The Role of the State in Financialised Systems of Provision: Social Compacting, Social Policy, and Privatisation

This paper draws on a series of case studies to consider the Role of the State, using the systems of provision (SoP) approach where the state and market are not considered to be dichotomous entities (as in most orthodox literature). Rather, markets are organised by the state in ways that are continually evolving. Our coverage of this extensive topic has been delimited by focusing on three aspects of the role of the state. The first of these is social compacting which considers the ways in which economic, political and ideological interests relate to the state. This section considers the state’s role in representing different social interests with a declining influence of labour. The second aspect addressed here is the state’s role in social policy and the provision of basic services. The paper shows that this increasingly comes down to providing for the hard to serve while wider concerns of equity and redistribution are neglected. Finally the paper explores the role of the state in connection with privatisation. Using the empirical evidence of the case studies, the paper shows that implementation and outcomes have been diverse across sectors and countries but common strands are emerging. These sectors are far from competitive, and privatisation has created conditions for significant rent extraction in ways that were unintended at the time of privatisation