The Role of the State in Strengthening Economic Security: Institutional Capacity, Regulation, and Strategic Intervention

This article asks what the state can realistically do to make an economy more secure, and under which conditions its efforts backfire. Economic security is treated as the capacity of an economy to keep its essential functions running, and its policy choices open, under external shocks or economic coercion. The study is a qualitative comparative policy analysis. It reads the economic security frameworks of the European Union, Japan and the United States together with IMF and World Bank material on Uzbekistan, and it organises the evidence around three levers: institutional capacity, regulation and strategic intervention. The main finding concerns order rather than quantity. Instruments such as subsidies, notification regimes and import-concentration benchmarks look most convincing where a competent administration and predictable rules already exist, and least convincing where the state is at once owner, regulator and market participant. For Uzbekistan the evidence points to a narrower and better-governed state presence rather than a larger one. The article does not estimate causal effects. It offers a way of judging state action and a set of policy implications.