Review: How to Make an Entrepreneurial State. Why Innovation Needs Bureaucracy, by Rainer Kattel, Wolfgang Drechsler and Erkki Karo.

The government as entrepreneur is now an idea with the wind in its sails. In the 1980s, the opposite presumption was the default position—that private enterprise performed tasks more efficiently than government and was the source of dynamism and innovation. Here, the very fashionability of state intervention dictates that justification can be dealt with in a perfunctory manner, with a passing mention of the role of bureaucracies in sustaining ‘cross-sectoral complementarities underpinning socio-economic development’ and of the state's ‘patient public investment into basic and applied R&D, government procurement contracts and regulatory nudges that have often created first customers and markets’.