The entrepreneurial state: Market structure and state trading in wheat.

摘要

Why do governments with mixed-trade economies choose to order trade for certain products, specifically wheat and wheat flour, by state trading as opposed to a system based on private trading? The establishment of state trading is linked to severe international crisis acting as a catalyst. Vulnerability, defined as a state's ability to maintain control over the effects and, if possible, the sources of uncertainty from national participation in the world market, explains the order in which state trading is established during crisis. The more vulnerable the country's position in the international market structure, the earlier state trading is established. The more the potential benefits of private trading outweigh the current costs of direct intervention, the earlier state trading is disestablished upon the return to non-crisis conditions. Expectations of aggregate, group, and individual state trading behavior are generated from the explanation and compared to the actual outcomes for the universe of cases between 1914 and 1980 and for select subsets of cases. The major alternative explanations are based on ideology and on domestic politics and are compared for relative logic and available historical support. Congruence exists between crisis and state trading and between non-crisis and the return to private trading. Congruence is established between expected state trading behavior and actual outcomes. The crisis of economic depression during the 1930s demonstrates a somewhat stronger relationship than war, and crisis more generally demonstrates a closer congruence between expected and actual behavior than the return to non-crisis conditions. No bivariate explanation is adequate alone. However, the explanation developed appears to provide the best generalized explanation for twentieth-century state trading behavior.