There are two great, world-encompassing changes associated with the last quarter of the twentieth century: the rapid integration of the global economy and the unprecedented decline in the economic role of the state in most countries. The first of these, usually referred to as ‘globalization’, represents not a new direction but an acceleration of the long-term trajectory of the international system. The second, however, is new and different. For two hundred years the historic trend has been for greater public control over economic life, whether through state ownership, as the communist world, or state-directed regulation and redistribution, as in the mixed economies of Europe and North America. Developing countries had usually incorporated both of these features: large state-owned sectors embedded in a dirigiste system of controlled markets. Over time these restrictions on private capital became increasingly pronounced, and the universal expectation was that still greater regulation would be imposed in the future.1 Yet the final decades of the twentieth century have reversed the flow of history: now it appears that private capital is progressively freeing itself from control, and the guiding vision is the liberal Utopia of the classical economists.