China’s gradual transition has avoided the economic collapse and stagnation caused by the shock therapy in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, but many problems arising during the rapid development are closely related to the incomplete SOE reform. The root cause of SOEs’ problems is the policy burdens. Privatizing SOEs without first addressing the policy burden would only exacerbate the problems. Therefore, the removal of policy burdens is the prerequisite for a smooth transition to a market economy.

Chapter 7 details the retrenchment of German housing programs during the country's structural economic crisis in the 2000s. Unlike American policymakers who expanded housing programs during the 2008-2009 crisis, German leaders cut housing programs to reduce fiscal deficits and reallocate funds to education, research, and technology. Following reunification, Germany experienced a brief housing boom in the 1990s, driven by demand-side housing stimulus programs, including a mortgage interest deduction, to spur growth in eastern Germany. However, this boom soon turned into a construction bust, leaving the country with one million vacant homes and reinforcing mass unemployment and capital misallocations in the economy. For German policymakers, housing programs became structural economic problems detrimental to the manufacturing-based, export-oriented economy. In 2006, Chancellor Angela Merkel's grand coalition sacrificed major social housing and homeownership programs, despite their popularity, in the name of reviving the German export-oriented economy.

This chapter argues that the resurgence of strong religion has forced liberal states to find new answers to its effects on women’s rights. It discusses two examples. The first is recognition of the jurisdiction of private Muslim Sharia Tribunals to decide Muslim divorces and family disputes, and the second is intervention in Jewish divorce cases in which Jewish religious women find themselves anchored to their marriages due to their husbands’ refusal to grant them a religious divorce. The chapter offers a novel classification of religion–state relations, which sheds new light on the different solutions offered to such dilemmas and their compatibility with women’s rights and with religious freedom. It employs a comparative perspective on religion–state relations to distinguish between three approaches toward religion – nationalization, authorization, and privatization. It assesses the advantages and disadvantages of these approaches and claims that, contrary to liberal inclinations, measured state intervention that enables the liberal state to acknowledge the importance of religious belief in people’s lives, while at the same time protecting the rights of all its citizens, is required.

The conclusion of Money, Value, and the State reflects on the rise of a neoliberal government of value. The architecture of political economy for postcolonial Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda—their currency management, agrarian credit, export monopolies, and price controls—was similar to how many other nation-states managed capitalism, exerted sovereignty, and cultivated citizenship in the postwar decades. And like many other parts of the world, by the late-1970s, the government of value in East Africa was challenged by new models of determining worth. The neoliberal proviso to “get prices right” targeted the legitimacy of the moneychanger state: instead of controlling the conversion between currencies and managing exchange rates, central banks would delegate power to commercial firms. It was likewise a call to eliminate state monopolies on the valuation of export crops and other commodities in favor of merchants’ power to set prices. Yet, instead of merely being a project of marketisation, neoliberalism was always a theory of state power and the ethos of citizenship. As structural adjustment was imposed—haltingly, imperfectly—by international creditors and their East African partners, the problematic of price continued to imply far more than the value of a commodity. It was a call to revalue the relationship among people and between citizens and states. As a result, the state government of value has not disappeared--it has been disavowed by central banks and bureaucracies that dismiss popular claims-making in favor of serving the sovereignty of capital.

Focusing on the relation and conflict between imperial, colonial, and local levels, Chapter 1 lays out the historical context that gave rise to the collective freedom suit. It first traces the process of making law and policy according to the imperial state’s reform imperatives here directed at the privatization and revival of an extractive metal industry based on the once rich copper mines of El Cobre near Santiago de Cuba. Crucial to the production of artillery in the Crown’s arms industry, copper was at the time a strategic resource for the imperial state. But for the beneficiaries of the privatized mining estate, the most valuable resource were the former royal slaves who had long lived in quasi freedom as an unconventional pueblo in the mining jurisdiction. A growing demand for slaves in the colony led to the re-enslavement, removal, and sale of hundreds of cobreros, or natives of El Cobre, thereby upending former local customary practices. A denied offer for a collective self-purchase, or coartación, and land eventually led to a wrongful enslavement action in Madrid. The chapter shows the major impact of imperial Bourbon reforms and of global factors in this so-called hinterland region of empire.

