| Purpose | Increase state power through a trade surplus and strategic reserves | Coordinate voluntary exchange through private property and profit/loss | Combine private markets with social insurance and bargaining institutions | Execute a political production plan and replace capital markets | Use markets while the state controls strategic capital and national objectives | Organize private owners and labor into state-supervised sectors |
|---|
| Capital ownership | Crown-chartered or politically privileged merchants; farms and shops remain private | Private individuals, partnerships, cooperatives, and firms | Mostly private firms; public ownership concentrated in selected services | State owns or directs major productive assets; private capital is marginal or prohibited | Mixed, but state firms and state-guided finance dominate strategic sectors | Nominally private, conditional on political direction and cartel membership |
|---|
| Price formation | Markets inside licenses, tariffs, quotas, and monopolies | Competitive bids and offers; bankruptcy reallocates failed capital | Market prices plus taxes, benefits, wage bargaining, and regulated services | Administrative prices and physical quotas allocated through ministries | Market prices for much consumer activity; administrative credit and industrial targets steer investment | Market exchange inside state-approved cartels, wage rules, and procurement plans |
|---|
| Trade posture | Exports praised; imports restricted unless they supply strategic inputs | Unilateral or negotiated openness; imports are gains to consumers and inputs to producers | Generally open trade with adjustment assistance and product regulation | State foreign-trade monopoly; imports allocated by plan | Export-led strategy, managed technology access, and selective protection | Bilateral clearing, autarky goals, exchange controls, and strategic imports |
|---|
| State role | Grant monopolies, police shipping routes, accumulate fiscal and military capacity | Define property and contract rules, adjudicate disputes, and supply limited public goods | Regulate markets, tax broadly, insure income and health risks, provide services | Own firms, set output targets, allocate labor/capital, and ration shortages | Own commanding firms, direct banks, set plans, and permit bounded private enterprise | Choose sector bodies, suppress independent unions, set production priorities |
|---|
| Meaning of wealth | Bullion, a favorable trade balance, taxable commerce, and naval capacity | Value people place on goods and services; productive capital raises future output | Market output plus security, health, and broadly shared consumption | Physical output targets and collectively controlled productive capacity | National productive capability, technological autonomy, and state balance-sheet strength | Mobilization capacity, employment discipline, and national self-sufficiency |
|---|
| Money and credit | Specie reserves and chartered banks support state trade and war | Competitive capital markets; monetary regime varies by school | Central bank stabilization plus regulated private finance | State bank creates and allocates credit to plan targets | State-influenced banks channel credit to priority sectors | Centralized credit allocation and capital controls support the political plan |
|---|
| Labor position | Workers are subjects; guild, settlement, and poor-law rules limit movement | Labor contracts in markets; unions may bargain but receive no production quota | Independent unions and sector bargaining share productivity gains | State is the dominant employer; independent bargaining is absent | Private labor markets coexist with state-sector employment and political union control | Independent unions abolished or absorbed into state corporations |
|---|
| Canonical case | England, Navigation Acts 1651/1660 through the 18th century | Hong Kong after 1961 or post-1948 West German market reforms | Sweden's postwar model, especially 1950s–1980s | USSR from the first Five-Year Plan in 1928 to dissolution in 1991 | China after the 1978 reforms, especially the 2000s–2020s | Fascist Italy after the 1927 Labour Charter; Nazi Germany after the 1936 Four Year Plan |
|---|
| Thinker / text | Thomas Mun, England's Treasure by Forraign Trade (published 1664) | Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (1776), Book IV | T. H. Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class (1950); Nordic labor institutions | Karl Marx, Capital vol. I (1867); Lenin's state implementation | No single canon: reform directives, five-year plans, and state-ownership law | Giuseppe Bottai's 1927 Labour Charter; state corporatist doctrine |
|---|
| Measured record | Expanded protected shipping and customs revenue, but raised consumer/input prices and invited retaliation | West Germany coupled June 1948 currency reform with price liberalization; output and exchange recovered rapidly | High living standards with private production, high taxes, and universal social insurance | Rapid heavy-industrial buildup alongside chronic shortage, coercive collectivization, and the 1932–33 famine | Large post-1978 output gains alongside preferential finance for state firms and investment-heavy growth | Rearmament reduced measured unemployment while controls, repression, and war made the system fiscally and humanly catastrophic |
|---|
| Characteristic failure | Rent-seeking coalitions turn national power into producer privilege | Externalities, market power, fraud, and underprovided public goods when institutions fail | High marginal wedges, benefit lock-in, and political difficulty reforming universal promises | Calculation failure: quotas cannot reproduce the information carried by changing prices | Soft budget constraints, politically directed overinvestment, and unequal access to credit | Political loyalty replaces competition; nominal private ownership offers no protection from command |
|---|