Semi-Peripheral Catch-up, State Capitalism and Global Governance

This paper examines the relation between major emerging economies’ domestic “state-society-market” complex and their demand for international regime and global governance. Building on the “Varieties of Capitalism” literature, it argues that relative to both the previous catch-up economies and the current leading regimes of capitalism, state plays a unique role in the domestic complex in the emerging economies. That unique role makes the national systems of capitalism in these emerging economies different from both historical patterns of “state capitalism” and neoliberalism in the post Cold War period. In particular, the state is in command of new tools and instruments to control and coordinate the behavior of national capital, making it possible for a genuine model of national development to emerge. Along several policy dimensions, these emerging economies, represented particularly by China, are demanding non-liberal regime in global governance without a full-scale challenge to current institutional structure of the global system. Thus, the nature of domestic complex state capitalism among emerging economies foresees the prevalence of a set of “parallel structures” to existing western-dominated liberal structures in global governance.