ABSTRACT
In the West, critiques of state intervention, market volatility and global economic crisis since the early 1970s contributed to the undermining of traditional state-led approaches to managing economic development (such as Fordist-Keynesianism). The result was the growth in the 1980s of a neoliberal agenda stressing the importance of the self-regulating market above the state in the co-ordination of economic activity (Dunford 1990; Tickell and Peck 1995). The ascendancy of neo-liberalism represented the shortterm victory of one side of a view of political economy, seeing a separation between state and markets as dominant coordinating mechanisms. However, despite the hegemony of neo-liberal economic approaches, the world economy has continued to lurch from one crisis to another (Peck and Tickell 1994). At the same time, the collapse of the Soviet system and the perceived crisis of centralised planning, together with the failure of neoliberal marketisation to construct capitalism, further undermined the dominant view in political economy of the separation of states and markets. These changes have also challenged the argument that either the state or the market can effectively create dynamic institutions of economic governance.
