State-owned enterprises

State-owned enterprises (SOEs) are often considered to be relics of twentieth century history. They are understood as vanishing entities, soon rendered obsolete by the privatization policies of the 1980s and 1990s (cf. Toninelli 2000). Nonetheless, SOEs continue to exist in the most advanced countries (Christiansen 2011), and represent a growing factor in the international market (OECD 2015). Their relevance among the world’s largest multinational enterprises (MNEs) is significant. Today, 15 percent of the world’s largest multinational enterprises (MNEs), or 40 percent in emerging economies, are under the legal ownership of their home countries’ governments (UNCTAD 2017). Our claim is that this development emerged from a fundamental change in the basic concept of the SOE.