It may surprise you to learn that the European Union, a group of 28 nations that accounts for 7 per cent of the world’s population and 25 per cent of economic output, accounts for over 50 per cent of global welfare spending. These are statistics that German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, has previously emphasised in an effort to get Europe to rethink its approach to the role – and size – of the state.

A similar theme is taken up in the recently published, best-selling book, ‘The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State’. The two writers are the editor in chief of the Economist, John Micklethwait, and the magazine’s management editor, Adrian Wooldridge (described by The Wall Street Journal as liberals but not libertarians, right-of-centre though decidedly not neoconservative).

Essentially, they argue that democracies in the west are being outpaced by leaner competitors, largely to the East, and should learn from their ‘small-state dynamism’.
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