State and Denationalization: Risks and Constraints of a “New Privatization Policy”

It will be some time before we can fully appreciate the radical nature of the socio-economic effects produced by the global crisis of the end of the first decade of the twenty first century. However, it is already evident that the two leading market economic systems of the Western world – that of the USA, based on an ideology of free market competition, and the socially oriented system of Europe, were unable adequately to respond to the initial phase of the crisis. Moreover, the only measures that proved capable of preventing financial and economic collapse were those taken by states that possessed powerful levers for acting upon the economy as the crisis unfolded. Russia was one of these states, though circumstances in Russia were not typical.