From Friedman and Friedman’s (1980) celebration of being ‘free to choose’ to Fukuyama’s (2004: ix) opposition to ‘cutting back the state’, scholars have successively attempted to solve the puzzle of how state and market can be best coupled to promote or/and regulate economic development. Whilst insightful, their works tend to provide only individual pieces of this puzzle. Scholars often presuppose the particular point of entry enshrined by their root discipline as the endogenous variable of economic development, while treating the concerns of other fields as exogenous variables. Notably, three disciplines – ‘government and politics’, ‘business and economics’, and ‘geography and planning’ – have respectively advanced state-centric, market-centric and space-centric approaches to analyse state-market relations (SMR) (ibid; see also Section 4). They obscure the potential reciprocality between their respective entry points. Their arguments are also varied by their levels of abstractions (e.g. conceiving the market as a collective vs. individual firms).

This project advocates an interdisciplinary dialectical approach to SMR. Rather than privileging any one of them (and the disciplinary approaches privileging them), we contend that state, market and space are theoretically of equal importance and ‘dialectically related’ Each constituent of this triad, though different, is not fully separate from others. Each internalises the influence from others without being reducible to any of them. This approach necessitates a synthesis of knowledge across disciplines, which analyses the interplay of this triad in different casual directions (e.g. state affects space vs. vice versa) and levels of abstractions.