ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to evaluate and move the claims about the 'withering away' and 'retreat' of the state. It outlines the influence of the post-war Keynesian welfare state form on the economic landscape, as a backcloth for them critically examining the nature, extent and spatial implications of the changes in state intervention and regulation that are allegedly being driven by new social-economic-political pressures and forces. The chapter suggests that the argument that the state is being undermined by globalization is overdrawn. Rather than all industrialized states shifting to a single post-Keynesian model of intervention in the space economy, different types of policy innovation and experimentation are being pursued in different states. In the Keynesian welfare model, the national economic space is the essential geographical unit of economic organization, accumulation and regulation over which the state is sovereign actor. The idea that globalization is undermining the economic sovereignty of the nation-state is widespread.
