presents the interrelationships of the size of national economies, the openness of economies to trade and other such factors, and also presents the implications of these interrelationships. This chapter concentrates on the changing patterns of intra-national and international spatial relationships that are relevant in understanding the origin of capitalism.

This chapter explores the national economy and transition strategies of Uzbekistan. At independence Uzbekistan inherited important assets, including the best civil aircraft fleet, the military command, and the best administrative capacity in Central Asia. Indeed, during the 1990s, Uzbekistan was the most successful of all Soviet successor states in terms of limiting the fall in output, and in the early 2000s it became the first former Soviet republic to regain its pre-independence level of GDP. Uzbekistan was fortunate that world cotton prices increased substantially after independence, providing the resources to maintain public services, and when cotton prices fell in 1996 the government overreacted by introducing foreign exchange controls. A new phase of Uzbekistan's economic development dates from the termination of forex controls at the end of 2003.

This chapter looks at the national economy and transition strategies of the Kyrgyz Republic. The Kyrgyz Republic was the most explicit of the Central Asian countries in attempting a rapid transition from central planning. Economic performance was, however, disappointing due to limited resources and poor institutions. The country became highly dependent on revenues from a single goldmine, Kumtor, while other mineral and hydro resources remain poorly developed. The biggest symptom of economic distress was the rise in number of Kyrgyz migrating to Russia for work; by the end of the oil boom, the numbers were commonly thought to be around a million people and in 2014, the Kyrgyz Republic's remittances to GDP ratio was the third highest in the world. This left the country susceptible to Russian pressure to join the Eurasian Economic Union, which it did in 2015, and vulnerable to downturns in the Russian economy.

Marx and List agreed on one thing and that was that the division of human society is the key to the central truth of human history. List asserted that Germany needed a policy of state intervention to be able to survive in the international community. Nations existed and shared the impulse on self-preservation especially in a world of competing nations. List's real position was to stress the need for nations to attain a high level of economic development. National economy was a lesson that needed to be learned so that one day freedom of trade would become a reality. For List, England was the world's first truly modern nation as England became an example and a pattern for other countries to emulate. List wanted Germany to challenge England when it comes to the latter's manufacturing supremacy.

Explains the relation between competitive advantage in the firm and competitive advantage in the national economy. In the context of a free market system, the former can lead to the other, given that inequality of information, externalities, and the existence of natural or strategic monopolies are absent. The basic sources of competitive advantage of nations are similar to the sources of competitive advantage for firms, i.e. sustainable and appropriate distinctive capabilities of architecture reputation and innovation.

This chapter assesses the national economy and transition strategies of Turkmenistan. Among all the former centrally planned economies, Turkmenistan has regularly ranked last by transition indicators measuring speed of reform or degree of economic liberalization. Indeed, apart from the cotton and gas exports, Turkmenistan remained the most closed and least reformed of the Central Asian countries during the 1990s and early 2000s. In the years after independence, Turkmenistan could sell its cotton on world markets, and like Uzbekistan benefited from buoyant world cotton prices until 1996. Exacerbated by falling output, cotton export revenues declined sharply; like Uzbekistan but with a delay, Turkmenistan imposed draconian forex controls in 1998. After the 2014–2016 collapse in energy prices, Turkmenistan was left in a vulnerable position, facing lower global energy prices, to which the government responded by reducing subsidies on basic goods and strengthening exchange controls.

This chapter focuses on the national economy and transition strategies of Tajikistan. Tajikistan is the only Central Asian country whose political transition from Soviet republic to independent nation was not peaceful. Open civil war in 1992–1993 simmered on for several years before peace negotiations led to the June 1997 Agreement on Peace and National Reconciliation. Moreover, Tajikistan was the poorest republic in the Soviet Union, with the highest proportion of under-provisioned households. During the 1990s, economic progress was massively disrupted by the civil war, which completed the destruction of central planning but prevented introduction of institutions such as the rule of law and contract enforcement that are essential for a well-functioning market economy. The rapid growth that could be expected in the recovery from civil war did not begin until 2000, and Tajikistan remains the poorest country in Central Asia.