Philip G.Cerny 455public goods per se, because they constitute the framework, the playing field,
within which private goods as well as other public goods are provided in the
wider economy and society. In other words, actors seeking to pursue regulatory
public goods today are likely to see traditional state-based forms of regulation
as neither efficient nor sufficient in a globalizing world. Perhaps a more familiar
theme in the public goods literature, however, has been the impact of globalization
on the capacity of the state to provide productive/distributive public goods. The
most visible aspect of this impact has been the crisis of public ownership of
strategic industries and the wave of privatization that have characterized the
1980s and 1990s. Once again, both political and economic scale factors are at
work. At one level, such industries are no longer perceived as strategic. Steel,
chemicals, railroad, motor vehicles, aircraft, shipbuilding, and basic energy
industries were once seen as a core set of industries over which national control
was necessary for both economic strength in peacetime and survival in wartime.
Today, internationalization of the asset structure of these industries, of the goods
they produce, and of the markets for those products—with foreign investment
going in both directions—has caused the internationalization of even high-
technology industries producing components for weaponry.
At the same time, the state is seen as structurally inappropriate for the task of
directly providing productive/distributive goods. Public ownership of industry is
thought so inherently inefficient economically (the “lame duck syndrome”) as to
render ineffectual its once-perceived benefits of permitting national planning,
providing employment, or enlarging social justice. Third World countries
increasingly reject delinkage and import substitution industrialization and embrace
export promotion industrialization, thereby imbricating their economies even more
closely with the global economy. Even where public ownership has been expanded,
its ostensible rationale has been as part of a drive for international competitiveness
and not an exercise in national exclusiveness, as in France in the early 1980s. The
same can be said for more traditional forms of industrial policy, such as state
subsidies to industry, public procurement of nationally produced goods and services,
or trade protectionism. Monetarist and private sector supply-side economists deny
that the state has ever been in a position to intervene in these matters in an
economically efficient way and argue further that the possibility of playing such
a role at all in today’s globalized world has utterly evaporated in the era of “quick-
silver capital” flowing across borders. However, even social liberal and other
relatively interventionist economists nowadays regard the battle to retain the
homogeneity of the national economy to be all but lost and argue that states are
condemned to tinkering around the edges.
The outer limits of effective action by the state in this environment are usually
seen to comprise its capacity to promote a relatively favorable investment climate
for transnational capital—[that is], by providing an increasingly circumscribed
range of goods that retain a national-scale (or subnational-scale) public character
or of a particular type of still-specific assets described as immobile factors of
capital. Such potentially manipulable factors include: human capital (the skills,
experience, education, and training of the work force); infrastructure (from public
transportation to high-technology information highways); support for a critical