The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in governments playing increasingly prominent
roles as active economic agents. However, state capitalism does not necessarily serve broad
developmental purposes, and rather can be directed to supporting sectional and private interests. As
the literature on variegated capitalism alerts us, governments ...
The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in governments playing increasingly prominent
roles as active economic agents. However, state capitalism does not necessarily serve broad
developmental purposes, and rather can be directed to supporting sectional and private interests. As
the literature on variegated capitalism alerts us, governments and other actors regularly devise fixes
in response to a systemic crisis, but the focus, scale and scope of the interventions vary
considerably, according to the constellation of interests. Rapid progress with vaccines
notwithstanding, the UK government’s response to COVID-19 has been associated with much
controversy, not only because of an extraordinarily high death rate, but also because of allegations
of cronyism around the granting of government contracts and bailouts. We focus on the latter,
investigating more closely who got bailed out. We find that badly affected sectors (e.g., hospitality,
transportation) and larger employers were more likely to get bailouts. However, the latter also
favored the politically influential and those who had run up debt profligately. Although, as with
state capitalism, crony capitalism is most often associated with emerging markets, we conclude that
the two have coalesced into a peculiarly British variety, but one that has some common features
with other major liberal markets. This might suggest that the eco-systemic dominance of the latter is
coming to an end, or, at the least, that this model is drifting towards one that assumes many of the
features commonly associated with developing nations.