In the wake of financial, sovereign debt and health crises, public interventions in the European economy have taken on a new level of breadth, marking a reentry in force of the state in economic life that goes beyond the regulatory state. Yet, these interventions do not follow the old Keynesian interventions neither, being shaped through a particular logic of investment that link public and private actors in a particular configuration. By the concept of “European Investor State”, Ulrike Lepont, Matthias Thiemann (guest editors) and the authors of a special issue of the journal Competition & Change refer to the redefinition of the role of the EU and its member states in the economy as “investors,” in reference to private investment funds, which the state seeks both to imitate and to enroll.

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In their introduction, Ulrike Lepont and Matthias Thiemann embed this redefinition of state intervention in the context of the 2010s in Europe, characterized by worries about “secular stagnation” and growing concern about an “investment gap,” interpreted as the failure of financial markets to invest in productive sectors, especially when risky. The budgetary constraints and the ideological outlook then shaped the specific financial and off-balanced sheet tools of the investor state. Finally, the paper explores the implications of the Covid-crisis on this intervention model. It concludes that despite major changes in fiscal policy at the EU level, this approach is likely to persist, because of the lasting interpretation in terms of “investment gap,” which only public-private collaborations are seen to be able to fill.

The special issue includes the following papers:

The three ages of the European policy for productive investments, by Pierre Alayrac and Antonin Thyrard 
Public spending and austerity: The two faces of the French Investor State, by Ulrike Lepont 
Breeding ‘unicorns’: Tracing the rise of the European investor state in the European venture capital market, by Dan Mocanu and Matthias Thiemann 
The European Investor State has no clothes. Generic promises and local weaknesses of green public subsidies in France, by Antoine Ducastel, Camille Riviere, and Edoardo Ferlazzo
Between investor state and investment gaps in the just transition in Romania, by Clara Volintiru and Sanda-Elena Nicola 
Governing public investment in Europe: The politics of off-balance-sheet policymaking, the rise of Eurostat and contrasted regional policies in Belgium, by Damien Piron
Off-balance-sheet expertise to the rescue: the role of statistical expertise for European Public-Private Partnerships, by Vanessa Endrejat

Link to the special issue