Commonly Offered: This course is very likely to be offered in the next one to three years.
In domestic and international policymaking, stark differences between the private sector (“the market”) and the public sector (“the state”) are dissolving. For example, the private sector is being pushed to help achieve public policy goals, while the public sector is being pushed to be customer-oriented. This course, which focuses on the interplay of the public and private sectors in policymaking, has three aims. First, it develops an analytic framework and historical context for understanding how the roles and interactions of states and markets have fluctuated across time. Second, the course examines how the policymaking “division of labor” between states and markets has differed across countries – for example, with a relatively market-based approach in early industrializers such as Britain but a more explicitly state-led approach in contemporary rising powers such as China. Third, the course examines energy, health, telecommunications, finance, transportation, or other policy areas in which governments are wary about letting markets function without state intervention. Throughout, we will apply political economy concepts in order to understand actual policy choices for various policy issues, both in the U.S. and abroad.
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