Abstract
The historical perspective provided by John Kay in his article presents a compelling rationale for re-thinking what a state is and what it should do. The production relationships and consumption patterns that characterise today’s interconnected global economy mean that sub-national regions or cities are more natural units within which to analyse socioeconomic development and the policies to promote it. Indeed, in Europe and elsewhere the globalization of the last twenty years has been associated with considerable devolution of policy-making powers from national to sub-national levels in search of an ‘economic dividend’ and/or the closing of a ‘democratic deficit’ (Morgan, 2002; Diaz-Serrano and Rodríguez-Pose, 2015). A result is that the powers once typically associated with the nation state are now distributed in different ways in different places, and increasingly are also exercised in new ways that reflect more porous boundaries between public and private sectors.
