Sovereign wealth global investment announcements by country (2007-2020)

The visual output illustrates temporal patterns in investment activity across world regions from 2007 to 2020. Restrictions: Semi-structured elite interviews were also conducted however the interview data associated with this project cannot be made accessible due to its sensible nature.

Project

Description: This project asks the research question How does state capital transnationalise? wherein the state is a market actor itself. The transformative potential of state capitalism remains a debated issue. What constitutes state capitalism, specifically Chinese state capitalism, is ambiguous to begin with.

More to the point, it is often conflated with statism, which over-privileges the strategic coherency of the state in the face of the conflict-ridden, multi-scalar and multi-actor processes imbricated in the reproduction of state capital. This project contributes to a growing body of literature that emphasises the hybridity of its transnational expansion as simultaneously state-led and convergent on the liberal international order and (neo) liberal capitalism.

Using Chinese foreign investment as the empirical lens, I outline three domains in which the legitimation imperatives faced by state-owned entities and sovereign wealth funds shapes their interests and investment behaviour: the party state apparatus, the global financial profession and the investment recipient/host context in Europe.