Dr. Adrian T. Mitroi,
CFA teaches Organisational Psychology and Behavioural Finance
at the Master of Applied Finance programme,
Faculty of Finance, Bucharest University of
Economic Studies (ASE București).
I. The Wrong Question
The debate over state ownership has, for decades, been conducted in the wrong register. State or market? The question generated more heat than light — more reflex than reasoning — and was always, at its root, the wrong question entirely. Three and a half decades of post- communist privatisation across Central and Eastern Europe have produced a verdict, and it is not what either side expected: performance diverged not along ownership lines, but along governance ones. The real inquiry was never who holds the capital — it was whether those who hold it possess the institutional intelligence to make it grow: competitively, sustainably, on behalf of generations not yet born.
This is the argument for the intelligent antifragile state: not a state that owns more, but one that governs better. The benchmark is no longer set by other governments.
It is set by organisations that have demonstrated what governance with genuine consequence looks like: SpaceX recovering orbital boosters and repricing an entire industry; Anthropic making safety the architecture of competitive advantage rather than its enemy; a frontier-economy that has compressed decade-long development horizons into product cycles measured in quarters. The performance gap between institutions with identical mandates is explained not by what they own, but by the rigour with which they govern it — and that gap now compounds in years, not percentage points.
Ownership is a legal category. Governance is a civilisational one.
II.Antifragility As Institutional Standard
The economy of artificial intelligence has rendered the passive-proprietor state not merely inefficient but structurally dangerous. It rewards institutional velocity— the capacity to read a situation, form a judgment, and move before the moment of advantage closes. A state managing critical infrastructure through administrative inertia accumulates disadvantage that compounds until the cost of correction becomes the cost of survival.
Antifragility — the property of systems that grow stronger under stress, converting volatility into competitive advantage — is the standard to which intelligent state institutions must now be built. Not merely resilient, but capable of compounding strength precisely when pressure is greatest. The transition from proprietor to strategic shareholder is therefore not a reform of organisational charts but of culture, consequence, and epistemic honesty: capital allocation disciplined by comparative analysis; monitoring continuous enough to intervene before deterioration becomes crisis; an investment philosophy that measures success in generational resilience rather than the dividend extracted before the next election.
III. Return On Stakeholder
Among the most persistent category errors in public policy is the evaluation of utilities by criteria designed for profit-maximising firms — judged on equity returns and margin, as though their obligation were to a shareholder rather than to the citizen with no alternative supplier and no power to exit. I propose Return on Stakeholder ROS — as the precise framework for this obligation: the individual consumer first, the community dependent on uninterrupted service second, the wider economy absorbing the externalities of resilient or fragile infrastructure third.
A utility deferring network reinvestment while reporting record margins is not performing. It is transferring today’s underinvestment into tomorrow’s bills — and tomorrow’s citizens did not vote for the arrangement.
IV. Net Fiscal Sustainability
The fiscal dimension of this argument requires a concept conspicuously absent from conventional analysis: net fiscal sustainability loss — the difference between the real economic yield of public debt and its carrying cost. Financing near-zero growth at seven percent incurs an annual loss of seven percentage points: public capital consumed with no return in competitive capacity or citizen welfare. This does not appear in national accounts; it appears in the slow erosion of the state’s capacity to invest, and in the quiet deterioration that headline aggregates are built, by design, not to capture.
The mechanism deepens through what I term counterproductive deficit reduction: the headline deficit narrows by one GDP percentage point, earning a ratings- agency approval, while public debt expands by six — financing consumption rather than investment. The fiscal multipliers are overestimated; the net costs are obscured; and the approval is real while the consolidation is not.
A deficit reduction financed by borrowing above the economy’s own growth rate is not consolidation. It is deferral — with compound interest, charged to the future.
V. The Reform That Matters Most
The most consequential reform is neither legislative nor fiscal. It is the reform of how leaders of state enterprises are chosen. An intelligent antifragile state appoints its stewards as a serious investor appoints a fund manager: by matching demonstrated competence to a precisely diagnosed problem. Selection that precedes diagnosis produces mismatches whose costs radiate across the broader economy for years.
Term limits with genuine evaluative rigour, competitive succession unconditioned by political negotiation, the expectation that public office is an obligation rather than a sinecure — these are the institutional antibodies the state requires. Without them, strategic assets do not remain strategic. They become instruments of private extraction.
VI. The Agenda
Own less. Govern more. Grow competitively. These are not aspirations — they are an operational agenda, executable within the existing legal and institutional architecture of any serious state. Board appointments disciplined by competency mapping rather than political proximity. ROS scorecards replacing margin metrics as the primary measure of utility performance. Net fiscal sustainability accounting embedded in budget frameworks, alongside and independent of the headline deficit. Reinvestment covenants attached to every public enterprise reporting above-threshold distributions. The instruments exist. The sequencing is known. What the agenda requires is not invention — it requires will.
In the economy of artificial intelligence, energy, transport, and digital infrastructure are no longer economic sectors. They are the material substrate of competitive sovereignty and they compound in favour of those who govern them with The advantage accrues not to the state that owns the most, but to the state that converts ownership into institutional intelligence fastest.
Unlike any private actor, the state cannot exit its citizens, restructure its obligations, or pivot to a more attractive market. That permanence is not a constraint to be managed — it is the source of the state’s only genuine comparative advantage: the capacity, and the obligation, to govern on a time horizon that no private capital can match and no election should shorten.
Own Less. Govern More. Grow Competitively.
