Goodbye Washington Confusion, hello Wall Street Consensus: contemporary state capitalism and the spatialisation of industrial strategy

Abstract

ABSTRACT Recent scholarship has narrated the financialization of development, which Gabor (2021) refers to as the Wall Street Consensus (WSC), whose purpose is to facilitate the investment of global capital in Southern infrastructure by institutionalising the distribution of risk, reward and responsibility between investors and states. Gabor’s conceptualization of the ‘de-risking state’ subordinated to global finance capital stands in stark contrast with scholarship on state capitalism, which charts the unprecedented entrepreneurial role played by states as investors and market participants. Our objective in this article is to reconcile the apparent paradox presented by the simultaneous emergence of the WSC and evolution of state capitalism. We argue that the WSC affords de-risking states scope to pursue autonomous strategic visions, and many have responded by embracing infrastructure-led development designed to integrate places within global value chains in ways that foster economic diversification, industrial upgrading and balanced regional growth. We present three examples in which de-risking states have implemented spatialised industrial strategies – Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030, Kenya’s Vision 2030 and Thailand 4.0. In each of these cases spatialised industrial strategies undertaken by de-risking states have fuelled the proliferation of large-scale infrastructure projects and served to justify political centralization.