Conclusion

In the complex world that we live in the twenty-first century, state-society relations help us understand much of the puzzles bewildering us. This is what the research done in this book showed, depending mainly on power relations among key actors but also on other important dimensions whenever relevant.

A number of SBLR modes were identified based on power relations among the four main players in the industrial sector: the state, tycoons, entrepreneurs, and labor. With power relations one could differentiate between balanced, state capture, crony, and state-dominance modes, with other dimensions such as coordination and state-interest facilitating further differentiation within some modes. The balanced and state-dominance modes are at the two extremes of state vis-à-vis social actors' power, as the name of the modes indicate, but both have low favoritism to individual social actors, namely tycoons. Favoritism is high at the state-capture and crony modes, but the position of state vis-à-vis tycoons' power differs, where the state dominates the relation in the latter but the opposite is true in the former. On a geographical scale, the Crony mode is the most widespread globally and is exclusively present in developing and emerging economies. Balanced SBLR is more concentrated in North and Western Europe and is almost exclusively present in the developed world, with the exception (at times) of India and Hong Kong. State Capture have different geographical concentrations, the most remarkable of which are Eastern and Southern Europe and Latin America. The world's biggest economy, the USA belongs also to this mode, even if not as strong as in the other cases. State-dominance is the least common mode in the twenty-first century, with its center being the Arab Gulf states, besides the second biggest world economy, China. Presumably, this mode was much more pervasive in the world in the second half of the twentieth century and the time of the Cold War witnessing the expansion of Marxist-Leninist and state-corporatist regimes.