The doctrine of attribution in international law has been defined, in large part, by the International Law Commission’s (ILC) provisions on attribution of conduct in the Articles on State Responsibility for Internationally Wrongful Acts (ARSIWA). It is uncontroversial to note that despite the influence of the ILC’s rules on attribution, the regime of international responsibility remains underdeveloped. In addition to being underinclusive, the rules of attribution in ARSIWA are beginning to appear outdated. The central question, therefore, is whether the rules of attribution in ARSIWA are flexible enough to accommodate two disparate trends. On the one hand, we have witnessed an outsourcing of public functions to private actors in areas such as immigration, prison management, and education, whereby privatization has reduced state control and, consequently, potential state responsibility. On the other hand, there is a marked centralization of power in SOEs, some of which are now playing a global role as investors. This chapter assesses whether the default rules on attribution are flexible enough to manage both ends of the spectrum of state activity, which will be a crucial issue for regulators going forward.

The privatization of government functions has given rise to instrumental questions concerning the execution of these functions. Proponents often hail the efficiency of private institutions, while opponents often speak of the accountability of public institutions. This chapter challenges the instrumentalist terms of this debate. It establishes that there are principled, noninstrumentalist arguments against the privatization of certain goods. More particularly, it argues that there are goods that are “inherently public,” namely that they cannot be provided by private entities, even in principle.

The chapter also maintains that to count as an act of the state, the person who provides the good (the key case studies are inflicting criminal punishment and waging wars) must be a public official. To defend this latter position, the chapter develops an abstract account of public officials as agents who defer to the state’s judgments.

The typical arguments concerning privatization are instrumental, relying heavily on comparing the performance of a public functionary with that of its private counterpart. This chapter challenges this approach for leaving unaddressed other important consequences of shifting responsibilities to private entities. Privatization cuts off the link between processes of decision-making and the citizens and, therefore, erodes political engagement and its underlying notion of shared responsibility. Consequently, privatization undermines individuals’ public autonomy.

The effects of privatization are not restricted to the question of whether a public prison is better or worse qua prison than its private counterpart, or whether private forestry is better or worse qua forestry than its public counterpart. Stripping the state of its responsibilities erodes public responsibility, for privatization is not only the transformation of detention centers, trains, tax inquiry offices, forestry operations, and so on, considered one service at a time. It is also the transformation of our political system and public culture from ones characterized by robust shared responsibility and political engagement to ones characterized by fragmentation and sectarianism.

Chapter 3 identifies the numerous strategies the contemporary liberal states have pursued to navigate the cross-pressures engendered by the migration trilemma during the post-Cold War period, and especially since September 11th. Contesting scholarly claims that the liberal states cannot avert unwanted immigration, its main argument is that they have considerably reconciled the tensions inherent in the trilemma by enlisting and coopting non-central state actors at the intersection of human mobility and security. Specifically, they have forged bilateral and multilateral policy agreements and devolved many of their responsibilities for implementing immigration and human mobility policy to international, subnational and private sector actors. In pursuing this multifaceted course, the immigration policies of states have converged, and their burdens in managing their immigration-related responsibilities have been partially alleviated. But in doing so, the liberal norms inspiring their once steadfast commitments to maintaining relatively open borders and safeguarding citizen and immigrant rights have been compromised.

To fully understand the role of law in China’s capital market, one must first consider how modern firms and the capital market came to form and how their early emergence fit within the Party-state’s overall economic development plans.

The chapter presents the emergence of the capital market in China. It focuses on two key elements: (1) the rise of the large (public) firm and (2) the creation of the capital market as a platform for the offering and exchange of securities. Through these elements, the chapter looks at how the legal framework that governed firms in the early stages of market development was shaped by, and helped secure, the political–economy dynamics at that time.

An important feature of Iran’s political economy is the variety of opportunities it provides, through which individuals and groups can accrue economic benefits from and through the state. At the broadest level, the Iranian economy cannot be said to be in a healthy state. The Iranian economy is structurally unhealthy. But the economy’s maladies are products of, and also contributing factors to, means of personal enrichment for those with the right political connections. There are a number of areas to focus on, including the strong connections between the state and bazaari merchants; the perverse consequences of resource curses such as overreliance on oil and rampant corruption; the state’s efforts at various welfare schemes and the impulse toward statist economics; and the processes and consequences of pulling back from statism through privatization. All of these developments have combined to undermine the economy’s developmental potential. They have also coalesced to provide multiple means of patronage and clientelism in which the state plays a critical facilitating role. As such, Iran’s economy, diseased and underperforming as it is, provides important sources of support and resilience for the state.