This is obviously reductive because there are government stakes in most private companies, but I’m mostly looking for a general opinion. So, if you HAD to put a percentage to it, what would your estimate be?
Follow up: What percent would North Korea be? Vietnam? USA? Russia? India? Iran?
Follow up 2: Is that percentage increasing or decreasing? I would assume it’s increasing, but it’s difficult to tell because the change seems to be taking place over the span of decades.
I wrote about the way the economy is organized in China. It’s not so much about the percentage, but rather about controlling the commanding heights of the economy. The party is concerned with ensuring the overall direction while letting the markets work as allocators within the central plan. And any critical industry is directly state owned.
This isn’t an answer to your question, but nevertheless, the percentage matters less than the overall trajectory of the economy, towards further socialization (ie centralization and interconnection, development, etc) or not, and whether it still is dominated by a proletarian state that controls at minimum the commanding heights of the economy. At a certain level of development, private property begins to fall apart and only central planning presents a path forward, ergo development is the number one priority as long as the state constantly sides with the interests of the proletariat. This will naturally lead to a collectivized economy as it develops.
I’m going to be entirely honest, this is a virtually impossible macroeconomic question to answer with any concrete number that doesn’t rely inherently on vibes.
What do we consider part of the economy? Consumer? Infrastructure? Military? Utilities? What constitutes “planned”? Very little of the consumer market in China is truly planned, and are we counting extremely heavy oversight and regulation, or only direct control?
Also the number is actually “decreasing” in China, not because capitalists are winning, but so many private businesses are opening and succeeding each year.
North Korea is a black sheep siege economy, plus we have little to no economic data to base any answers off. The Russian economy is nearly entirely subsidized by oil and gas production which you could say is “planned”, because the same oil oligarchs also run the government. I don’t want to touch the US economy with a ten foot pole, as dissecting the largest/second largest economy on the globe is a terrifying prospect.
Imperialism as a stage of capitalist economies shows us that the fusion of banking capital and industrial capital turns the seat of power of an economy into one held by finance capital, where banks and industry work together to decide what initiatives get lines of credit and funding and which languish to die.
China has nationalised the banks and finance sector, meaning that private businesses can only access domestic finance options if their People’s Bank branch allows it. This creates a situation where, in a market economy like China’s, although the market actors are overwhelmingly private interests, the ones that receive funding and the amount of funding they receive is controlled by the state itself, commanded by the Communist Party. This means that finance initiatives are subordinated to national and regional congresses’ planning, meaning that in conjunction with the commanding heights of the economy being mostly state-owned and operated, much of private business is ultimately subordinated to the interests of the People - from a macroeconomic perspective.
Just my two cents in addition to the other commenters great contributions.
