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This book examines the rise and fall in the twentieth-century Western world of state-owned enterprises, a chief instrument of state economic intervention. It offers historical perspective on the origins and purpose of state-owned enterprises, their performance, and the reasons for their precipitate decline from their heyday in the 1960s to the waves of privatization in the 1980s and 1990s. Looking to the future as well as the past of state business, this book explores the concept of state-owned enterprise and its context in Western political economy, as well as the permutations and future prospects of the institution in practice. The contributors present studies of the development of state-owned enterprises in seven Western European countries and the United States.