The legal theory of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) posits that SOEs persist due to legal failures rather than market failures. It views privatization fundamentally as a process of legalization rather than liberalization. Privatization does not always suggest the state’s withdrawal from private sectors; in many cases, it is accompanied by expanded or stricter regulatory oversight. This perspective generates two implications. First, the successful reform of SOEs depends on the state’s ability to clearly define its control and establish institutions that deter opportunistic actions. A judiciary capable of effectively distinguishing between government opportunism and the legitimate exercise of power – thereby restraining abuse of power while upholding lawful decisions – is crucial. Second, if the government can develop effective regulation of private firms without ownership, the need for maintaining SOEs diminishes. Given the advantages of private firms in terms of ownership costs, further investment in developing robust legal and regulatory institutions could promote social efficiency by reducing the role of SOEs.

Despite sustained efforts to privatize state-owned enterprises (SOEs) across various sectors in China, they continue to play a significant role in certain industries. Existing scholarship has yet to provide a fully satisfactory explanation for the historical development and sectoral distribution of SOEs. Economists frequently argue that SOEs serve as tools for addressing market failures, while others interpret them as outcomes of political decisions shaped by ideology and interest group dynamics.

This book advances a legal theory of SOEs, asserting that prevailing accounts are incomplete. Market failures, after all, can also be addressed through regulatory measures. The more pertinent comparison, therefore, is between the use of SOEs and the use of regulation. When regulatory costs are high, SOEs are more likely to arise, endure, and resist privatization.

Rural income growth substantially slowed down in the 1990s, both relative to the growth rate in the 1980s and relative to contemporaneous GDP growth. This was the start of the phase of Chinese reform era in which the majority of the Chinese population gained a decreasing share of the GDP improvement. The pivotal moment was 1993–94, when China’s central bank recentralized finance and banned private finance. The Chinese state prioritized urban development at the expense of rural China. Rural enterprises began to falter owing to rising credit constraints. Capital constraints increased and labor adjusted in response and rural labor migration rose dramatically beginning in the mid-1990s, a development, while partially offsetting a broad rural plight, that was to leave a detrimental impact on rural human capital in the long run.

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.

This volume closes with Brenna Bhandar’s fascinating inquiry into how rights bear on housing. Adequate housing is one of the older goals of mobilizational struggle, consecrated in such instruments as the UDHR and the post-Apartheid South African Constitution. At the same time, Bhandar documents, its salience has arisen in the age of financialization and neoliberalism, with their consequences for the precariously homed or unhomed. Human rights struggles do not always identify and therefore do not challenge the very culprits for the violence of the norms they invoke; but even here, Bhandar closes by invoking a “right to the city” that would overcome this long-standing limitation of human rights history, which is to multiply in their agents and domains, but not always in ways that undermine power or wealth locally or globally.

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.