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In recent decades, governments around the world have increasingly used various forms of state aid to try to attract and retain the business activity of foreign-owned multinational corporations. Yet, in most cases, this "commercialisation of state sovereignty" (Palan, 2002) has failed to catalyse foreign investment and economic growth as intended. This paper seeks to understand the general failure of such commercialised state strategies, while also explaining how demand and income growth in some notable exceptions can be understood. To this end, a simple demand-led model is presented that suggests that foreign-targeted state aid may lead to beggarthy-neighbour, FDI-driven growth in one economy if certain conditions are met, such as there being sufficiently little policy competition from other countries. It is shown that the exceptional cases tend to be the early movers, i.e. those few economies and special economic zones that engaged in the commercialisation of state sovereignty before the widespread competitive emulation that followed. This paper argues that state aid for the attraction of foreign multinationals is unlikely to be an effective growth strategy in the current environment of intense state competition and that international coordination on corporation tax and other forms of state aid is desirable.

Veterinary surgery provides an interesting context in which to address important questions about the links between formal 'book' learning and actual, personal experience of the phenomena in question, and to examine the processes through which these links are forged. Participant observation of surgical procedures suggests that surgeons initially learn about anatomy from books, pictures and demonstrations, and become skilled 'operators' through the application of enhancement and reduction procedures that have the effect of transforming the living body into something more closely resembling anatomical pictures of it. Some of these procedures can be seen as a set of formalized 'rules' for performing operations, and like most rules, they appear to decrease in importance as a surgeon gains experience. They may, however, regain importance when a practitioner meets with an anatomical variant that he or she has not previously encountered. Other practices appear to be less formalized, requiring creative, constructive use of visual aids or language practices outside formal textbook knowledge. The links between actual bodies (and operations) and textbook representations of them are thus formed within a community of 'operators'.